This article was downloaded by: [University Library Utrecht]

On: 29 October 2012, At: 05:52

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:
Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Interventions: International Journal of

Postcolonial Studies
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription
information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riij20

THINGS FALL APART

Mpalive-Hangson Msiska
a

Birkbeck, University of London, UK

Version of record first published: 13 Jul 2009.

To cite this article: Mpalive-Hangson Msiska (2009): THINGS FALL APART, Interventions: International Journal
of Postcolonial Studies, 11:2, 171-175
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13698010903053030

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial
or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the
contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae,
and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not
be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this
material.

T H I N G S F A L L A PA R T

Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 05:52 29 October 2012

A Resource for Cultural Theory

Mpalive-Hangson Msiska
Birkbeck, University of London, UK

................
Chinua Achebe
literary
criticism
literary
representation
postcolonial
theory
plurisignifying
practice
Things Fall
Apart

................

Things Fall Apart has been an important resource for the emergence as well
as sustenance of postcolonial theory and practice. This is largely because it is
a confluence of a number of conceptual tensions that are deeply implicated in
the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century intellectual
formation. It is in that sense that one might regard Things Fall Apart as
not simply a classic, but also a text that even as it takes upon itself the
designation of a classic also transgresses it, embodying the transformative
energy of the quintessentially avant garde, as an elaboration of a new
relationship of consciousness to a changing material world (Williams 1989).
More than that, the novels abiding appeal has to do with its expression of
what Williams apprehends as a new metropolitan universal that breaches
the older universalism founded within the confines of the racial, national and
western metropolitan imagination, which, in my view, enables the text to
proffer a space of dialogic exchange between African and other cultures as
well as, within Africa itself, between the diverse identity formations. In this
way, Things Fall Apart serves as both an intensely Pan-Africanist as much as
a transcultural text.

......................................................................................
interventions Vol. 11(2) 171
175 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)
Copyright # 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13698010903053030

i n t e r v e n t i o n s
11 :2

Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 05:52 29 October 2012

.........................

172

It presents itself as a plurisignifying practice that reflects and refracts a

variety of diverse as well as intersecting cultural and political concerns, a
problematic that the new study of African as well as other literatures in
English has rearticulated as postcolonialism. In this context, postcolonial
theory is a systemic elaboration of that structure in the particular practice and
discursive protocols of literary criticism and cultural theory. In other words,
to the extent that postcolonial theoretical practice, as acknowledged
among
others
by the authors of the seminal text The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft
et al. 1989), Abdul JanMohamed (1983) and Biodun Jeyifo (1990), began as
an attempt to formalize within the discourse of theory the representational
practices and strategies of the founding texts of postcolonial literature, and
since the novel is one of the main postcolonial texts, it can be contended that
Things Fall Apart has an intimate and determinative relationship with
postcolonial theory.
Postcolonial critical practice is the veritable offspring of postcolonial
textual creative practice. Postcolonial writing, as paradigmatically expressed
in Achebes novel, accounts for this theoretical practices distinctive
ideological lineaments and moral geography. What I am saying here is
that, as postcolonial critics, the texts we study have given us our critical
ethical moorings as well as the fundamental categories which inform our
critical analysis. By no means is this our only source of critical formation

western and other critical and cultural texts have also shaped us, or at least
should do so
but the particularity of our practice arises out of the dynamic
interaction with these texts. In this regard, one might summon Georges
Poulets (1971) phenomenological textuality and argue that the texts are not
merely passive objects of critical reflection, but they actively function as
independent forms of consciousness that transform the minds seeking to
apprehend them. Nevertheless, the relationship between the critic and the
text is characterized by mutual determination and it is in that respect that
postcolonial theory can be said to be produced by its creative writing.
It is not only in its institutional relationship to critical practice that Things
Fall Apart stages such a complex dialectical relationship; it does so as well in a
number of respects within the narrative itself. Things Fall Apart is one of the
key texts in postcolonial theorization of the tension between colonialist
discourse and the indigenous counter-colonial representational discourse,
especially as dramatized by the conflict between the District Commissioners
and Obierikas view of the significance of Okonkwos life. It is identification
with the latters ethical pole of the binary opposition that animates the
foundational politics of postcolonial critical practice, as, like postcolonial
literature, it too writes back not only to western cultural criticism, but also
to those approaches to postcolonial writing that elide the link between culture
and ideology within the cultural universe of the colonial order, as well as that
fashioned subsequently as the postcolonial formation. Similar to writers such

