"things fall apart" chinua achebe

my advanced english students read chinua achebe's THINGS FALL APART as their summer reading assignment.

this book deals with the "falling apart" of the society in an nigerian village in the 1890's. the final blow to the way of life comes with the invasion of christian missionaries to the area. these missionaries sole purpose is to convert the polytheistic natives to christianity. these missionaries, as are ALL missionaries of any sort, are firm in their belief that what they are bringing the "heathen culture" is better than what they have, and therefore, is a good thing.

i have had some time to absorb this idea since bush has put us smackdab in the middle of a modern day "things fall apart" situation. it is called IRAQ. our presence in this country truly does illustrate the arrogance that we as a society have about the rightness and correctness of how we live.

it seems to me that one of the things that makes life interesting is DIVERSITY. however, it seems as human beings, we don't honor that concept. there seems to be an overwhelming need to reject that which is different because it takes us emotionally out of our comfort zone of what is "normal." the whole normal concept is sad too, in that we spend so much time looking around at others and then judging ourselves, our self-worth, our successes based on some sort of mythical yardstick. of course, there IS going to be a yardstick in any culture, and cultures exist in a variety of areas big and small. as a teacher of high school students, i recognize my school alone as having its own culture. it isn't exactly reflective of even the society of our city, richmond, as we have approximately 1,350 students and of that number maybe 100 are minorities. that sets up a really interesting "normal" and makes it pretty hard for the minority kids to feel accepted.

this issue came to the fore 2 days ago when the use of the word "nigger" was brought up in a classroom discussion. personally, i hate the word and, as a child, had my mouth washed out for saying it..once. it didn't happen again. the word was a racial slur and a huge divider in 1950-60's culture. to this day it makes me uncomfortable and i understand its power. however, a whole generation of black students have been raised in a culture where the word can be used amongst themselves without the connotations that i associate with it. thus came the argument/debate in this classroom setting. the white kids wanted to know why it was ok for black kids to use it, but they were not allowed to use it.

this is not an unknown or undiscussed subject. but it suddenly exploded into a nasty, hurtful and ultimately useless discussion because of the "culture" of that classroom. there were 3 black students, the rest all white. this reflected the school setup, and in our case, white is the majority, and therefore "normal." black students expressing themselves as they normally would is often bothersome to a few because it goes against the grain of the vanilla-whitebread society that is mostly in charge in at least this area of our county. everyone is middle class white. they (including myself) don't live in racially or economically diverse neighborhoods, and the schools in turn reflect this. when this discussion occurred in class, the teachers asked the black students to explain this to the white students. the result was a disaster, with one of the girls dissolving into tears, and the other into outward anger. the teachers did not understand their reaction, as they considered everyone "equal" in the classroom.

this is a mistake that sometimes we white people make. in an effort to try and make everyone equal, we bend over backwards to erase the differences. the concept, i suppose, is to homogenize everyone while at the same time giving lip service to celebrating differences. in actuality, we don't. i often remind my culturally comfortable students of the fact that they are the majority and their belief systems and comfort zones are bolstered by NUMBERS. what if they were suddenly one of 70 white students in an urban, lower socio economic school? how would they feel if suddenly a majority classroom of black students began, as a group, to question them about their whiteness and their differences from the now-majority white people? i don't think that too many of them would react any differently than their ethnically different classmates. there is an arrogance that comes with being a part of the majority white culture, and that has been there since this country was founded. it was not founded by ethnically diverse people. it was founded by WHITE PEOPLE looking for religious freedom, people who were so desperate to be able to be DIVERSE AND WORSHIP DIFFERENTLY that they put themselves on small boats, crossed a forbidding ocean under the worst of circumstances, and their reward was a land full of mosquitos, mysteries, native americans, and hardship. interesting thing about that diversity thing, however. once we got here, everyone had to be a puritan and worship the same way. the native american tribes here were savages not particularly worthy of anything but our contempt, and we set about creating a new society that was ironically based upon the old one they had sacrificed to escape.

