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.
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