Language, Culture, and Identity in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

In Decolonising the Mind, Ngugi wa Thiong’oasks, “[w]hat is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?” (26). For Thiong’o, this was likely a rhetorical question. He vociferously rejects what Chinua Achebe calls the “fatalistic logic of the unassailable position of English in our literature,” which Thiong’o describes as the tendency of African writers to, at once, mourn the effacing betrayal involved in accepting the English language, but at the same time, regard English indispensable for all practical purposes (Achebe 6).

However, the political consequences of choosing to write literature in English cannot be seamlessly analogised with the self-loathing, internalised-inferiority complex that leads postcolonial subjects to accept – and even appreciate – the project of colonialism. I propose the analogy falters because language and culture occupy a different relational position to identity than the edifice of a colonial state.[1] To build this claim, I look at how Achebe’s Things Fall Apart reckons with the fraught relationship between language, culture, colonialism and identity. I ask two questions in this essay: what are the cultural stakes of language and identity within Things Fall Apart?; and, relatedly, how can this textual reading of Things Fall Apart help unravel the broader theoretical effects of language on literature and identity?

Things Fall Apart does not present itself as a non-confrontational novel that will confirm what people already believe of Africa or of its postcolonial literatures. Instead, it presents itself as an ultimately much more rewarding, but nonetheless challenging novel that makes immersive demands of its readers. Igbo words like ‘chi’ or ‘egwugwu’ or ‘ekwe’ or ‘iyi-uwa’ are repeated constantly throughout the novel, and Achebe makes no effort to provide direct translations. As Ashcroft writes in Empire Writes Back, “the choice of leaving words untranslated in post-colonial texts is a political act” (65). Their meaning and connotational nuances emerge contextually and slowly, becoming clearer as the novel’s explication of Igbo life gets clearer and more detailed – these words cannot be imported to English without first establishing the culture from which their meanings arise.

For instance, ‘chi’ is variously interpreted as a personal god, destiny, or individual capability. ‘Chi’ can be understood as a deterministic force in a person’s life – protagonist Okonwo laments when in exile that “[a] man could not rise beyond the destiny of his chi” (131). At the same time, ‘chi’ is still subject to an individual’s active decisions and hard work, “[w]hen a man says yes, his chi says yes also” (27). The linguistic-ethnographic exercise of grasping this dialectical concept is, in fact, an exercise in grasping the nonlinear structures of feeling and moral calculus of the Igbo.

In Umofia, society is tightly wrapped into the collective wherein each member, by design, contemplates how their actions affect the destiny of the whole. During the New Yam Festival we are told that “every man whose arm was strong … was expected to invite large numbers of guests from far and wide” (26). Here, the proverbial strength of a man is qualified and confirmed by fulfilling the Umofian ethical imperative to the collective, that is, bringing together and hosting others in a manner that reflects positively on Umofia. Yet, Things Fall Apart meticulously characterises the agency of individuals as central to their status; the Igbo’s arbitration of others’ actions and behaviour is framed by what they choose to do with what they have been given. Early on, Okonkwo’s intergenerational mobility is perceived by others not as moral luck or good fortune, but as the direct consequence of his “solid personal achievements” (3). Thus, in working out the meaning of chi, a micro-sociological feature of Umofian life is revealed.

Achebe’s untranslated words evolve the basic grammar of his English to reflect the basic grammar of Igbo society. In addition to these choice words, Things Fall Apart’s tactile description of Nigeria is realised by the luxurious, languid introduction of proverbs whose precise meanings are not always immediately apparent in English, yet still, they saturate the text like palm-oil spilling from the story’s lips mid-orature. In fact, the familiar yet omniscient narrator directly provides this meta-commentary about interpersonal dynamics and oral tradition in Igboland; Things Fall Apart contains ethnographic cues about African culture that are embodied by the text’s language itself, demonstrating its own facticity and ontological worth:

Having spoken plainly so far, Okoye said the next half a dozen sentences in proverbs. Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. Okoye was a great talker and he spoke for a long time, skirting round the subject and then hitting it finally

Achebe, 7

Even when proverbs are translated into English, as in “Oji odu achu ijiji-o-o!” the parenthetical explanation Achebe gives is not the spoon-fed, technically accurate ‘cow,’ it is “[t]he one that uses its tail to drive flies away!” (114). Elsewhere, the breadth of communication is expanded to include the rhythmic “language of the hollowed-out” drum, whose onomatopoeic lexicon all Igbo are well-versed in (120). Furthermore, because of language’s revered, mystical, and sacralised position for the community, the Igbo recognise its potential dangers. For example, Ekwefi will not acknowledge the hailing involved in being named by language’s voice unless she is certain of its source:

‘Ekwefi!’ a voice called from one of the other huts. It was Nwoye’s mother, Okonkwo’s first wife.

