“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity ... When we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Introduction
Every year, I teach Things Fall Apart to sophomores in my World Literature-centered English class. Every year, I see my students struggle with the content in terms of just familiarizing themselves with culture they are not familiar with. The names of the characters, the use of Ibo language and Ibo proverbs, the structure of the Ibo society are all foreign to them. Students may not quite agree with Okonkwo or his tribe's customs and culture, but they commit to trying to understand this new perspective. Through this commitment of understanding a new world, they struggle and feel uncomfortable; however, they find their bearings and come to sympathize with certain characters and with Umoufian society. And every year, I see my students get to the end of the book, experiencing the irony of spending all this time trying to understand this new world -- feeling every bit of the productive struggle-- only to have their hard work completely invalidated through the District Commissioner deciding that he “could almost write a whole chapter on [Okonkwo]. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.”1 Shocked (just a paragraph!) and angry (primitive tribe!), students finally understand the feelings of the colonized, and this reinforces the idea that history is always written by the victors and that single stories exist. Their dissatisfaction is palpable as they realize their journey into understanding the world of Umuofia and Okonkwo’s character has been overtaken by colonizers.
After many years of teaching this novel and seeing their frustrations, I want to introduce contemporary Black art to help combat this frustration -- to show students how artists are reclaiming/ rethinking traditional, colonial history or at least are commenting on postcolonial frustrations. In 1958, Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart to show that “African peoples did not hear of culture for the first time from Europeans…Their societies were not mindless but frequently had a philosophy of great depth and value and beauty…they had poetry and, above all, they had dignity.”2 Modern artists such as Kehinde Wiley, Yinka Shonibare, and Hew Locke are doing a similar service as Achebe did with his novel -- dispelling narratives written by colonizers or white oppressors and reframing perspective to give power to the oppressed.
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