Things Fall Apart #2: The sap of life
Footnotes & Tangents for chapters 6–9 of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
He grew rapidly like a yam tendril in the rainy season, and was full of the sap of life.
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Hello and welcome to week two of our slow read of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
The second week covers chapters 6-9, from the fate of Ikemefuna to the drama of Ezinma. I recommend reading this section of the book first, and then returning to this post to join in the discussion.
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1. Slaves and slavery
The elders and grandees of the village sat on their own stools brought there by their young sons or slaves.
This isn’t really a book about slavery. The story takes place in the 1890s, many decades after the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade and the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.
However, this brief mention of slaves is worth noting. Slaves in Igboland were mostly people captured in war and raids. Although the institution existed before the Europeans, they created new incentives for it. Today, between 10 and 20 per cent of people in Igboland may be descended from slaves and are still subject to discrimination.
Tangent: The Descendants of Slaves in Nigeria Fight for Equality (The New Yorker; paywall)
One of the most famous people to be enslaved in Igboland was Olaudah Equiano, born around 1745. He was shipped to the Caribbean, where he later bought his freedom. In England, he wrote his memoirs and became a vocal participant of the abolition movement.
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2. Silk-cotton trees
Behind them was the big and ancient silk-cotton tree which was sacred. Spirits of good children lived in that tree waiting to be born. On ordinary days young women who desired children came to sit under its shade.
This is the Ceiba pentandra, also known as kapok, which is found across the tropics. Unsurprisingly, it is the object of much folklore and mythology around the world. In the Caribbean, kapoks are inhabited by duppies – malevolent spirits and souls of the dead. Here, it is the source of “good children”, which contrasts with the “bad children” story of Ezinma in Chapter Nine.
3. The spirit of the drums
They were possessed by the spirit of the drums.
I have been a very poor drummer in my time. In London in the 2000s, I played in an activist samba band at anti-war demonstrations. I keenly remember the first time I felt the band play, for it did feel like possession. The drums controlled the players and the crowd, and seemed to say something that words could not.
What is the significance of the drums for the Umofia?
The “intoxicating rhythm” of the drums has a sublime effect on the people of Umuofia. Afterwards, “they became ordinary human beings again.” We see many examples in the story of people becoming other, like Chielo, a friendly widow with two children, who at other times is the feared priestess of the Oracle.
Anyone seeing Chielo in ordinary life would hardly believe she was the same person who prophetised when the spirit of Agbala was upon her.
We learn in the next chapter that it is in this supernatural guise that Chielo has demanded Ikemefuna's death.
4. Bean-cakes and foo-foo
I was curious to learn more about the food eaten in Umuofia. The bean-cakes are akara, deep-fried fritters made from cowpeas or black-eyed peas. The work akara originates with the Yoruba, and bean-cakes are a popular street food across Nigeria and the diaspora.
The word "foo-foo" comes from the Akan people of Ghana and is a staple dish throughout West Africa. Traditionally, foo-foo is made from boiled cassava, plantains, and cocoyam, pounded into a broth-like stew.
No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man. He was like the man in the song who had ten and one wives and not enough soup for his foo-foo.
It would be great if we could identify this Igbo song and find a recording of it. Still, this quote brings together the themes of food and polygamy, wealth and masculinity – all central to the story and Okonkwo's concerns.
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5. Mother’s stories
Nwoye knew that it was right to be masculine and to be violent, but somehow he still preferred the stories that his mother used to tell, and which she no doubt still told to her younger children.
This perfectly constructed sentence introduces us to Nwoye’s great choice: is he going to follow his father down the road of “violence and bloodshed”, or will he reject this path for another?
What influence does Ikemefuna have on Nwoye?
Any sense that “it was right” not to love these stories for “foolish women and children” is contradicted by the enchantment of Achebe/Nwoye recollecting the “quarrel between Earth and Sky.” Like Unoka watching the kites returning in Chapter One, Nwoye intimates a way of being and a way of being Igbo that is closed off by Okonkwo’s binary reasoning.
Igbo Folktales in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (Mythological Africans)
Even more: Igbo folklore
6. Shining star-dust
At first, a fairly small swarm came. They were the harbingers sent to survey the land. And then appeared on the horizon a slowly moving mass like a boundless sheet of black cloud drifting towards Umofia. Soon it covered half the sky, and the solid mass was now broken by tiny eyes of light like shining star-dust. It was a tremendous sight, full of power and beauty.
Locusts are fascinating. Eggs can remain dormant for 20 years, waiting for the right conditions to hatch. When food is plentiful, their appearance and behaviour change: they grow and reproduce more quickly, change colour and begin to swarm. Billions of locusts can join a swarm that “plagues” crops and causes famine.
