Arrow Of God Research Articles

Transliteration in Selected Nigerian Novels and The Discourse in Traditional Ceremonies in Urhobo And Ukwani

The study investigates the use and importance of transliteration in selected Nigerian novels as well as the discourse in traditional ceremonies such as marriage and funeral in Urhobo and Ukwuani in Delta State. Unlike in literary works where some works have been done in transliteration, none has been carried out on the English used in traditional ceremonies. Even in literary works, studies on transliteration are mostly aimed at how English is "domesticated" to reflect African culture. None of the studies has actually specified what aspects of African culture each transliterated expression reflects. Owing to this gap in literature, this work aims at providing a socio-linguistic explanations for the special linguistic choices made in Achebe's Arrow of God, Anthills of the Savannah, Chimamanda Ngozi, Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and in traditional ceremonies. The theoritical framework adopted for the study is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis of communication accomodation, which attempts to explain the relationship between language and the interpretation of social reality. Data were sourced from the novels and the speeches of spokesmen in marriage and funeral ceremonies of heterogeneous nature and were analysed through descriptive method. The following research questions guided the analysis: i. Are there defining characteristics that determine the English used in the novels and the traditional ceremonies? ii. Are there similarities between the language used in the novels and the ones used in the traditional ceremonies? iii. Is the variety of English used relevant to African culture? iv. What specific aspects of African culture do the linguistic choices made reflect? The findings from the study show that the expressions identified reflect and promote African culture. The findings also show that there are similarities between the language of the novels and that of traditional ceremonies.

실패한 지도력의 회복을 위한 제언―치누아 아체베의 『신의 화살』과 『사바나의 개미언덕』

Examining the internal problems that cause chaos in Nigeria, this paper tries to look into Chinua Achebe’s suggestions for overcoming it in his novels, Arrow of God and Anthills of the Savannah. Especially, the paper makes a close study of the failure of leadership to which Achebe pays attention as the core of the internal problems. The failure of leadership that can be stated first is resulted from the leaders’ limitations and attributes in both novels. Those are their incompetency, irresponsibility, and lust for power and interests. Emphasizing that the failure of leadership is due not only to the leader but also to the people, the paper also claims that the situation in which a real leader cannot appear is because the people conform to the system and lose their sense of resistance. Finally, this paper confirms that Achebe does not stop at analyzing and criticizing the failure of leadership, but instead proposes the community where leaders and the people support and cooperate with each other to overcome chaos and create a new Nigeria.

The Representation of War in Chinua Achebe's Novel, Arrow of God

The Representation of War in Chinua Achebe's Novel, Arrow of God

RECONSTRUCTING WOMEN IDENTITY IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANNAH

African literature is the mirror of African community in which African social reality is depicted. Gender issue is one of the main themes that are a matter of interest to the majority of African authors. They portrayed woman character in patriarchal African society in which male hegemony is a stereotype. In this sense, Chinua Achebe as well as his fellows did not stray from the rule in their writings. In Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, woman is considered as a second class citizen, and gender inequality is a predominant aspect. However, Achebe’s narratives shifted from covering and ignoring women rule to unveiling and reshaping their own identity in his Anthills of the Savannah. For that reason, the objective of the present paper is to determine how Achebe reconstructs women identity by focusing on the character of Beatrice, the female protagonist in his novel Anthills of the Savannah. By adopting post-colonial and feminist perspectives, the present research work attempts to clarify the recreation of new African women and their empowerment in the post-colonial Africa

Individualism and Nonattainment of Social Change in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God

Purpose: In a society where many believe that only the mailed fist can maintain discipline, a refreshingly different point of view is reached by the comparison of two of Chinua Achebe’s novels: Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. The purpose of this paper is to explore the viewpoint presented in these novels by comparing their two heroes – Okonkwo and Ezeulu. They are compared first as revolutionary characters and second as revolutionary leaders, using as a guide Calvert’s (1996) claims that individual leaders are not necessarily revolutionary leaders. Okonkwo and Ezeulu are seen to be both leaders and revolutionaries; they fail however, as revolutionary leaders for the simple but unarguable reason that they have no supporters.
 Methodology: Methodological procedures are adopted which include description of the study’s sampling and method of data analysis. The study adopts a simple survey design.
 Findings: The paper in its findings discovers that individualism cannot thrive in a revolution of a society rather it is collective effort that appears to be more effective in a revolutionary struggle such as fou nd in Umuofia and Umuaro respectively. The paper concludes that followership marks an authentic revolutionary leader as the non-support of Okonkwo and Ezeulu in the novels leads to their tragic end.
 Unique contribution to theory, policy and practice: The paper recommends communalism as a way out of African socio-political barriers and posits that individuality cannot bring the social change and total liberation in African continent.