‘Is that me?’ Ekwefi called back. That was the way people answered calls from outside. They never answered yes for fear it might be an evil spirit calling.

Achebe, 41

Up to this point, knowing the same language – of proverbs, of drums, of beliefs, of fear, of folklore – are what bestow belonging and coherence to Umofian social life. Cultural identity is inextricably associated with speaking the same language and constructing meaning in the same connotational framework. The Igbo are a community who approach objects and experiences in the world with a shared set of critical tools and syntagmatic cues as encompassed by the language of their cultural logic. When the white colonisers arrive in Umofia, the Igbo’s internal codes of communication and order are punctured by the competing colonial languages as articulated in their religion, and systems of organisation.[2]

Achebe’s title is a reference to Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming,’ which is also quoted in the epigraph: “Things fall apart the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (5). Most directly, this speaks to the disintegration of traditional African life by the invasion of Christian missionaries and colonialists. The second half of the novel documents the collapse of Umofia’s indigenous social fabric through instances of religious conversion, chaotic violence, and ideological indoctrination. One of the clearest instances of things beginning to fall apart in this sense comes when Nwoye, son of hyper-masculine, aggressive, and unrelenting Okonkwo, is among the first to convert to Christianity.

Nwoye was a “sad-faced youth,” subject to frequent beatings at the hands of his dissatisfied father who cursed Nwoye for his laziness, and crucified him for his soft-heartedness (14). Nwoye was inherently attracted to his mother’s ‘feminine’ stories, and had seen his tribe inflict trauma on its weakest members – like twins left to die in a forest due to an old Igbo superstition. His titled, respected father constituted an ideal Nwoye could never live up to, and more importantly, one that he did not know if he wanted to live up to. When Okonkwo killed his adopted son and Nwoye’s beloved brother – Ikemfuna, Nwoye was overwhelmed by his disconnect with the rules of his culture that mandated such cruelty. With these disaffections occupying his mind, when the Christian missionaries’ hymns and evocative sermon soared through the Umofian air, to Nwoye, Christianity’s language sounded forgiving, sanctimonious, and transcendent:

It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul-the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed

Achebe, 147

Nwoye never fully accepted the cultural language of the Igbo, he never fully understood why things had to be done in the way they did. For this reason, where Okonkwo thought the missionaries were ridiculous and incomprehensible, Nwoye thought they spoke a language whose logic he had been trying to find his whole life.

Similarly, the missionaries’ acceptance of the osu (outcasts) builds on this premise that the deracinated, ostracised, and supposedly forsaken members of Igbo are the most susceptible to the colonial conversion; for colonial inclusivity is lucrative to those who have been previously excluded, those who have nothing to lose, or to those who have lost everything because of the tribe’s ways of life. Nwoye is drawn to the altered ontological lens Christianity provides: its cultural truths structurally differ from the Igbos,’ and he is willing to buy into their methods of perception, communication, and arbitration in response to the social facts of Igbo life with which he is dissatisfied. 

Furthermore, in three distinct instances, Christianity was able to compromise Igbo culture’s ontologies: first, when they built a church in Mbanta’s cursed forest without dying in four days; second, when they fail to die even after twenty-eight days; and lastly, by killing the revered python without incurring doom. This sent the cultural knowledge systems of the tribe into something of an existential crisis, by proving the fallibility of their collective investment in these systems, as Frantz Fanon writes, “every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society” (82).  Clearly, the Igbo cultural “center” of the title and Yeats’ poem cannot hold up against colonial force.

