Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Read: Feb. 8th 2024
Published: 1958
Country: Nigeria
Length: 215 pages
Pretty cool book. Okonkwo was kind of a real prick for the vast majority of this book but I thought his move at the end was pretty baller to be fair. I liked that they considered Yams to be a manly food. I wonder if this book has the record for the appearance of the word Yam. I’m also big sucker for some good proverbs and folktales. I was pretty into the folktale about the Tortoise who tricked the birds into carrying him into the sky.
Quotes:
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“proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.”
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“A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string.”
- “Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed.”
- “He remembered his wife’s twin children, whom he had thrown away. What crime had they committed? The Earth had decreed that they were an offense on the land and must be destroyed. And if the clan did not exact punishment for an offense against the great goddess, her wrath was loosed on all the land and not just on the offender.”
- ““Then listen to me,” he said and cleared his throat. “It’s true that a child belongs to its father. But when a father beats his child, it seeks sympathy in its mother’s hut. A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet. But when there is sorrow and bitterness he finds refuge in his motherland. Your mother is there to protect you. She is buried there.”
- “But there was a young lad who had been captivated. His name was Nwoye, Okonkwo’s first son. It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul—the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth. Nwoye’s callow mind was greatly puzzled.”
- The rainbow began to appear, and sometimes two rainbows, like a mother and her daughter, the one young and beautiful, and the other an old and faint shadow. The rainbow was called the python of the sky.