Social Issues and Unexpected Changes between the British and Igbo People Which Reflects in the Novels of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God

Social Issues and Unexpected Changes between the British and Igbo People Which Reflects in the Novels of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God

Women and Nature for Plunder: an Ecofeminist Study of Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People

Nature and women have through all ages been victims of exploitation, oppression and subjugation. Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People recreates the exploitation of both nature and woman. While A Man of the People has enjoyed wide-ranging critical examination, and unlike Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God which have been examined from ecocritical perspectives, not much has been done to underline Achebe’s ecofeminist underpinnings as depicted in the novel. This study, therefore, examines A Man of the People through the Ecofeminist critical lens as this allows for a nuanced examination of the connectedness of the domination of women and natural resources in the novel. By engaging Achebe’s all-time famous text, A Man of the People, through the Ecofeminist lens, the study serves to underscore the complex gendered drama that unfolds when women and nature are exploited by capitalist patriarchs. The study draws attention to Achebe’s master craftsmanship in exposing the complex network of forces that have over time sought to objectify women and nature, in service of selfish interests. The study concludes by drawing attention to Achebe’s vision for emancipating women and nature from bearing the brunt of capitalist modernity.

Subjugative cultural transformation in Chinua Achebe’s arrow of god

Chinua Achebe's Post-Colonial novel, Arrow of God, was released in 1964. This novel is a component of the African Trilogy, which also includes two other novels – Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease. In Arrow of God, the astounding tale of a man's loss of faith and subsequent collapse in a community that colonialism has irrevocably altered is told. It serves as an example of the clash between indigenous customs and beliefs and the changes that the British intended to impose on colonial countries. This paper explores how colonialism, brought about by British imperialism, altered native African culture irrevocably. This demonstrates people's fragile psychological states since they are so quickly swayed by the new culture (Christianity). The combined effects of colonialism and psychology on humans as a result of cultural change are illustrated in this paper.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God: The Investigation of Current Environmental Degradation

Literature in relation to the natural world and the environment is the subject of ecocriticism. The current global environmental crisis has made it urgent to examine literature from an ecological point of view. By examining the ways in which the natural world and the environment are portrayed in literature, ecocriticism seeks to identify a method to improve the current ecological predicament. The fusion of ecocriticism with postcolonialism has given new life to critical thought overall, providing fresh perspectives on concepts like race, land, environment, wildness, etc. The two African novels, Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1965) chosen for the examination haven't often been studied from an ecocritical angle, but the current paper has attempted to look at how nature and the environment are portrayed in them. This analysis aims to show that, despite pre-colonial African societies being unaffected by nature, colonialism opened the door for its exploitation while neglecting or demeaning the profound values that nature and the environment had for pre-colonial Africans.

RETHINKING THE PEDIGREES OF AFRICAN CULTURAL WATERSHED: A POST-COLONIAL INQUEST NTO CHINUA ACHEBE’S ARROW OF GOD

The African cultural identities have undergone earth-shattering shifts from the precolonial epoch to the colonial and post-colonial periods. It is the colonial empire that advented in the African continent in the 15th century and attempted to erode and stigmatise African cultural practices as part of its mission to take control of Africa. Despite Africa being under a democratic administration today, African cultural identities are still marginalised, chiefly, by colonial remnants that have not yet been successfully uprooted. Thus, this paper aims to re-anatomise the African cultural identity-crises in the present day from the onset of colonialism on the continent. It utilises a qualitative approach and crystallises this African cultural watershed from a literary perspective. Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God is purposively sampled for the paper as a primary reference point by dint of its conformity to the main theme of the study. The paper, comprehensively, blames the enduring colonial fragments in the present day for the African cultural identity-crises as they hinder decolonisation and peril African cultures. The colonial legacies in Africa today, like in the colonial times, are found to be championing Western identities at the expense of African cultural identities, hence, the latter is still menaced.