this kind of arrogance isn't just limited to white people of european descent. go to any culture, anywhere, and you will see it...the need to say "my way is superior" and we go about making it that way by the old "might is right" concept. a show of physical force has the same results, whether is comes from hutus and other rwandan tribes butchering each other with machetes, to american tanks filled with soldiers and weapons. which one is more civilized? this was the ironic question that was posed in achebe's book THINGS FALL APART. in the end, the white culture does succeed in molding the black tribes. but by doing so, they destroy the things that were important to this culture. they chopped out the heart, only to replace it with what these missionaries considered to be a new and better heart. but is that true? do we as human beings always have to be on a crusade to convert every culture to our own? if there is a higher power, do you really think he would ask us to go out and make these people leave their bedrock beliefs to convert to ours? i suspect that a truly benevolent god, the one i believe in, not only created all types of people, but has made us all diverse and wonderful in order for us to learn something about beauty. it comes in all sorts of packages. soul growth comes from diversity and dealing with life outside of our comfort zone. in essence, life is about constantly resetting the boundaries for our comfort zone. i would think that even jesus wouldn't have hated a hutu warrior, and he wouldn't have told a gay person to give up being gay because if not, he/she is going to hell. what is hell? hell is living on earth with no sense of happiness, no sense of security. we live in our selected societal worlds which are ironically built upon shifting sand. however, we are often insistent that we channel our energies into making sure the sand is converted to concrete and doesn't go away.

a solid belief system, a solid, traditional society in a culture is also not a bad thing. this was the other side to the story in achebe's book. what was wrong with honoring your gods generation after generation? what was wrong with having a hierachy in the village if everyone for the most part was happy with it and didn't complain? yes, they did some things there that we wouldn't tolerate in our society, not the least of which was killing people who broke laws or rules or banishing people from the society for again violating time honored traditions. we consider these acts to be acts of small minded barbarians. yes, maybe so. but what are we basing this upon? european, christian based tradition. a pygmy society in south america or a society of islanders in the south pacific aren't necessarily going to be made happier or spiritually better by having what is normal to them replaced by what we consider to be better. a good working example of that is the shameful way we "subdued" the native americans in our country. one look at how they have adopted or adapted our western european lifestyle ought to show the value, or lack thereof, of this mindset. are native americans better off on their reservations? have we honored their cultures? are they better off because we rounded them up, put them on reservations that can support no visible ways of making a living in the white world? are they a better people because we took their children from them and forced them to go to school miles away from their families, forced them to convert to christianity, and forced them to learn english and abandon their traditional native languages and cultures? i would have to think the answer is pretty obvious.

from the classrooms of hanover county to the streets of rwanda, from the huts of islanders in the south pacific to the towns of iraq, we keep pushing forward with an agenda filled with arrogance. it seems to me that we should honor people's rights to live their lives as they wish. the only common denominator should be that we harm no one else in the process. this would include the abuse, especially sexually, of children in any culture. but even drawing that line would be difficult i think. we complain about the sexual mutilation of young girls in certain african tribes and how that should be stopped. but at the same time, this is what is "normal" to these tribes, and has been as long as they have existed. to "civilized" society, inflicting pain upon a child in this manner is an abomination and should be stopped. but their culture might consider our permissive society and its influence on our children an equal abomination because we have no set rules and they are always under discussion.

everything in life doesn't need to be discussed, debated or destroyed. while the "n word" question was a legitimate one in the classroom situation i described, it was handled in a way that reflected the majority's belief concerning sensitivity and fairness. not much thought went into how it would feel if you were the minority under the microscope like a bug. it wasn't so much the forcing of the answers from the minority students as it was the insensitivity of the majority to the position we had put those kids in. i do not believe that either of the two teachers in the classroom thought they were doing anything wrong. in fact, i believe they were following what they considered to be a right path of equal questioning from both sides. however, when the balance is glaringly off kilter in favor of one side, as it was in this situation, some sensitivity to that position probably should have been considered. however, i wasn't there, and i truly cannot judge what happened. i can only point out that we as humans need to be constantly thinking not only about what we think is normal, but what is normal for the other person gazing back at us. we may not like what we see, and we are free, at least in this country, to walk away from it and to retreat to our comfort zone. however, to continue to do that does not in the long run help anything. it only perpettuates the polarizations that exist worldwide as well as in this country. wouldn't life be sweet if we could, as rodney king ironically said, "just all get along."