Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Postcolonial Novel)

 

Things Fall Apart

by Chinua Achebe

(Postcolonial Novel) 

Postcolonialism in the larger sense represents not only a period but also a conflict within one’s own self as there is an effort to step outside one’s colonial self and to approach the past reality from a new perspective. Jasbir Jain in her essay, “Post coloniality, Literature and Politics” in the anthology Contesting Postcolonialism has focused on Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj as a major postcolonial text and pointed out the close association between history, literature and theory.

In broad terms, postcolonial can be said to cover all the cultures affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. When a nation start conceiving and constructing ideas and practices to resist colonialism, its ways, ideologies and legacies. The seeds of postcolonialism can be traced. To the resistance and opposition that a nation or a people put up to the impositions of the imperial forces. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart falls clearly in the category of a postcolonial novel.

The strain and tension of the colonized are reflected through the character of Okonkwo, who symbolizes the position of the African under pressure in a rapidly changing social situation. Through him Achebe builds a controlled tension between the general and the particular by maintaining a balance between the social and individual perspectives. At the societal level, Okonkwo symbolizes the traditional Igbo past which the community wants to preserve. Okonkwo’s inflexibility, his insistence on manliness and his rigid resistance to change are as much individual traits as the traits of his culture. The novel can also be termed as a resistance novel without being overtly political, it draws attention to the cultural imperialism of the white men and portrays how a community falls apart because of the collision between the imperialist powers and the local inhabitants.

Rather than simply being the writing, which came after Empire, Things Fall Apart is a novel which critically scrutinizes the colonial relationship and sets out to exhibit in one way or another the resistance to colonial perspectives. The novel traces the beginning of colonization, presents conflict and generates multiple voices which makes it a multi-layered novel.