Yet, to suggest that prior to English interference the Igbo identity was pure, choate, and impenetrable, is to misread Things Fall Apart. For Okonkwo, the tragic hero, things have been falling apart for quite some time. We are introduced to his character with mythical language, elevating him as “one of the greatest men of his time” because of his wrestling prowess, his many wives, and his flourishing yams (8). The diction of the initial praise of Okonkwo is written with such symbolic casualness and simplicity, that mere statements like “he had a large barn full of yams” and “he had three wives” communicate what is culturally valorised in Umofia (6). Okonkwo grew up seeing his weak father fail to thrive in Igbo culture because of his inability to repay debts or work hard; Okonkwo fashions himself in the negative spaces of his father’s shameful figure in an effort to project masculinity, strength, and embody the Igbo ideal in all the ways his father could not. He lashes out at tribespeople, his children, and his wives when he feels they are not delivering on what their culture and roles expect of them.

However, on multiple occasions, Okonkwo’s overblown and misplaced sense of loyalty to his abstracted perception of his culture and what it valued was what ended up alienating him from the real people who comprised his culture. His killing of adopted son Ikemfuna against elders’ advice is a shattering instance where the ugly head of his inferiorities are reared, namely “the fear of failure and of weakness” which drove him to so fiercely defend what he saw as his culture (13). This ends up costing him both his adopted son, and Nwoye. He abused his wife during his tribe’s Week of Peace, and fatally maims a young boy during a ceremony – the latter resulting in his 7-year exile.

Although he incurs punishment from his tribe for these transgressions, Okonkwo’s unchecked masculine aggression is at least in part, an overcompensation coming from his visceral need to be accepted by his community as a man in ways his father was not. He pedestalises violence and pride as attributes, because they were once the traits that helped him make a name for himself; he fondly reminisces the days he was a famed wrestler called a “Roaring flame” (153). When his friend visits him in exile and tells him of the enslavement of neighbouring tribes and his own at the hands of colonial powers, he is genuinely dumbfounded, because submission and inferiority do not exist in his cultural logic of Igboland. He asks, “almost to himself… ‘But I cannot understand these things you tell me. What is it that has happened to our people? Why have they lost the power to fight?’” (175).

To Okonkwo, self-defence and brute force coursed through the blood of his tribespeople by fact of birth. By letting the white man insidiously take over all their systems of life, the Igbo people of Umofia had proved, once again, the fallibility of their own identity and ontologies. Ultimately, when Okonkwo and his compatriots face persecution at the hands of their colonisers, he sees his compatriots’ unwillingness to fight and their collective inability to assert dominance as an insuperable existential failure. The mythical trappings of his culture have been laid bare. He feels betrayed by his culture and disillusioned about the principles he structured his life around, and so in return, he betrays his culture by taking his own life.

This is to suggest that within the text, there is compelling evidence that ‘culture’ cannot be regarded as a monolithic designation that gives people a continuous and complete sense of self and community. Which is not to say that there is no such thing as Igbo culture, nor that the colonial project did not cause acute psychological and sociological dislocation and dismemberment from a historical tradition that sustained members of communities. Rather, the idea is that Things Fall Apart engages with the polycentrism of what it means to belong to a tradition, a culture, or a language by acknowledging the multiplicity of lived experiences occurring within a single cultural site and a single historical moment. It is indisputable that European colonialism brutally and unconscionably eroded Igbo culture by asserting hegemonic Western systems. However, there are diverse forms of restrictions and ideological manipulations involved in the sustenance of any culture. This textual reading of Things Fall Apart displays not only that there is no essential superiority of the white man, but also that there is no essential cultural identity of the Igbo that can be predictably and authoritatively captured.

By denying the deterministic and reductive perspective of what it means to belong to a culture, Achebe opens the door to better understand how culture can hurt its own members.

In fact, some of the most traumatic repressions and costs of culture are incurred by the silenced, flattened female characters in Things Fall Apart. Where we see the toll myths of identity and masculinist imperatives take on Okonkwo, little attention is paid to his beaten wives. Florence Stratton’s ‘How Could Things Fall Apart For Whom They Were Not Together,’ rightly points out that although “Achebe does not…idealize Igbo society,” it is still evident that “his criticism does not encompass the condition of women in Umuofia” and even though, “Achebe presents the collapse as being due not solely or even primarily to British military superiority, but also to an internal disorder,” he does not flesh out the terrors Umofia’s women must sustain to reproduce its fractious culture (Stratton 33). 