TH INGS FA LL APART

Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 05:52 29 October 2012

Mpalive-Hangson Msiska

173
........................

as Chinua Achebe, as postcolonial critics we seek to grasp the working of

colonialist discourse from the perspective represented by Obierikas criticism
of the District Commissioner. In other words, postcolonial criticism derives
its affective content from postcolonial texts. However, that is not to suggest
that all that the critical practice does is merely to reproduce those sentiments,
but rather that postcolonial theory simulates the structure of feeling
(Williams 1977) embodied in the postcolonial text.
That structure of feeling is dramatized in Achebes Things Fall Apart by
the opposition between the colonialist and the indigenous symbolic frames, a
tension that touches the personal and institutional practices of Umuofia,
leading to the falling apart not only of things generally, but also and palpably
of Okonkwo himself, the protagonist of the novel and a man at the centre of
the public embodiment of the sovereignty of the polity and its defining
values. It is significant that in the framing of the conflict, Achebes text
preserves the notion of agency within the indigenous space, as the conflict
between the external and local forces, though an important factor in the
heros downfall, is portrayed as only partly responsible for that. Thus, the
interiorization of the source of Okonkwos conflict must be seen not simply
as a function of the tragic flaw of a hero typical of the Aristotelian
conception of Tragedy, which, if true, would have the effect of making
Okonkwo a passive victim of an indeterminate fate, but rather of the agency
and dynamism of the time and space anterior to the arrival of the missionary
and District Commissioner. Okonkwos failure and his societys concomitant
capitulation to western forces are also seen as a product of the fracture
between Okonkwos individualist interpretation of heroic agency and the
way in which it is understood by his society as a whole.
So, Things Fall Apart registers the advent of colonialism as a significant
moment of change for the people of Umuofia, but, noticeably, it does so by
placing the event within an indigenous historical temporality, an unfolding
of time on which is inscribed a particular human narrative. That narrative is
articulated as both private and public performances of selfhood in the stories
of success, as in Okonkwos rise from poverty to wealth, and of failure, as in
the protagonists downfall and his fathers unremarkable life; the ordinary
everyday, as in Nwoyes sitting at his mothers feet listening to oral tales, and
the extraordinarily heroic, as in Okonkwos memorable victory over
Amalinze, the Cat. In all this, the novel reminds us that it is by holding
onto the theory of differential histories (Bachelard 2000) that we can eschew
the instinctive hegemonic gesture to privilege ones time as the vantage point
from which to measure all Other times. It is in this regard that Okonkwos
real tragic flaw becomes that of ontological hubris, the projection of ones
particular cultural instant and instance into universal time, precluding the
potential to transcend the constraints of ones moment and propel oneself
into the future.

Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 05:52 29 October 2012

i n t e r v e n t i o n s
11 :2
.........................

174

Yet Okonkwos will to power is in some ways akin to the District

Commissioners and the overzealous missionarys, showing that even as he is
the quintessential product of Umuofia, as a contingent social and historical
formation, his fundamental attitude to power is not unique to him, but
shared by others outside his society
it is a transcultural manifestation of the
desire for absolute control that afflicts culturally and professionally diverse
characters in the novel. It affects Okonkwo, an Igbo military and judicial
leader, as much as it does Reverend Smith and the District Commissioner,
representative of the new colonial state. It is equally significant that the
forces of good are also universalized, through the presence of Obierika in the
novel and also the old warrior Ndulue and Reverend Brown.
This structure of simultaneous affirmation and sublation of the space of
the Selfsame is markedly evident in the novels citational affiliation. It adopts
a comparative framework rather than merely elaborating history as the selfcentred heroics of an unchanging ethnic or national historical ideal.
Especially in its Yeatsian link through the title of the novel, Achebe signals
the value of a productive textual dialogue or intertextuality. In this regard,
the function of intertextuality is to transform the contact zone (Pratt 1992)
from its inherently antagonistic structure of relations between the Selfsame
and Other to a mode of cultural hybridity (Bhabha 1994) that entails the use
of cultural texts as sources of identity formation at a number of levels

