Chinua Achebe

● Poet, novelist, teacher, editor, journalist;

published over 20 books

●Born 1930, Ogidi, Nigeria (one of the 1st centers

of Anglican missionary work in Eastern Nigeria)

●Was 28 when he published Things Fall Apart, his

first novel, in 1958

●Nigeria gained independence in 1960

Achebe

●Achebe was heavily involved in Nigerian
politics until the 1980s.

●He taught at the University of Nigeria,
University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Brown
University among others

●After a car accident in 1990, he was
paralyzed from the waist down

●Achebe died in Boston in 2013

Quote from Achebe

“Nigeria has disappointed me and has disappointed many Nigerians and

I feel that the situation is getting worse and worse. I thought I should

draw attention to this, (a wake up call) because people are losing

patience and losing confidence. And Nigeria is losing its position in

Africa and in the Black world and in the world as a whole. The situation

in Nigeria is far below expectation.”

Things Fall Apart

●

Takes place in Umuofia, a village or clan
in Igboland, in the 1890s

●

Heavy use of Igbo names and terms

●

Motif: a word, character, object, image,
metaphor, or idea that recurs in a work

○Proverbs, yams, fire, ash, and masculinity
vs. femininity

"The Second Coming - William Butler Yeats

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.