How to write about Venezuela

For starters, there is no such thing as a Venezuelan. In Latin America everyone is Mexican. If not, then you speak Portuguese. And before you get the idea, allow me to tell you that it is pointless to try and explain to your readers what the difference is. About 60% of them don’t really care about your country, so just go straight to the point. However, if you do want people to realize that it’s Venezuela you’re talking about, then here are a few things that will make everyone understand more easily.

Firstly do not, EVER, speak badly of the government. Chávez was a great hero and everyone loved him. Thanks to him the country is in a “decent state.” It’s important to mention what a kind and gentle soul he was. And never say anything about giving away practically free petroleum to other countries. All the money the government makes goes toward helping the poor people inside the country and toward giving power to the people. His successor, Maduro, is of course a wonderful man too. Talk as nicely as you can of these great men and your readers will love your work.

Always remember that all of the women in Venezuela are what defines beauty. The women are the only good thing that comes out of the country. Don’t mention Gustavo Dudamel or Maikel Melamed, because you will lose your audience. Always make sure that you include a lot of women in your story, because that’s the only thing people know about and will be able to identify with. And don’t try to make your women smart, because you’ll confuse your audience.

If you want to include a guy in your story then you have two options: either he’s a fat guy that drinks beer all day and deals drugs, or he’s a skinny guy that robs places and deals drugs. And of course, never try to bring up those malandros that work for the government on the streets killing people. Remember that anyone who’s come out of the Chávez regime is like a sacred figure. These men do not exist, and any good men can’t be round characters. And every now and then make sure your male drug dealer fails horribly, like crashing a plane with his cargo of cocaine on the mountains. And always remember that everyone is poor and living on a shanty house. Yeah, this doesn’t contradict the fact that the government still helps the poor people more than anyone. Deal with it.

When it comes to music it is important that you note that the only thing people can dance is Salsa. And you pronounce that with a swallowed L. You can also mention Reggaeton and how popular it is. People love that kind of crappy rap. Don’t worry, nobody will understand all the swear words, so you won’t go get criticized for putting Reggaeton lyrics in your writing.

One of Venezuela’s most interesting points is its wide diversity in landscapes, which includes plains, beaches, islands, many green mountains, a desert, a snowy mountain, nice cities with lots of trees around and the ever amazing Amazonian Rainforest with its Angel Falls. When it comes to writing though, using all of these will be at your disadvantage, because people will not understand where the action’s taking place. Always set your story either in the gray downtown area of a violent city or in a messy jungle where the only inhabitants are antisocial natives. Sometimes you can let the natives have a magical shaman among them, but you should avoid such clichés and leave them to the Africans. And remember the jungle can’t be the Amazonian rainforest because that is only in Brazil and Guyana. Oh, and don’t mention the Angel Falls, unless you want people to think of the Disney movie UP which copied the waterfall. 

Paper 2 practice: Myths and Legends in Things Fall Apart

Show how and to what effect Achebe makes use of myth, legend of other stories and tales.

Stories often form an important part of the culture of a people. It is through stories that ideas, moral beliefs and everyday life can be preserved most easily. In a culture with no form of written language, such as Achebe’s Igbo culture, story-telling becomes the most practical way to convey knowledge to the younger generations. In his novel Things Fall Apart, Achebe makes good use of various stories and myths of the Igbo culture to create a genuine depiction of his own culture, which in turn allows his readers to not only better understand the Igbo culture, but to entirely immerse oneself into Achebe’s fictional village of Umuofia.