national and transcultural as well as transnational.
That is also the structure of postcolonial theory, for it seeks to mediate,
albeit critically, between western and indigenous structures of knowledge. In
this respect, postcolonial theory appropriates the resources of the postSausurean and post-Marxist discursive formation for a distinctive hermeneutics of the margins, recatheticting the epistemic resources of the Centre so
that, in Ngugis words, the Centre is moved, effectively to the margins
(Ngugi 1993). Of course, that is not to say that every postcolonial theory
attempts to do that or approves of such an enterprise, nor indeed, that
uneven relations of power do not operate in postcolonial critical theory as an
institutional practice, as many critics, particularly those based outside the
metropole, notably Aijaz Ahmed (1992), have argued. Nevertheless, the
moral of Things Fall Apart is that a too-exclusive concern with the authentic,
as in Ahmeds case or, indeed Chinweizus (Chinweizu et al. 1985), can lead
to an isolationist theoretical cul-de-sac that reproduces the Manichean and
hierarchical structures of colonial formation.
It is the particular potency of the novel that, much as it locates itself within
a universalist semiotics, acknowledging and appropriating the presence of
Europe in Africa, it presents one of the most powerful nationalist cultural
projects which affirms the integrity of indigenous culture and provides a
rationale for its beliefs that is understandable from both the perspective of an
inhabitant of Umuofia and that of a metropolitan student of literature in

TH INGS FA LL APART

Downloaded by [University Library Utrecht] at 05:52 29 October 2012

Mpalive-Hangson Msiska

175
........................

modern-day London. That is an important achievement, as it offers a

template for imagining the viability of an authentic African culture, one that
is neither overwhelmed by the forces of colonialism and globalization nor
hermetically sealed off from the world. Perhaps it is the honesty with which
Achebes novel approaches the question of cultural conflict that in the end
imbues the novel with a self-evident integrity which presents the space of
hybridity as one which, whatever its deficiency, always offers the possibility
of plenitude, of a future.
However, it is in the staging of a colonialist and what might be described
as a nascent postcolonial point of view that Achebe uses the text to reveal the
ideological signification of literary representation, a question central to
postcolonial critical practice. In the memorable differential representation of
Okonkwos huge life in the District Commissioners projected ethnographic
text, on the one hand, where it is reduced to a paragraph and, on the other,
its ample treatment in the text to novelistic proportions and depth, the
operations of ideology on narrative representation are laid bare, indeed, just
as much as the urgency of the need for the African writer to forge a
postcolonial counter-discourse. Perhaps it is Things Fall Aparts insistence
that the lives of the colonized and postcolonial subjects deserve more than a
paragraph, and even more than an anthropological ethnographic embodiment, that makes it a vital and abiding resource for contemporary cultural
theory which, in its on way, seeks to recount Okonkwos story from the
cultural vantage point that the writer has scouted for us.

R e f e ren c e s
Achebe, C. (1958) Things Fall Apart, London:
Heinemann.
Ahmed, A. (1992) In Theory, London: Verso.
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (1989)
The Empire Writes Back, London: Routledge.
Bachelard, G. (2000) [1950] Dialectic of Duration,
trans. M. M. Jones, Manchester: Clinemen.
Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture, London:
Routledge.
Chinweizu, Onwunchekwa, J. and Madubuike, I.
(1985) Toward the Decolonization of African
Literature, London: Kegan Paul.
Derrida, J. (1994) Spectres of Marx, London:
Routledge.
JanMohamed, A. (1983) Manichean Aesthetics,
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Jeyifo, B. J. (1990) For Obierika: the resilience and

predicament of Obierika, in K. Petersen and
A. Rutherford (eds) Chinua Achebe: A Celebration,
Oxford: Heinemann, pp. 51
70.
Ngugi, wa Thiongo (1993) Moving the Centre,
London: James Currey.
Poulet, G. (1971) The phenomenology of reading,
in H. Adams (ed.) Critical Theory Since Plato,
New York: Harcourt, Brace, pp. 1213
22.
Pratt, M. L. (1992) Imperial Eyes, London: Routledge.
Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Williams, R. (1989) Metropolitan perceptions and the
emergence of modernism, in The Politics of
Modernism: Against the New Conformists,
London: Verso, pp. 37
48.