Showing posts with label Things Fall Apart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Things Fall Apart. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
CER on Things Fall Apart
The vice of colonialism is brought out by the hypocrisy of white settlers in blindly achieving their ends, condemning already established culture despite knowing scarcely anything about it. Yet it also festers in the native people who blindly follow these settlers, and polarize their homeland as a result. As the threat that the white people pose to the Igbo people and the realm of Umuofia becomes increasingly grave, Obierika and Okonkwo have a conversation that channels author Chinua Achebe's perspective on colonialism. They say, "'Does the white man understand our customs about land?' 'How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says our customs are bad... How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man... has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart'" (Achebe 176). Unity is what makes a community strong and well. It is also necessary in resistance to colonialism. Therefore, the way in which colonialism takes its toll, by attracting native community members to colonists, fosters disunity. This diminishes the impact of any resistance and ensures that the settlers will have power. It is the metaphorical knife with which white colonists, Achebe says, tear already established communities apart. This passage's tone of gravity and severity, as well as use of metaphor, extend the impact of this idea. Colonialism preys on those who are susceptible to influence and pits them against their community members, in a rejection of the cultural traditions that keep them together.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Danger of a Single Story Response
1. Single stories are dangerous in many ways; this word is accurate, but really a single story in itself of what single stories can do. Single stories are pervasive. They spread like epidemic diseases, giving incomplete perspectives about a group to myriad people. Single stories are insidious. When they are told, they have truth, and this makes them seem harmless. This makes them told more and more often because their simplicity and the categorization they offer is desired. They give truth, but an understanding of a people or group that is false. In doing so, they diminish the dignity of a group of people hindered in pursuing an identity they seek to project. Single stories are crippling to the individual. People around them think of them in a one, distinct fashion, and this burdens them from being themselves. They want people to know them, but with the single story, they do not. Single stories are polarizing. They make one people distinctly different, and focus on these rather than numerous similarities between people which would serve to bring them together.
3. As Chimamanda Adichie says, power is closely tied with the idea of a single story, and what single stories are told. She uses the Igbo word nkali, which loosely translates to "to be greater than another," to describe the concept to listeners. If who is in power is the storyteller, than those who do not have power -- because they are in the minority, because they are oppressed because of beliefs, or because they are simply perceived as distinctly different -- do not have their stories told. American history is almost always told from the perspective of the white colonists because they had the power: they were the people who conquered and progressed with advanced technology, and the idea that they were superior to the Native Americans already there because of their vastly different societies, which made these Europeans view their ways as "savage." Yet if the story is told from the Native Americans, whose stories were not told because they did not play a role in the development of the American state, but were pushed aside with intolerance and disregard to the oblivion of posterity, the complete story would change. We would see incredibly complex societies torn apart because of power. Today, voices of whites are elevated by their greater number and American tradition of institutionalized oppression against people of color, and especially, black people. Their stories are told and told in greater number because of opportunities which arise from power.
5. As a writer, Chinua Achebe is conquering the idea of the single story by showing the complex, sophisticated Igbo society in Umuofia of Nigeria. American readers who have the idea that Africa is a one-dimensional place of violence have their views and projections of the world altered by Achebe's writing. He shows that Africa is a place of extreme diversity, in which different countries have very different stories, by presenting a very unique culture and society in Nigeria. Furthermore, he puts readers into sorts of intellectual traps by making readers draw conclusions about Igbo society as a whole solely by Okonkwo's perspective. This is a single story about men in society, and he shows this to us by later offering other perspectives. An example of the integration of the idea of the single story into Things Fall Apart is in the men's discussion of varying gender relations. They see that their idea of how genders should interact is not the same as those in other villages. Overall, the destroying of single stories in the readers' minds plays into the terrible impact of British colonialism.
3. As Chimamanda Adichie says, power is closely tied with the idea of a single story, and what single stories are told. She uses the Igbo word nkali, which loosely translates to "to be greater than another," to describe the concept to listeners. If who is in power is the storyteller, than those who do not have power -- because they are in the minority, because they are oppressed because of beliefs, or because they are simply perceived as distinctly different -- do not have their stories told. American history is almost always told from the perspective of the white colonists because they had the power: they were the people who conquered and progressed with advanced technology, and the idea that they were superior to the Native Americans already there because of their vastly different societies, which made these Europeans view their ways as "savage." Yet if the story is told from the Native Americans, whose stories were not told because they did not play a role in the development of the American state, but were pushed aside with intolerance and disregard to the oblivion of posterity, the complete story would change. We would see incredibly complex societies torn apart because of power. Today, voices of whites are elevated by their greater number and American tradition of institutionalized oppression against people of color, and especially, black people. Their stories are told and told in greater number because of opportunities which arise from power.
5. As a writer, Chinua Achebe is conquering the idea of the single story by showing the complex, sophisticated Igbo society in Umuofia of Nigeria. American readers who have the idea that Africa is a one-dimensional place of violence have their views and projections of the world altered by Achebe's writing. He shows that Africa is a place of extreme diversity, in which different countries have very different stories, by presenting a very unique culture and society in Nigeria. Furthermore, he puts readers into sorts of intellectual traps by making readers draw conclusions about Igbo society as a whole solely by Okonkwo's perspective. This is a single story about men in society, and he shows this to us by later offering other perspectives. An example of the integration of the idea of the single story into Things Fall Apart is in the men's discussion of varying gender relations. They see that their idea of how genders should interact is not the same as those in other villages. Overall, the destroying of single stories in the readers' minds plays into the terrible impact of British colonialism.
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