Things Fall Apart, Border Crossing and the Psychology of Exile

Abstract

AbstractBringing Chinua Achebe’s seminal text, Things Fall Apart, into the current global scholarship on refugees provides a consideration of the problem of displacement from a literary perspective. While there is a substantial body of criticism on Things Fall Apart, there has not been tangible concentration on the psychology of Okonkwo’s exile in the text. This article expands upon the literature by locating Achebe’s seminal text and the narrative strand of Okonkwo’s exile in the discourse of refugee studies. By examining Okonkwo’s pre-exilic and post-exilic life as intrinsically connected to his exile, it foregrounds the inevitable psycho-traumatic effect of exile on the refugee’s mind that plays out in the form of violence on the self, and on the victim’s human and material environment.