A Cold Coming

When I finished Things Fall Apart (reviewed in yesterday’s entry in this ever-serendipitous space), I read the author bio at the back and was quite surprised to discover that the author, Chinua Achebe, had written a sequel.  Obviously I had never read the author bio before.  I was intrigued by the idea of the sequel.  Then I noticed the title: No Longer at Ease.  Shock.  That book was on my bookshelf; I had picked it up at a library book sale years ago and filed it away for later reading.  I had no idea it was a sequel.  Nowhere on the cover of No Longer at Ease does it say it is a sequel.  Odd.

Not surprisingly, I read it.  The quick answer: it isn’t as good as Things Fall Apart. But it was worth reading; it is short and a quick read so that helps, but even on its own terms it is worth reading.

The hero of this tale (Obi Okonkwo) is the grandson of the hero of Things Fall Apart.  The first novel is the African Tribe’s first encounter with the British.  This novel traces what was wrought in that encounter.  The tribe we met in the first novel has scraped together enough money to send one of its own, young Obi, to England for an education.  Obi returns to his homeland, and this novel is the result of what follows.  The title tells it all:  from Eliot’s poem, “Journey of the Magi”:

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

Obi doesn’t fit.  He isn’t British, but he also is no longer truly at one with his tribe.  He is bewildered by both the colonial culture and the tribal culture.  Indeed, it is a society which is nearly impossible to navigate.  Obi does not meet with a good end, which comes as no surprise, since the novel opens with his conviction in court for accepting a bribe.  The rest of the novel is a flashback showing how Obi arrived at this point.

As a novel about the problems of Colonial Rule in Africa, it is pretty good.  It’s not a good society; it would be hard to spin the situation as good for anyone, African or British.  It would be a simple matter to spin this novel into a question about the merits, or lack thereof, of colonial rule.  But, to do so reduces Obi to a prop.  Think about his plight, not the plight of Africa as a whole, but the plight of the individual, and it is suddenly obvious that there is a much deeper problem to ponder.

Obi returns from England.  The hopes of his tribe are on him—they paid for his education and now they want a return on their investment.  Obi is meant to get a job in the government, from which he can return favors to the tribe.  There is a weight of expectation on Obi, not just to provide for his family and his tribe, but to keep up the appearance of being a success.  It is not long before Obi finds himself mired in debt.  On top of that, he falls in love with a women, who it turns out is from an abhorrent caste.  Now such things shouldn’t matter in a modern society, but tribal memories die hard and everyone is his tribe, his parents included, are adamant that Obi cannot have a relationship with a woman of this class.

Now put yourself in Obi’s situation.  What do you do?  Is there any way to live in that society without disappointing someone?  Do you discard the expectations of your tribe, your family, your employers?  And thus begins the slow slide into accepting bribes to square the circle, but of course that doesn’t work either.  It isn’t at all clear that Achebe has given any way out for Obi.  And therein lies the deep matter of this novel; how do you live a life when there is absolutely no way to fit into the world in which you find oneself.

One answer: just rebel.  A nice answer. Simple. To the point.  But after the death of the old system?

“I had seen birth and death/ But had thought they were different: this Birth was/ Hard and Bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”
The story of decolonization?