Duality and Resilience in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Abstract

Many readers and critics of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart come to the easy conclusion that the hero of the novel, Okonkwo, exemplifies or represents Umuofia or Igbo culture and traditions and that the author uses Okonkwo's story to show the process of the collapse of those traditions when they came into conflict with a more powerful colonial culture. Bernth Lindfors, for instance, understands Arlene Elder as saying that Okonkwo is "a typical Igbo man," used by the author to portray the "suicidal fragmentation of Igbo society" during the colonial era (Lindfors, 17). The result, in Clayton MacKenzie's reading of the novel, is that " . . . the Umuofia come to believe in the supremacy of the missionary colonizers as devoutly as they once had in their own theatre of gods" (MacKenzie, 126). However, there are readers of Things Fall Apart who perceive a resilience in Umuofia society which in their view ensures that the center holds, even if things have fallen apart (Sarr, 1993). In this essay, I want to locate the source of that resilience in the twin notions of duality and balance, central to the Umuofia view of life and the world. I argue that these notions form the basis of the conceptual framework which structures the ambivalence at the core of the novel and that they help to explain the Igbo man's tendency to look both backwards and forwards. It is not quite correct to assert, as MacKenzie does, that " . . . the interrelation between the two (the new religion and traditional society) can never be characterized in terms of co-existence, because the economics of Mr. Brown's religion demand ideological substitution, not concurrence or hybridization." {RAL) He may be right about the demand, but certainly not right in his characterization of that relationship as "a logical, business transaction" which the clan finds "as compelling as it did obedience to the Oracle of the Hills and Caves."(Ri4L) The Igbo metaphysical landscape did not disappear from Umuofia with one straight business deal. Perhaps it is more correct to say that yet another duality, tradition and modernity, entered the landscape to join others like male and female, individual and community, spiritual and material, thereby providing those ready to understand the governing principles and how they are put to profitable use opportunities