Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart –
Bridging Cultural Differences

von: Andrea Fischer

Semester: 09

Table of contents

I. Introduction p.1

II. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart  p.2

III. Discourse analysis: cohesion and coherence p.3

3.1 Discourse as object vs discourse as process p.3
3.2 Background Knowledge p.5

3.2.1 Frames, Scripts, Scenarios, and Schemata  p.6
3.2.2 Mental Modelling p.7

3.3 Top-Down-, Bottom-Up- Processing  p.8
3.4 Inferences p.8

IV. Relevance Theory p.9

4.1 The Principle of Relevance p.9
4.2 Explicature p.11
4.3 Implicature p.12

V. Understanding Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart  p.14

5.1 The construction of cultural knowledge p.14

5.1.1 Ikemefuna’s death p.15
5.1.2 The arrival of the locusts  p.18

5.2 Analysis of some Ibo words  p.20

VI. Conclusion p.22

I. Introduction

Things Fall Apart is Chinua Achebe`s first novel. It is about the land of the Ibo in the eastern region of present- day Nigeria, in the period between 1850- 1900. Things Fall Apart gives us a vision of the Ibo`s life in a part of Africa called Umuofia, its history and their cultural, religious and political traditions.Also it allows us an insight into the differences and problems between the established tradition, that is the Ibo tradition, and the emerging traditions of the white colonizers. Things Fall Apart is not only the drama of a whole society but it also reflects the tragedy of one man, Okonkwo, that is worked out of his personal conflicts as well as out of the contrariness of his destiny. This novel shows the changes which have taken place in Ibo as a result of the encounter between Europe and Africa during the imperial-colonial period. In the book Achebe confronts us with a different culture which implies different habits, different concepts and a different philosophy of life and world view. Readers are drawn into the Ibo culture with which they are not familiar at all, hence readers who have no knowledge of the culture at all. Therfore the question arises, how it is possibile on the one hand to communicate a completely different culture and world-view and especially how are we able to understand the text and the culture behind the text, although we do not know anything about it? Usually when we encounter such a book we try to solve those problems with the help of literary strategies and approaches like literary theory, reading about the author and the epoch, studying of interpretations of the work , deconstructing the text and looking at the effects of the text with regard to us readers. Besides these literary strategies, which lead to an interpretation of the text, a linguistic analysis of literary texts helps us either to get a full understanding of the text or to comprehend why we have problems understanding the text. However, the linguistic analysis of literature is not an interpretation; it is more an explanation of how it means and why it means what it does. Linguistics demonstrates why a text is interpreted in this or that way and makes clearer what the underlying problems in the interpretation are. The main aim of this essay is to show and explain the linguistic strategies and mechanisms that enable us to bridge the cultural differences, to demonstrate how cultural knowledge is triggered off and to show how it is possible to learn something about the culture The goal of this essay is to show that readers can understand the text although they have no knowledge of the culture at all. In the first part of this work I will settle the question why it is difficult for us to understand the culture behind the text and give a brief account of the problems with which we are confronted in the process of learning about the culture in the book. In the second and third passage I will
2introduce and settle the theoretical basis of linguistic strategies that help us to understand the text and to reconcile the cultural contrasts. The following part will show the practical application of the linguistic strategies with examples of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

II. Chinua Achebe’s

Things Fall Apart While reading Chinua Achebe’s work the reader is confronted with some stumbling blocks for non Ibo readers. The first thing one recognizes is that Achebe writes in English and in doing so builds a bridge to Western readers. However, he incorporaters words, idioms, proverbs and concepts that invoke the Ibo tradition and culture into his prose. Some Ibo words are left untranslated such as chi, obi, nna ayi,.(Achebe:1959, 18/19)1 but are explained either in the text or in the glossary at the end of the book. Nevertheless these words create gaps and the reader has to start filling them in. Concepts, like second burial (p.18), share cropping (p.22), the Evil Forest (p.18), are translated into English but left unexplained. Proverbs such as, “The lizard that jumped from the high iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no one else did.” (p.21), are translated but only partly explained. It is obvious why Achebe has buildt in the Ibo language. The Ibo language reflects the culture, as language always has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture. Also Achebe wants to show with the Ibo vocabulary that the Africans did not hear of culture for the first time. Colonialist Europe tended to perceive Africa as a primordial land of silence. But the people of Umuofia speak a complex language full of proverbs and literary and rhetorical devices.The proverbs are part of a living tradition; they reflect the attitudes of the society and emphasize the society’s concern with physical survival and individual achievement, as well as its perception of man as at one with nature:

“Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with wich words are eaten.”(p.7) Achebe′s translation of the Igbo language into English retains the cadences, rhythms, and speech patterns of the language. More difficult is the question to which effect Achebe uses/explaines/translates the Ibo language. Through the original Ibo words Achebe distances the reader via things which cannot be explained. On the other hand he translates or explaines some, because otherwise they cannot be understood by us. The conclusion would be that Achebe plays a kind of double game: the Ibo words show an alieness of culture, proverbs are contextualized into English. Therfore the culture of the Ibo is not dissolved, but contextualized, which means that a certain distance is maintained between the two cultures. If the reader wants to understand the Ibo language and hence the culture, he has to construct meaning to all the unfamiliarities with which he is confronted.

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1 In the following quotes from the primary literature I will only indicate the page number of the book in brackets after each quote