Revenge Literature: The Paradox of Things Fall Apart

Achebe's Things Fall Apart merits attention because of its African perspective on the manifestation of colonialism in African society, but I found the text itself to be paradoxical not only in its intention, but in its contextual construct. Achebe clearly illustrates, in detail, the flourishing Ibo social system that existed before the Christian colonial powers appear, allowing the western reader to notice the parallels between western society and pre-colonial African society in terms of communal understandings on concepts of justice, ethics, and tradition.

Where the paradox in the text occurs as far as its contextual design is concerned is when the text itself as a physical object is considered. The oral traditions (and even unspoken, acknowledged traditions) that seemed to function as a sort of spine for the Ibo as a community have been replaced with a more Eurocentric design: the written novel. And weather this was an intentional, ironic maneuver by Achebe or not, the fact remains that the book itself is, in the context of Ibo tradition, an anomaly.

Ironic too that Achebe's discontent with British literature would not only cause him to produce a book in the very format of the British culture he holds in contempt, but also cause his own intentions while creating the text to fall under suspicion of being just as one sided as British perceptions of African culture. While it is true that the British may have imagined themselves to be superior to the Africans as a means to justify their conquering and colonization, and it is convincing that Okonkwo may only have a paragraph devoted to him in The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, Achebe spends virtually zero time exploring the colonizing white missionaries as human beings themselves, and both Christianity and British culture only receive a brief, biased nod. Achebe clearly didn't mean for the book to be a neutral examination of colonialism; he meant for it to be an antithesis of the British perspective and therefore, revenge-literature.

Even the Ibo community is represented in a way that offers a dimension of intimate subjectivity to the reader, thus losing all hope of being neutral; through the lens of the text, Ibo society borders on that of a utopia with factors such as war, slavery, starvation, and disease barely mentioned throughout the narrative and replaced with rural farm work and total compliance to Ibo tradition. While these negative factors are technically mentioned in the text, they are basically excluded and the positive, thriving Ibo society is the one Achebe shows to the reader. The British then, by definition, become white, faceless monsters imposing their will over, ignoring, and undermining African culture. This, to me, is what made the text truly interesting; it is a passionate, multifaceted work of literary vengeance that, if read in the wrong context, could be viewed as satirical.