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Paper 3 - Things Fall Apart
Paper 3 - Things Fall Apart
performances and the way that Okonkwo and the other Igbo people
men of low status, and the Westerners that attempt to colonize them
all .
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Paper 3 Kaila Cauthorn
Professor Coly May 31, 2012
This becomes clear when one notes that although women are
house. It was like pouring grains of corn into a bag full of holes. His
mother and sisters worked hard enough, but they grew women's
crops, like coco-yams, beans and cassava. Yam, the king of crops,
was a man's crop (Achebe 19) . Women are barred from growing the
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Paper 3 Kaila Cauthorn
Professor Coly May 31, 2012
most important crop, the one that not only holds the highest value
yams, so that in times of crisis such as the one that Okonkwo faced,
only a man would be able to claim the honor of reviving his family . In
this sense, these women are similar to the female nationalists that
arrested, gain the status of heroes in jail, learn public skills, all of
wife they are unlikely to have either the skills or the communal
63) . Because they are denied the responsibility of mens tasks and
Okonkwos own exclusion from his worldview of, among other things,
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Paper 3 Kaila Cauthorn
Professor Coly May 31, 2012
that women, and even men who are not as ostensibly masculine, are
her husbands titles, which the first wife alone could wear (Achebe
16) . The way in which she displays her husbands titles for him is
than men (Conrad 49) . Their role in the world of men is to act as
reflective possessions.
word agbala that people of Umuofia use . Early in the story, the
who has taken no title, and, most importantly, serves also as a term
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Paper 3 Kaila Cauthorn
Professor Coly May 31, 2012
marking the woman as the most base and undesirable entity . This
reappears as the name of a god, the Oracle of the Hills and Caves
(Achebe, 13). Therefore, the term for woman stands between two
extremes: the lowest form of man, one with no title, and the highest
exhibits authority and agency over men in some cases, even though
Agbala for advice on farming, the Priestess Chika reprimands him for
him to Go home and work like a man (Achebe 14) . Through this
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Paper 3 Kaila Cauthorn
Professor Coly May 31, 2012
take her to the Oracle (Achebe 90) . It is unlikely that any other
the idea that an average woman would have a right to her own
do not attribute the power and agency that the priestesses embody
Chielo was a widow with two children . She was very friendly with
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Paper 3 Kaila Cauthorn
Professor Coly May 31, 2012
seeing Chielo in ordinary life would hardly believe she was the same
person who prophesied when the spirit of Agbala was upon her
despite her role as a priestess, she is subject like any other woman
match she stands with the masses of women and insignificant men,
authority that the priestesses are granted is invalid for use toward
their own personal benefits and they therefore might not accurately
harmless and not worth concern particularly because they did not
living in the Evil Forest . The leaders of Mbanta reasoned that the
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Paper 3 Kaila Cauthorn
Professor Coly May 31, 2012
one of them said, Let us give them a portion of the Evil Forest .
They boast about victory over death . Let us give them a real
and writing also characterized their lifestyle, and the value of these
too are the weaker men and outcasts who were attracted by
writes of the people that were taken from the clan by the
the clan; but many of them believed that the strange faith and the
white man's god would not last . None of his converts was a man
whose word was heeded in the assembly of the people . None of them
was a man of title . They were mostly the kind of people that were
Agbala, called the converts the excrement of the clan, and the new
faith was a mad dog that had come to eat it up (Achebe 128) . In
other words, the people who had resisted conversion considered the
way that the masculinities of men like Okonkwo were judged based
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Paper 3 Kaila Cauthorn
Professor Coly May 31, 2012
on their possessions, like their yams, titles, and wives . Because the
thus herald the beginning of the end of the Igbo people because
similarly to the manner in which the Westerners defied the gods, the
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Paper 3 Kaila Cauthorn
Professor Coly May 31, 2012
Niger became the most relevant masculinity to the newly created context
family to family begging people to send their children to his school. But
at first they only sent their slaves or sometimes their lazy children. Mr.
Brown begged and argued and prophesied. He said that the leaders of
the land in the future would be men and women who had learnt to read
and write. And it was not long before the people began to say that the
white man's medicine was quick in working. Mr. Brown's school produced
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Paper 3 Kaila Cauthorn
Professor Coly May 31, 2012
strength to strength, and because of its link with the new administration
this phenomenon; even among his own people, his masculinity was
stammer and whenever he was angry and could not get his words
out quickly enough, he would use his fists (Achebe 2). This directly
could not escape without this fault becoming his poetic undoing.
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Paper 3 Kaila Cauthorn
Professor Coly May 31, 2012
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Paper 3 Kaila Cauthorn
Professor Coly May 31, 2012
authority and enforce it over men , and for men without titles or
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Paper 3 Kaila Cauthorn
Professor Coly May 31, 2012
Works Cited
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