A Tale of Two Books: A Forgotten Story and Things Fall Apart

Abstract

A short while later, perhaps a week, perhaps two weeks after reading that book whose title Christmas has forgotten, serendipity throws Achebe’s Things Fall Apart into her path. Reading it is like a spiritual experience. She will recognize later, when she is older and wiser, how it saves her. This book tells the story of a civilization and a community completely disrupted by the coming of the white man. Its protagonist, Okonkwo, is a warrior, a proud man whose life is completely ruined by the clash of civilizations that is brought by the English colonizers. For the first time in her life, she reads a book that shows her ancestors’ history does not begin with colonization, that her people had a world that was complete on its own, a world that did not seek validity outside of its own community. For the first time, colonization was presented as an intrusion, and not as something she ought to be grateful for.