Therefore, coming to the second problematic of this essay, this textual reading of Things Fall Apart unspools the broader theoretical effects of language on literature and identity. Achebe’s declared intention with this novel was to provide a counterpoint to homogenising colonial literature that saw all African subjects as interchangeable products of their brutish, simplistic culture. He takes offence with Heart of Darkness because he sees Conrad as one who “chose the role of purveyor of comforting myths” rather than portraying the human complexities of any culture which include contradiction, inconsistency, and conflict (325). In “The Writer and His Community,” Achebe, always upfront about the political stakes of his writing, observed that his work intentionally resisted “the trap of seeing the differences as absolute rather than relative” (59).

In this novel, he shows how different members of the Igbo community responded differently to the process of colonisation – for instance, Nwoye willingly accepted it, Okonkwo could not survive it, and other characters such as Obiereka were coerced into re-organising their culture around it. In this way, Achebe repudiates that essentialising view of identity which argues that belonging to a race or culture makes experiences, ideas, and reactions to situations a foregone conclusion of linguistic and cultural structures.

There is nothing so intrinsic, fundamental, and consistent about the Igbo identity that makes it impossible to be contested or variably understood. Igbo culture – encompassing its religion, language, and organisation – is not so far removed from the rest of the world or even from Western colonialists that another language is unable to begin to discuss it. Thiong’o and other language purists posit that, “[l]anguage and literature were taking us further and further from ourselves to other selves, from our world to other worlds (Thiong’o 12). Achebe disagrees by rejecting Thiong’o’s basic proposition that there is an unbroachable linguistic and cultural schism between “our world” and “other worlds,” because he recognises that “language is not an enemy – language is a tool” (Achebe 152). In the postcolonial context, language is a tool which made cultural diffusion, African unification, and the interplay of ideas possible: “there are not many countries in Africa today where you could abolish the language of the erstwhile colonial powers and still retain the facility for mutual communication” (Achebe 344).

Achebe defends his choice to write in English first on the level of convenience – writers must consider whether their work can be read by others – and also secondly on a theoretical level – language is not caught in a cultural straitjacket, nor is writing in a language the plain act of translating cultural realities or identarian truths into literature. Asserting that members of a culture should only write in their historically-given language is to reify a reductive, deterministic view of race, language, and culture. The task for a postcolonial writer, then, is to create “an English that is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience” (Achebe 347).

Returning to Thiong’o’s rhetorical question, the political reality of colonialism is not only a historical fact, but also the culmination of war on multiple different fronts – resource-based, psychological, and cultural. The bloodied methods by which the colonial project sustained itself cannot be equated with the choice to communicate ideas in a language given to a community through colonialism. The fact of colonialism is undeniable, but the choice to use parts of its legacy as resistance, as expedience, or as creative and philosophical exploration is not to undermine or protract the severity of colonial oppression. Rather, it is to step into the postcolonial future without trying to erase or deny the irreparable effects of the past. Allowing the boundlessness of language to work its way around a culture only liberates people from the suffocations of essentialised identities. As Frantz Fanon writes, “I do not come with timeless truths” (Fanon 1). Things may fall apart, but sometimes freedom emerges from fragmentation.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. “English and the African Writer.” Transition 18 (1965): 27-30. Web.

Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa.” Falling Into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Ed.

Achebe, Chinua. The Education of a British-Protected Child. New York: Random House, 2009.

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Ed. Abiola Irele. New York: Norton, 2009.

Achebe, Chinua. Home and Exile. New York: Oxford Up, 2000.

Ashcroft, Bill, et al. The Empire Writes Back. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2002.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1982. 

Florence Stratton, “How could things fall apart for whom they were not together?,” Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender

Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. Decolonising the Mind. New Hampshire: Reed Publishing Inc., 1986. Print.

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[1] Identity, here, refers to a sense of continuity and self that emerges from psycho-sociological processes.

[2] Here, language and culture are not the same thing. Language is a component of culture, a reflection of culture, and an architect of culture. The existence and reproduction of a culture depends on the reproduction of its language. But it is clear that language is not a single Igbo language, its communication technology is far more advanced than that. Different forms of meaning formation are also vital, breathing facets of a culture’s language. In this way, religion and organization are competing languages of cultural logic.