The beauty of simplicity. Chinua Achebe's Things fall apart.

Is is impossible not to be reminded of Hemingway while reading Achebe's 1984 interview published in the Paris review. The reason being Hemingway's famous thinking of the novel as a testimony of truth.  Moreover, this focus enables the reader to notice the small details and apparently simple facts, although once connected, we see a universe.

“until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” 

To begin with, this is exactly the case of the Igbo people once the British arrived, and things began to fall apart. Messing with their identity, replacing custom with theirs,  the 'correct' ones.  But they did not realize the damage -hopefully-, nor the beauty and wisdom of the simpleton savages they were conquering.

“(..) no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us. But at the same time I know that an important message is not a novel. To say that we should all be kind to our neighbors is an important statement; it’s not a novel. (…) it is not just the message, but also the way that message is conveyed, the arrangement of the words, the felicity of the language.” (The Paris Review, 18)

Achebe stresses enough this fact, nonetheless, that was not what written tradition on the Africa(ns) subject presented, but one of the 'good white man', who’s intelligent and most likely, fair, arriving at rough diamond lands, craving for salvation. These inhabitants were savages, stupid and ugly people whose portrait will remain with the Colonial novel. 

On the one hand, the novel seemed to be rather difficult to follow, due to its constant odd-to-pronounce lexicon, the underlying meaning was the complete opposite.  In particular, character's names were the most difficult, thus, making the story hard to grasp. Ironically enough for me, Okwonko is one of the most common names, meaning "The sun of Monday", as a result of an Ibo tradition of naming children after one of the four week days. 

On the other hand, something which is complex, is conveyed in the simplest words, the construction of characters and their lives, all of them projections of complex tradition's influence and their logic background. Luckily, the author relies on lbo speech and proverbs, which are “ the palm-oil with which words are eaten.” (Achebe, 3), for some things which cannot be translated without losing its original meaning.

Egwugwu dress. 

“The egwugwu with the springy walk was one of the dead fathers of the clan. He looked terrible with the smoked raffia "body, a huge wooden face painted white except for the round hollow eyes and the charred teeth that were as big as a man's fingers. On his head were two powerful horns.” (Achebe, Things Fall Apart 1858)

Troughout the book, we follow Okwonkwo and his fears, goals, behavior and so on. 

Nevertheless, it is not just him, is the tribe, and the relation between them, and their handling of the British arrival; they represent something far more complex, religion, power, even roles and duties within the tribe. But there is not much complexity on the ordeal or understanding of these, it is actually quite easy to follow, the book is so well written that nothing leaves hanging.

To illustrate the above, is the hierarchy of the tribe. A man can aspire to as many titles as big feasts he can offer the tribe. Sounds simple, right? Likewise, higher influence means, accumulated wealth -crops- hence, a man will not have the power to rule over the land, since the richer he gets, the higher the title, the bigger the banquet.

In summation, this is just one of the brilliant aspects  from the book. Achebe’s commitment to truth, without forgetting complexity, yet, making it easy to read and dive into the uniqueness of the Ibo culture.  Unluckily, many things are lost due to the conquering era. For example, missionaries created the Ibo-standard language, so that dialects fade away.
Last but not least,  I  wonder, how many other beauties have we missed in order to assimilate into canons, denying our truest self?  (to us and the world) Is it really worth it? 

Works Cited.

Henry James: Literary Criticism: Vol. 1: Essays on Literature. "Chinua Achebe"  by Jerome Brooks.The Paris Review, 1998. Print

Achebe, Chinua  Achebe. Things fall apart. City of Publication: Publisher, 1958. Print.