Manifesto for the Fluidity of the Igbo Space and Achebe’s Reconstructions in his Narratives

This paper seeks to reveal Chinua Achebe’s verisimilitude in his colonial-era narratives: Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. These two novels owe their roots to constructs and happenstances that range from myth and semi-myth to real-life events. These occurrences and scenes are congruent to Achebe’s fictional societies partly because of the artistry, believability, and binding force of the warps and wefts of the author’s story-telling craft and partly due to their realistic reality nature. Using the New Historicism critical theory, a re-interrogation of these seminal works will reveal a unique pan-Igbo albeit utopian world, where special characters, scenes, interactions, and revelations play a pivotal role in Achebe’s dream Igbo nation. This, in essence, is his new dream environment, a meta-tale hovering above the two linear plots of the narratives, implicit and ontologically joined but revealed by this paper.

Dimensions of Intertextuality in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God

The readings on Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are, for the most part, steeped in Igbo culture and cosmology as well as the deployment of language in the texts. None, consequently, has taken up the question of examining both texts by means of Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality. This research report occupies that critical void. Concretely, it utilizes select dimensions of Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality in investigating Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. This is in order to understand what the characters are saying and what the narrator is saying, the role played by culture in these discourses, and whether the theory’s select dimensions apply to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. Ultimately, it is uncovered that indeed intertextuality is applicable to and exists in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God by means of the various dimensions of the theory. By Kristeva’s account, these dimensions are the intersecting of citation and narration within the novel, dyadic figuration and arbitrary termination, the relationship between the literary text and the text of culture, the figure of double destinations, the horizontal dimension of the function of the symbol, the non-conformity between a named object and its name within the Symbol as Ideologeme, and the relationship between individual texts (books).

Linguistic Stylistic Analysis of Lexical and Grammatical Categories in Arrow of God

Linguistic Stylistic Analysis of Lexical and Grammatical Categories in Arrow of God

Theatrics of Achebe’s Arrow of God as Matrix for Dramatic Adaptation

This paper seeks to examine the theatrics of Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God with a view to verifying their potential for the novel’s dramatic or stage adaptation. The paper is motivated by the assumption that the theatrics can be artistically synthesized to create a play script or performance that can be more aesthetically and ideologically appreciated than the novel. In view of this motivation and to inspire many effective adaptations of the novel, the following questions need to be addressed by the paper: What are theatrics? What impressions, performances, behaviours and effects exemplify the theatrics of the novel? How do these exemplary theatrics constitute a matrix for dramatic or stage adaptations of Arrow of God? While addressing these questions, the paper hopes to achieve its major objective of verifying the theatrics of the novel and suggesting how they can work together as a matrix for adaptations.

THE LEXICAL CHANGE IN THE PERSONAL NAME IN ACHEBE’S NOVELS

Language change is a process by which change occurs in the distribution of linguistic variants across sounds, words or constructions of a language. The change can be as a result of the following factors: contact, region, level of education, gender, age and so on. In the light of this, the research investigates the lexical change in the personal names that occur in the following novels of Chinua Achebe: Things fall apart, No longer at ease and Arrow of God. From the findings, this study portrays that contact is the major factor that brings about the lexical change in the personal names used in these novels. Furthermore, this contact is classified under religious contact, culture contact and education contact. Finally, Holmes (2013) opines that for there to be a language change, there must be language variation. In the case of language change in the personal names that occur in the aforementioned novels, there are no variations before the lexical change in the personal names. Eckert & McConnel- Ginet‟s (1992) proposition that no single variable can be held responsible for language change is visible also because inasmuch as the reason for the language change is stemmed to contact with the white men but it further spilled to other factors like education, religion and culture. Key words: Novel, language, Lexical Change

Confusion, Misjudgment and Dissonance: The Fall of a Priest, a People and a God in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God

Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God portrays the gradual downfall and the ultimate doom of the protagonist, Ezeulu, of the entire Igbo community and even their deity, Ulu. Ezeulu’s tragedy happens in numerous stages influenced by various factors stemming from personal, communal and religious conflicts and his misinterpretation or misunderstanding of himself, his people, his deity and institutions and circumstances. Set in the 1920s Nigeria, Arrow of God portrays a period when colonial machination is well underway, and the native beliefs and institutions are crumbling under its grueling pressure. This paper seeks to show how Arrow of God shows that the main reason for the debacle of Igbo society lies in their internal conflicts, failure to stick to their tradition and the helplessness and dilemma to which colonialism has subjected them. Achebe asserts that for the sake of maintaining age-old traditions, some flexibility in judgment must be there, and any kind of absolutism should be avoided for the greater interest of the people.