Achebe shows us just how important stories are in Igbo culture by showing us a story made up by Ekwefi, who is telling it to Ezinma. Ekwefi’s story carries a moral that she intends to teach to her daughter. She uses the story as a method of education. Ekwefi then asks Ezinma to create her own story, a task which she finds to be harder than what her mother made it look like. The use of stories as a form of education and the encouragement for young members of the population to be trained in the art of making stories from a young age shows us that in Igbo culture stories are the main way of transmitting knowledge and of educating the population. Achebe also shows us that this transmission of knowledge was something more than just a mere moral lesson. It was also used to shape the Igbo society itself. This can be seen when we see that Okonkwo’s male sons are told stories by him while his daughters are only told stories by their mothers. This shows that stories were used to determine the gender roles within the Igbo society, since there would be a separation as to what stories the boys would hear and what stories the girls would hear. And as remarked by Achebe through Nwoye’s opinions of the difference between Okonkwo’s and his mother’s stories, these stories would differ in content, the male ones usually being more violent than those told by the mothers.

Another example of an Igbo legend used by Achebe, and in this case one that has a visible effect within the culture is the legend of the Ogbanje. The Ogbanje is a demon child that keeps dying young and being reborn into the womb of the same mother. In Things Fall Apart, Ezinma is considered to be an Ogbanje, since Ekwefi has had many children before her, but they have all died young, thus she was thought to be plagued by an Ogbanje for a long time. At one point in the novel, the members of the village even harass Ezinma so that she gives off the location of the small pebble that is supposed to be the link between the Ogbanje and the physical world, in order to make sure that Ekwefi would not be tortured anymore. Achebe, writing for a contemporary audience, would have known that there is a scientific explanation for this phenomenon which the Igbo mythology attributed to supernatural forces, and that his audience would have known this as well. The fact that the reader knows that this is indeed nothing more than a legend may cause some confusion or misjudgment of the Igbo culture, but Achebe tries to stay as true to the culture as possible and show his readers exactly what the culture was like. And to this end, he shows us the extreme extent that these legends would impact the behavior of the Igbo people.

Another example of a myth that would directly impact the lifestyle of the Igbo people was their belief of having a very strong connection to Ani, the earth goddess in Igbo religion. Throughout Things Fall Apart Ani is the most mentioned deity, since many of the actions taken by the people in the village have consequences that are directly related to her. An example of this can be seen when Okonkwo accidentally kills Ogbuefi Ezeudo’s son with his faulty gun. Killing a fellow clansman is considered to be an offense to Ani, and thus Okonkwo is forced into exile in order to prevent the earth goddess from doing anything too rash. Okonkwo’s house, all of his crops and his animals are also destroyed in order to please the earth goddess. This shows that the Igbo people had a very deep belief in their religion and that it heavily affected the way they lived. Achebe might have intended to make special emphasis on this aspect of the Igbo culture in order to make an indirect comparison with the Christian church, where a lot of people do not take religion as much into account during all of their lives, and thus portray the Igbo people as a culture that may be more religious than the colonizers themselves. This would have caused the western readers of the time of the novels release to question the religious aspects of their own lives.

These are just a few of the instances in which Achebe uses Igbo legends and myths in order to create a genuine portrait of the Igbo culture.

Obierika's Memoir

In the end, I suppose it was inevitable. Umuofia had for long had cracks in its system, incomprehensible actions that not only I, but others as well did not really understand. Why were twins not allowed to live among us? Why were some men not given the same respect during their burial even though they were born equal? Why should a man pay dearly for a crime he never intended to commit? All of these questions have been for long swirling in the minds of our people, but never were they truly answered until the white men came to our land.

When they came at first nobody truly took them seriously. The only ones who found refuge in the white man’s religion were the osu, those who we had rejected. But eventually everyone began to see the superior power the white men had. They wooed our people with their medicine, with their education system. But what caused our people to lose faith on Umuofia’s traditions was that the white man could do many things we believed would bring him certain death. He built his settlement in the evil forest and survived without any problems. He removed the Chukwu’s mask and was not met with any punishment. They accepted twins, who then grew up to be perfectly normal people. The actions of the white men confirmed the horrible doubts that had already been stirring within our people for a long time; our beliefs and our religion were indeed flawed from the very beginning.

Paper 2 Practice #1: Social status in Things Fall Apart

Discuss the significance of social status in Things Fall Apart, and comment on its contribution to characterization.

Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart, takes place in a fictional group of Igbo tribes known as Umuofia. Despite being a creation of Achebe, Umuofia’s society stays true to the vast majority of the Igbo social and cultural elements. Among these is the great importance of social status within the Igbo society. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe uses the element of social status in Igbo culture to enrich his characters and place them into the context he is writing them into. Three clear examples in which Achebe does this in his novel are when he uses a low social status to give a negative view of a character, when he uses high social status to create a positive view of a character, and when he represents the constant struggle to achieve high a social status in Okonkwo, the main character of the novel.

In the first chapters of the novel, Achebe tells the story of Okonkwo’s father, who was a man of low social status that spent his days being lazy and worried more about his music rather than gaining wealth and climbing the social ladder. It is important to remark that in Igbo society the achievement of a high social status through hard work was what most men would dedicate their lives to, and men who did poorly in this aspect were often looked down upon and thought of as weak and feminine. By giving Okonkwo’s father an extremely low social status and complimenting that with the description of him as a lazy person, Achebe effectively creates a negative image of this character in the reader’s mind. This in turn allows the reader to sympathize more with Okonkwo, who deeply resents his father’s paradigm, which in turn allows the audience to emotionally engage with the novel more easily since they will now be able to feel sorry for Okonkwo’s tragic occurrences. This is shows how Achebe can use a low social standing to create a negative image of a character.

Achebe, however, also uses high social statuses to create positive perspectives of characters, as is the case with Ogbuefi Ezeudo, one of the leaders of the tribe. Ezeudo is one of the most revered men in all of Umuofia and he is also meant to be a very wise character who always speaks the truth. It is for this reason that Achebe gave this man a very high position in the social ladder, with three of the four great titles that a man could have in Umuofia. Ezeudo’s high social standing immediately creates an image that portrays him as a man of honor, as a hard-working man who is worth looking up to. Even though Ogbuefi Ezeudo is a rather flat character, his high social standing allows the reader to quickly understand how important he is in his community, apart from creating such a positive image of him.

The entire hegemony of the Igbo society is portrayed clearly through Okonkwo. Similarly to Ogbuefi Ezeudo, Achebe grants Okonkwo a relatively high social standing and describes how he has got there through hard work, which creates a positive image of him for the reader. However, the fact that Okonkwo is still trying hard to climb up the social ladder gives him a drive to carry out most of his actions. At the end of Things Fall Apart Okonkwo is forced to take his own life due to the circumstances he was in, however most of the actions that led him there were typically related to climbing the social ladder. Throughout the novel, it is seen how Okonkwo works hard to attain wealth in order to obtain titles, which in Igbo culture can only be obtained when a man has enough wealth to pay for the initiation rites. We also see how Okonkwo strives to behave as manly as possible in order to be perceived positively by the community of Umuofia. Okonkwo’s constant attempt at looking manly is what often leads to many of his wrongful decisions, such as participating in Ikemefuna’s sacrifice. Okonkwo’s constant attempt to look manly has also had an influence in the way that he expresses his emotions, and he thus becomes less comprehensive and more violent, since imposing authority through violence is a trait that is considered to be manly in Igbo culture. This is what leads to Okonkwo breaking the week of peace by beating his wife and to him beheading the missionary at the end, which was the final mistake that led to his demise. This shows how Achebe not only uses social status to express specific traits, but also how he uses the hegemony in the Igbo culture to drive his characters, especially Okonkwo, in a specific direction. In Okonkwo’s case, his tragic end might suggest that Achebe wanted to show how detrimental the social hegemony was for the Igbo people, since the search for this eventually lead to Okonkwo’s demise.

In conclusion, Chinua Achebe is able to use a social structure, very resembling of that of the real Igbo tribes, to quickly convey traits of a character due to the clear views of social positions in Igbo culture. Achebe also uses the search for social status to drive his characters, most specifically Okonkwo, whose demise is eventually caused by this constant strife to be perceived positively in his society.