The African literature - Racial Description in Things Fall Apart
Transcript of The African literature - Racial Description in Things Fall Apart
1. Racial Discrimination In Things Fall Apart Name : Jitendra
V. Sumra Roll No. : 07 Semester : 04 Year : 2013 Paper No. : 402
Paper Name : The African Literature Dept Of English Maharaja
Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
2. He saw the world as a battlefield in which the children of
light were locked in mortal conflict with the sons of
darkness.According to Achebes greatest example of this binary logic
isHe saw things as black and white. And black was evil.He spoke in
his sermons about sheep and goats and about wheatand tares. He
believed in slaying the prophets of Baal.
3. "Things Fall Apart," Achebe presents a different idea
ofAfricans. They have families, religion, honors andtitles, music,
economy, laws and a court system, complicatedfarming techniques, a
tradition of wise sayings and the art ofconversation; on top of
this, they successfully practice an un-autocratic style of communal
living that Western societies longfor.
4. Achebe presents some of the same images of shadow that
ageneral and natural fear of literal darkness and solitude.
Byshowing Africans as also fearful of darkness. Achebe is not
meaning to say that Ekwefi is gullible or easily scared; he means
to say that in dark isolation, fear overcomes ones understanding of
truth and humanity.
5. What Achebe suggests is recognizing Africans and this goes
forall foreigners, including those of othernations, religions,
genders, sexualinclinations, histories, economic backgrounds,
politicalstatus, and over all everyone alien to the self as
fundamentallyhuman with the multitude of complexities involved in
that, andnot as some "us and them" abstraction.
6. This is Achebes criticism of Black and White" thought: that
it is based on stories read blind and alone removed several degrees
from reality. Achebe on the other hand comments that it is better
to be together than to be right or maybe that unity is whats right.
He criticizes Christianity not as something that is wrong, but as
something that divides communities with its individual
conversions.
7. Achebes criticism of We do not pray to have more money but
to have more kinsmen. We are better than animals because we have
kinsmen. An animal rubs its aching flank against a tree, a man asks
his kinsman to scratch him . . . A man who calls his kinsmen to a
feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food
in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village
ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his
own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do
so.
8. Okonkwo is a character with whom the reader is likely
tounderstand the book - he is brutish, rude, scornful, proudand
profoundly sexist - but in reading his story, one comesto
sympathize with him at least a little, and one knows forgranted
that he is a person.
9. Achebe relates the reasons behind individual andcommunal
crises in a society in which warheroes, titled and wealthy
subjects, and othercelebrated figures are dominantly male.
10. If you look carefully, the women were never really dealing
alone with issues pertaining towomen, they were dealing with issues
pertaining to society.
11. Achebe characterizes Umuofias women in the joys
andtribulations of their motherhood and selects specificmoments of
their lives to represent some of the mostmeaningful cultural and
historical aspects of existence inIgbo communities .