Discourse and Counter-Discourse in 'Things Fall Apart'

Chinua Achebe's novel, 'Things Fall Apart', tells a story that visualises a pre-colonial society poised on the knife-edge of change. It is therefore backward looking. Its vision is historical. But it is also, paradoxically, forward-looking, for its purpose is educative and political, to enable a different kind of future: a society proud of its own cultural achievements, aware of its limitations, liberated from colonial influence. That is to say, it is a decolonising fiction. In the emergent postcolonial critical theory of the 1980s and early 1990s, the colonial relationship tended to be psychologised as a binary opposition of coloniser versus colonised / self versus other. (The term postcolonial is used here to describe the kind of literary criticism, or history that acknowledges colonialism as a continuing structural force and seeks strategies of resistance to neutralise its effect and offer a reading toward liberation). Later we realised that the relationship was more complex, more entangled, and indeed at times contradictory. More recently, in the light of the world's globalised economies and increased transnational migrations flows, some critics have come to regard the old colonial oppositions or entanglement as less important or relevant. The national borders and boundaries that were the consequence of colonialism, they suggest are today less significant. Yet this really is what 'Things Fall Apart' is about, and why it still speaks so powerfully to so many people: it gives value to the small story, the local community, and insists on the importance of the particular history and culture of the ex-colonized society; it refuses assimilation by ways of thinking and, ultimately, of doing business in the world which have no investment in the 'local.'