Paper 2 Response

To what extent has an awareness of context enriched or enhanced your understanding of Things Fall Apart?

The Igbo people are a complex group of people with a rich history and traditions that are unlike many of the Western readers. Because Things Fall Apart is enriched with culture and tradition, reading it with an awareness of context completely changes the way the audience may perceive it. Without having an awareness while reading the novel, personal opinions can distort how the story and the characters are viewed. For example, feminists would find the treatment of women horrible. Not having an awareness of the context would prompt a reader to put their own personal life experiences and apply it to the Igbo society because in their eyes, the Igbo culture is not as complex. Wife beating and the notion of patriarchy would have been taken out of context and the reader would not have been able to focus on the actual purpose of the novel, which is the notion of tradition and the effect of colonization. Firstly, not knowing about the context would have led me to several conclusions. Firstly, the Igbo people are violent and beat their wives because women are considered worthless. After knowing about the context, I know that women were respected in the tribe and just like the disadvantages they had, they also had a fair share of advantages.  When it comes to throwing out the twins into the evil forest, it is known that that is one of the instances of the flaws of the Igbo culture. With that being said, I have learned that these things are a result of their religion and them believing that it is bad luck or “chi” to keep twins and it goes against the rules of their culture. The Igbo people spend their entire lives trying to reach and equilibrium. That equilibrium can be between the real and the spiritual world or it can be between having common sense while also respecting their cultures. Things like throwing twins out into the evil forest are one of the ways the Igbo try to reach that equilibrium. Without an understanding of that before reading the book, certain acts like that would have been considered barbaric. This is the first piece of African literature that I have read and been able to reach a complete understanding of. While I knew that the Europeans perspective on the Africans during colonization was highly skewed, I did not expect the Igbo people or any other group of people to have such a complex culture with so many different aspects. Reading the novel with an understanding of the context and the traditions and the culture allowed to open up my mind to more than one perspective while reading the book. I was able to understand the European perspective because to them, throwing twins out in the forest is barbaric. At the same time, I was able to understand the African perspective because it is their culture and it is what they genuinely believe is the correct way to live. Having such a deep understanding of the context and the different perspectives lets me read the novel in a different light and understand it on a much deeper level.