“He does not understand our customs”: Narrating orality and empire in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Abstract

This article delineates different strains of Achebe’s narrative technique in Things Fall Apart, arguing that earlier critics have failed to account fully for two fundamental principles in Achebe’s narrative: the myriad phrases that are repeated throughout the first part of the work; and the formative shift, the poetic volta, that takes place between parts one and two of the novel. Drawing on Achebe’s assertion that “anyone seeking an insight into [the Igbo] world must seek it along their own way”, the article shows that in the novel’s final section, the European colonizers have neglected to engage with African culture, and that this leads to a palpable failure. Achebe deprivileges and mocks the colonizing perspective that can only make sense of African customs in terms of the European conflation of print and the public spheres. The conclusion uses Wolfgang Huchbruck’s term “textual otherness” to argue against critics who maintain that the shift from communal to urban life, from oral to print culture, means the destruction of traditional culture. Achebe preserves Igbo speech culture by constructing a “fabricated reality” that suggests the timelessness of oral literature amid the struggle for control of the means of communication.