Watch: Swarm Of Locusts Devour Everything In Their Path (BBC Earth with David Attenborough)
But here in Umuofia, locusts are good news! A rare delicacy. A cause of celebration and feasting.
Opinion: Europeans should eat more bugs
Tangent: The historical benefits and future risks of eating swarming locusts
However, the word that leaps out in the quote above is “harbinger” – a forerunner or forewarner of something to come. I think first of those early European explorers “sent to survey the land” before contact and colonisation.
And it is while feasting on locusts that Okonkwo is taken aside by the village elder Ezeudu to be informed of the decision to kill Ikemefuna. Feast and famine. The locusts are their last meal together, “crunching happily”, before everything falls apart.
7. ‘My father, they have killed me!’
First, Unoka’s haunting and lonely death in the Evil Forest, and now the senseless sacrifice of Ikemefuna. It isn’t really explained to us why he must die, only that the Oracle has pronounced it, and it must be so. Ezeudu and Obierika both tell Okonkwo it is not his business to do the killing, but he does it anyway.
Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his matchet and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak.
Why did Ikemefuna die?
At the moment of his death, Ikemefuna calls Okonkwo, “my father.” Ikemefuna’s sacrifice is often compared to the Story of Isaac. (Tangent: love this haunting song by Leonard Cohen on the subject). I wonder what Ikemefuna has come to symbolise within the community so that the Oracle has seen it necessary to kill him?
What do you think?
Achebe chooses not to translate the Igbo song that Ikemefuna sings. Here is one translation by the scholar Emmanuel N. Obiechina:
[Singer’s call:] King, do not eat [it], do not eat! Sala [Chorus response] King, if you eat it You will weep for the abomination Where Danda [White Ant] installs king Where Uzuzu [Dust] dances to the drums Sala [Chorus response]
The song tells of a headstrong king who breaks a taboo by eating the first fruits of the yams set aside as a gift to the gods. The last two lines allude to the dishonourable death without burial that will befall the king: his body abandoned to termites and dust.
The song is a warning to Okonkwo, who is about to offend the gods. As Obierika later tells him:
‘What you have done will not please the Earth. It is the kind of action for which the goddess wipes out whole families.’
It is the second time Okonkwo has contravened sacred law. The violence against his wife in the Week of Peace, and now this. In stories, these things always come in threes.
More: On Ikemefuna’s song
Footnote: The Historical Antecedents of the Ikemefuna Story in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
8. Something gives way inside him
After Ikemefuna’s death, we switch immediately to Nwoye’s reaction. He remembers an occasion when he felt a similar “snapping inside him”. He was returning home from the harvest, the sweet taste of roasted yams on his lips, when
they had heard the voice of an infant crying in the thick forest. A sudden hush had fallen on the women, who had been talking, and they had quickened their steps. Nwoye had heard that twins were put in earthenware pots and thrown away in the forest, but he had never yet come across them.
Like Unoka’s flute in the Evil Forest, the detail of “earthenware pots” makes this all too real. We will return to this infanticide later.
Once again, Nwoye is torn and conflicted by his loyalty to his father and his culture, and his “moral nausea” – to borrow Tolstoy’s description of Nikolai Rostov’s rejection of military honour in War and Peace.
In the next chapter, Okonkwo tells his friend Obierika that he has failed to make a man out of Nwoye. “Too much of his grandfather”, thinks Obierika, who has more tact than to say it out loud. In a dreadful piece of self-delusion, Okonkwo refuses to reflect on this and instead considers “his own strength and success” in killing Ikemefuna.
What do we learn about Okonkwo, Nwoye and Obierika from their reactions to Ikemefuna’s death?
9. ‘The world is large’: guns, snuff and white men
In Umuofia, no one has seen a European. Stories of men “white like this piece of chalk” are compared to incredible stories of non-patriarchal societies. These are impossible things that cannot be.
But the objects in Okonkwo’s possession tell a different story.
‘Bring me my bag,’
Like many in Umuofia, Okonkwo takes snuff, a finely ground tobacco leaf that is inhaled through the nose or rubbed on the gums. The indigenous people of Brazil were the first to use snuff, which was brought to Europe by the first Spanish and Portuguese expeditions to the New World. In the 1560s, the Dutch gave powdered tobacco its name (“snuif”), and by the mid-seventeenth century, snuff had spread to Asia and Africa.
Okonkwo’s gun and tobacco links his story to the Atlantic Slave Trade. The three-way triangular trade brought European commodities into West Africa. Slave traders used these items to purchase enslaved people taken to the Americas and forced to grow cash crops on plantations – including tobacco. These commodities were shipped across the North Atlantic to Europe.