The Social Use of Language: An Ethnography of Communication in Chinua Achebe’s <i>Arrow of God</i>

During colonization, the English language was not only the primary language of government and administration but it was also used in the education of colonized subjects. Consequently, English became a national language in the colonies and had since then complicated its own status as a significant medium of communication because of the colonized conflicting attitudes towards it. Since a writer brings his personality, experience and the totality of his personhood to bear on his work of art, postcolonial writers and critics felt that the use of English from its standard form as well as the cultural values it carried cannot give genuine artistic shape and form to their creative impulses. While some advocate for the return to writing in indigenous African languages others are of the opinion that the use of a foreign language is pointless. In this sense, Chinua Achebe’s quest for a postcolonial literary aesthetic is delineated in <i>Arrow of God</i>, where, with an unparalleled dexterity, he adapts the English language to suit the cultural norms, social interactions, ideas and ideals of his traditional Igbo society. The study was conducted by applying a postcolonial approach to literature which suggests that post-colonial writing seize the English language and replace it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonised place. The primary material used for arguments in this study is <i>Arrow of God</i> where data were purposely collected. Much more data informed by Igbo’s indigenous tradition and culture were abstracted from internet sources and many critical works. The result of the analysis shows that language and culture intertwine to subvert the colonial perspective on the colonized.

ROOTLESSNESS IN ELIZABETH BOWEN'S THE DEATH OF THE HEART, AND CHINUA ACHEBE'S ARROW OF GOD: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN ANGLO-IRISH AND AFRICAN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

Postcolonial literature views the British Empire of the nineteenth century as unique in human history and literary products for it provides writers with different subjects that deal with the idea of how to resurrect the colonized identity even after getting liberation. Postcolonial literature seems to label literature written by people living in countries formerly colonized by other colonized and other colonial powers as British. Such literature and particularly novel, emerged to focus on social, moral, and cultural influences and their interrelation with the impact of English existence upon some countries as Ireland in Europe and Nigeria in Africa. Irish novel shares its genesis with the English novel. When we write of the eighteenth century and use the phrase ' the Irish novel', we are necessarily referring to novel written by authors who, irrespective of birthplace, inhabited both England and Ireland and who thought of themselves as English or possibly both English and Irish. This fact is apparent within hands when we talk about the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen and her novels that show the obvious effect of her Irish identity upon her works during the period of World Wars I and II with a consideration to Ireland as a British colony. The same impact with African culture, postcolonial Nigeria, when its writers saw the changes crept to their traditions. Their literary products concentrated on questioning their nation how to keep and reserve African identity from alternations. Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer tried to reflect his culture in a mirror to readers and challenge them with their own strength and weakness in his novel Arrow of God. His novel tackles these weaknesses of the traditional outlook and senses for change. The research paper tackles the concept of rootlessness in postcolonialism through Anglo-Irish novel The Death of the Heart (1938) of Elizabeth Bowen ,which is tackled in the first section , and postcolonial Nigerian novel Arrow of God (1964) written by Chinua Achebe in the second section. The paper ends with conclusions and works cited.

“What a Man Does Not Know Is Greater than He”: Analyzing Noos, Thymos and Akrasia in Achebe’s Arrow of God

This paper is an exposition of how Chinua Achebe&amp;rsquo;s Arrow of God (1964) is engaged with philosophical concepts of thymos, noos, eros, and akrasia. The focus of this study is principally on Ezeulu&amp;rsquo;s thymos. To achieve this end, Francis Fukuyama&amp;rsquo;s notion of thymos or &amp;ldquo;desire for recognition&amp;rdquo; has been considered to provide a more tangible description of the term. This study explores that when a person&amp;rsquo;s body formation is mostly dominated by thymos, which has run out of control, the result is akrasia. Subsequently, it will be discussed that Ezeulu&amp;rsquo;s akrasia or &amp;ldquo;weakness in will&amp;rdquo; is the result of his ambivalent quest for self-worth. This article also seeks to examine the ways in which Ezeulu, the Chief Priest of Ulu, struggles to maintain his dignity to remain Umuaro&amp;rsquo;s cynosure. Ezeulu&amp;rsquo;s old age, his poor eyesight, his conflicts with his people, his insistence on revenge, and his desire for higher values provide some of the major sources of akrasia. By applying these aforementioned philosophical concepts to this novel, it is hoped that this article will contribute to a new conceptualization in terms of psychic disposition in Achebe&amp;rsquo;s Arrow of God.

Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature By Ato Quayson

Reviewed by: Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature by Ato Quayson Mahruba T. Mowtushi Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature BY ATO QUAYSON Cambridge UP, 2021. 346 pp. ISBN 9781108921992 paper. Ato Quayson's Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature opens with lamentations for the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa by the Nigerian government in 1995 and ends with the murders of Treyvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman in 2012 and George Floyd by the American police in 2020. These events, separated by thousands of miles, and twenty-five years of social injustice, are not dissimilar in their tragic magnitudes for history repeats itself in real life as it does on stage and the pages of literature. The search for collective freedom and individual agency in the face of colonial hegemony, sociopolitical turmoil, and cultural oppression informs Ato Quayson's latest book. The volume reconsiders postcolonial writing vis-à-vis the history of literary tragedy from the Greek and Renaissance traditions to contemporary multicultural examples from around the world. In doing so, Quayson reassesses Western tragedy through a postcolonial paradigm. In order to comprehend Aristotelian anagnorisis, Quayson argues that we need to read Chinua Achebe and take into consideration the Akan concept of musuo, which translates as taboo or "harms to the soul." Quayson is concerned with examining questions on ethics by linking them to representations of pathos and suffering in postcolonial writing where suffering is defined as the experience of the impending annihilation of the self or the perception of imminent dangers to the self from external forces. Quayson arrives at a distinct hermeneutical interpretation of suffering, and thereby of tragedy, by way of an eclectic range of references from Eric J Castell's The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine, Cicero's Disputation on Grief, Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, and to Akan musuo. In the second chapter on "Ethical Cosmopolitanism and Shakespeare's Othello," the author resorts to a "postcolonializing of Shakespeare" (44) that assesses how Elizabethan social ideas about race, cultural identity, and "cosmopolitan contradictions" (45) reflect on contemporary critical debates on multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonialism. The conditions of colonial modernity in Chinua Achebe's "rural narratives" (Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God) inform the third chapter that considers whether Okonkwo, a character imbued with ethical contradictions, is a tragic figure and if so, how does the reader evaluate ethical choice-making concerning his actions. The "dialectical assimilation of opposites" (115) in the tragic characters in Death and the King's Horseman and The Road informs [End Page 198] chapter four that interrogates elements reminiscent of ancient Greek tragedy such as anagnorisis in Wole Soyinka's dramaturgy. In Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, which is the focus of chapter five, Quayson identifies the novel's scrupulous intertextuality and "literary echoes" as enacting a mirroring effect with the tragic parameters that govern key texts in the Western literary canon. The "melancholic introjection" of Mustafa Sa'eed and his "self-authorship" (185) as a colonized self and subject enable Quayson to classify thematic and ideational parameters that make Salih's novel postcolonial but also tragic. Chapter six turns to the "terrible beauty" of Toni Morrison's Beloved where the "tragic vision" of Sethe killing her daughter incites a moment of "split anagnorisis" in the character of Baby Suggs (187). For Quayson, the rationale (if it can be called that) behind Sethe's terrible action should be interpreted in light of the novel's brutally honest delineation of the history of slavery in the United States. The case of infanticide in Beloved must be read alongside other literary examples of infanticide from sources as diverse as "the Bible, Aeschylus, Euripides, George Eliot, Eugene O'Neill, Sam Shepherd, Chinua Achebe," and others (187). The absolute certainty that governs the choices made by the tragic figures in Morrison, Soyinka, and Achebe is dissipated when one comes to J. M. Coetzee's fictional characters who, according to Quayson in chapter seven in the book, labor tragically under the constraints of ethical challenges and second thoughts, a situation that is both ontologically and epistemologically problematic. The torturous cogitations of the adult world of "Big Things" in Arundhati Roy's...