Stefanie Burkhardt

„…and we have fallen apart“

Vom Zerfallen, Verschieben und Aushandeln von Grenzen in Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart

2024 · Mission in Film und Literatur. Band 2: Grenzüberschreitungen: Plots – Akteur:innen – Kontexte. Veröffentlichungen der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft für Theologie (VWGTh), 72.

edited by Klaus Hock, Claudia Jahnel and Klaus-Dieter Kaiser

ISBN 978-3-374-07542-3

 

Chinua Achebe's debut novel Things Fall Apart is one of the most successful and best-known English-language literary works by a non-Western author to this day. In it, Achebe recounts the experience of colonization from an African perspective at a very early stage in literary history. The plot follows the main character Okonkwo during his rise to success in his home village of Umuofia, his seven-year exile and his return. His story is used to tell the social and value structure of Igbo society, which suffers serious upheavals due to the beginning of English colonization and missionary work and ultimately leads to Okonkwo's suicide. The paper examines the novel with a particular focus on the negotiation, defense and transgression of boundaries, which can serve as both connection and exclusion here. Particular attention is paid to Okonkwo's daughter Ezinma, the novel's most important female character, who, as an ogbanje (“one of those wicked children who, when they died, entered their mother's wombs to be born again,” Achebe, 57) plays a special religious and social role and, in terms of narrative logic, functions as a kind of hinge by representing the importance and fragility of the connection between past and future. Furthermore, the role is considered that the ancestors represented by the powerful men play for the village community. This also concerns the transgression on the part of the English mission and the native converts that makes the “falling apart of things” in Umuofia and beyond irreversible.

 

Link to the publisher's website: EVA Leipzig Mission in Literatur und Film (2)