The triangular trade benefited from the favourable oceanic currents that run westward in the tropics from Africa to the Caribbean, and eastward from the Eastern Seaboard to Northern Europe. This is known as the North Atlantic Gyre.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
10. At home with Obierika
Chapter Eight follows Okonkwo as he tries to forget about the killing of Ikemefuna. He visits his friend, Obierika, who asks him to attend the negotiations for his daughter’s bride-price.
How are Okonkwo and Obierika different? What do you think is the role of Obierika in the story?
We certainly learn a lot more about the customs in the village and what men discuss when they meet. We also get this description of Akueke, dressed to impress her suitor’s family:
She wore a coiffure which was done up into a crest in the middle of the head. Cam wood was rubbed lightly into her skin, and all over her boy were black patterns drawn with uli. She wore a black necklace which hung down in three coils just above her full, succulent breasts. On her arms were red and yellow bangles, and on her waist four or five rows of jigida, or waist-beads.
You can view additional hairstyles of Igbo women from the early twentieth century here.
Uli is an art form that incorporates linear forms and geometric shapes to create patterns stained on the body or painted on the walls of buildings. The word refers to the types of plants used to make the dyes.
More: Uli: art and archive ([Re:]Entanglements)
11. Ezinma
This man told him that the child was an ogbanje, one of those wicked children who, when they died, entered their mother’s wombs to be born again.
The happy mood at Obierika’s house is in stark contrast to the tragedies that hang over Okonkwo’s compound. Not only has Okonkwo just killed his quasi-adopted son, but he also compares Nwoye unfavourably to Obierika’s Maduka. And while his friend celebrates his daughter’s anticipated marriage, Okonkwo’s daughter is an ill-fated ogbanje.
How does Okonkwo’s relationship to his daughter, Ezinma, differ from how he regards and treats Nwoye?
The concept of ogbanje resembles European folk beliefs in changelings, children substituted at birth by fairies. These myths may exist to explain inherited diseases, child mortality and disabilities. The Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi wrote a fascinating novel called Freshwater (2018) about a girl inhabited by ogbanjes – using the concept to explore gender, sexuality and identity.
Review: Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
Ezinma is enormously important to the story and a counterpoint to Okonkwo’s hypermasculine worldview. She has this unique relationship with her mother, whom she addresses by her first name. In Chapter 5, Achebe notes that Ekwefi’s daughter, “was only ten years old but she was wiser than her years.”
‘She should have been a boy,’ he thought as he looked at his ten-year-old daughter.
We will see more of Ezinma next week, where we can perhaps discuss more about her role in the story.
12. Glossary
Akalogoli: an evil spirit of someone who had a “bad death” and no proper burial, and was therefore unable to join the ancestors. More here.
chi: an individual’s life force, personal deity or spiritual guardian.
Chukwu: the supreme being in the Igbo pantheon and the source of all other deities.
ekwe: a slit drum with rectangular slits in the surface and a hollow interior.
ege: a style of wrestling.
eneke-nti-oba: a swift.
foo-foo: boiled and pounded root vegetables.
Harmattan: the dry season. More here.
iba: fever.
ilo: the village square.
iyi-uwa: an object that binds the spirit of a dead child to the world, causing it to return and be born again to the same mother.
jigida: waist beads worn by women.
Nne: mother
ogbanje: an evil spirit that deliberately plagues a family with misfortune.
obi: the main house in a compound inhabited by the head of the household.
ozo: a title bestowed on accomplished and respected men.
uli: traditional body and wall art.
Thank you
And thank you for reading and joining me on this slow read of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
In the comments, let us know what caught your eye and ask the group any questions you may have. And if you’ve tumbled down a rabbit hole or taken your reading off on a tangent, please share where you have been and what you have found.
Next week, we will read chapters 10–13. The reading schedule, weekly posts and further resources can all be found on the main Things Fall Apart page of my website, Footnotes & Tangents.
This slow read and book guide is free. If you have enjoyed it and found it helpful, please consider a paid subscription or a one-off donation to support Footnotes & Tangents. Thank you!
Until next time, I wish everyone happy and adventurous reading.
Simon
I really appreciate how well referenced to this post is. So many wonderful links, encouraging one to go down a number of fascinating rabbit holes.
I would also invite readers, interested in the gender relations and polygamy to look at the novels of Buchi Emecheta, especially The Joys of Motherhood and The Bride Price.
And for those interested in more on the role of food in West African fiction, I’ve now published the first essay my three part series on this topic.
The death of Ikemefuna was a harrowing chapter to read. Okonkwo frustrates me but I also feel bad for him. His fear of weakness hurts him as well. He can't experience full love or vulnerability. Part of me wonders if he is able to appreciate Ezinma because she is a girl despite his wishes otherwise. My guess is that if Ezinma was a boy then he would still seize upon any sign of weakness and complain still.