This article studies the use of Igbo language and cosmology in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. It analyses how, by making the Igbo language and culture share the literary space with the narratorial English, Achebe un-silences and centers indigenous voices in his novel. It shows how Achebe challenges a Western-centered hermeneutic of life as he captures and realizes, on the page, the world as it is for the Igbo. Looking at the plurilingual capabilities of both the narrator and the characters, this paper analyzes how a local Igbo fabulation leads to a worldwide celebration.
In response to skewed representations of Africa and Africans in narratives by Western missionaries and colonialists (Loti, 1881/1992; de Nerval, 1851/1998; Defoe, 1719/1994 or Conrad, 1899/1999), Chinua Achebe resolved to write a novel, on the continent, from an insider’s point of view. Achebe undertook to deconstruct views of the colonized subject as barbaric; a rationale that justified the imperial ideology of the British civilizing mission. Things Fall Apart (1958), Achebe’s first novel, chronicles the early encounter between people from Umuofia and the British colonizers as they settle in present-day Nigeria around the turn of the 19th century. Following the lives of Okonkwo and his fellow Igbo community members as they navigate their ways through the advent of a new language, a new religion, and new ways of life, Things Fall Apart constitutes a landmark piece in African literature. The novel received praises on the ways it un-silenced and centered indigenous voices as well as the original language of the narration as worth objects of study. Achebe challenges a Western-centered hermeneutic of life as he captures and foregrounds Igbo cosmology and worldview in the novel.