Cultural Identity Revisited in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and L.M Silko’s Ceremony

Cultural Identity Revisited in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and L.M Silko’s
Ceremony
By Styliani Karkanevatou
A dissertation submitted to the School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of the Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts.
Revisiting Community and the Struggle for Identity in TFA 4
The Possibilities of Hybridity in Silko’s Ceremony 8
Chapter One:
Problematizing Community, Culture and Nation in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart 17
1.1 The Struggle for Identity After Colonialism : Rethinking Culture 18
1.2 Community Revisited in TFA 23
1.3 The Concept of the Nation in the Postcolonial World 32
1.4 Identities in Process as Postcolonial Resistance 36
Chapter Two:
Hybridity, Postmodernism and the Significance of Interracialism in Leslie Marmon Silko’s
Ceremony 42
2.1 Literature from Underprivileged Cultures and the Postmodern Condition 43
2.2 The Struggle of Being a Mixed-Race Subject 47
II
2.3 Hybridity and Its Implications for Culture and the Mixed-Race Subjects 53
2.4 The Interrupted Community: Redefining Communal Ties 59
2.5 Ceremony and the Globalized, Multicultural World 61
Conclusion 67
III
Abstract
The present thesis aims at investigating the cultural identities of non-western cultures and,
particularly, the change of perspective regarding the concept of identity, nation and race in the
last 50 years. The two postcolonial novels I will be using, contest –each in its own way and
context- the idea of cultural purity. They show that inter-cultural exchange lies at the heart of
postcolonial/postmodern identity and community formation. I will also be arguing that, in this
way, they challenge postcolonial nationalist and cultural politics that seek to resist Western
domination by retrieving or re-imagining cultural and national identities uncontaminated by the
West. Through the exploration of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Leslie Marmon
Silko’s Ceremony (1977), I intend to show the struggles of different groups to find their own
voice at the colonial/postcolonial era, which the coming of postmodernism, with its promotion of
hybridity and acceptance of the people from the borders like interracial subjects, has fostered.
Hybridity, which will be a key notion in this paper, has altered the way in which we perceive
culture by suggesting that all cultures are to a certain extent hybrid, an idea which will be
investigated through the analysis of the two novels.
IV
Acknowledgements
A very special thank you to my supervisor Dr. Effie Yiannopoulou for her guidance and
invaluable help throughout the course of this project. She was there for me for anything I needed
and for that, I am truly grateful. I would also like to thank the professors that I have had the
pleasure to work with over the course of the programme and for their teachings that have made
me gain a better understanding of literature. I feel extremely lucky to have studied in this
Department and I will cherish the years I spent here for the rest of my life.
I would also like to thank my family and friends for the endless support they have shown
me throughout the course of this programme. I would not have made it this far without their love
and understanding for my ambition. I would particularly like to thank my mother who shared her
love for reading with me from an early age and my father who has always believed in me. I
would not be the person I am today without their good parenting.
Last but not least, I would like to thank the amazing group of this MA programme, my
wonderful fellow students. It has been a blessing to meet you all and I will miss our classes
together very much. The memories of the past two years have been fantastic and I am looking
forward to creating new ones with you. Each and every one of you is unique and I wish for all of
your dreams to come true. Thank you!
Karkanevatou1
Introduction
In Cultural Identity & Global Process, Jonathan Friedman suggests that “there is a very
large and virtually uncontrollable world system of which we are an inextricable part” (3). In
arguing this, he points to the need for humanity to reconsider notions once held as true and
undeniable in today’s changing world. The way we perceive our identity has troubled almost
every theorist in recent years. What concerns me in this paper is the articulation of our cultural
identity and its interconnection with ideas like nation, race and tradition. After the end of
colonialism1, some colonized countries felt that the best way to cope with its trauma would be to
return to their past to regain a sense of who they were, as the essentialist ideology of the
nationalist movements of the 1950s dictated. However, as that proved to be a repetition of the
imperialist techniques of the West, there has been a shift on this matter which favours hybridity
as far as notions like culture and identity are concerned. In exploring Chinua Achebe’s
postcolonial novel Things Fall Apart as well as Leslie Marmon Silko’s postmodern novel
Ceremony, this paper will focus on the struggle that the colonized subjects have carried out in
their effort to define themselves after their experience of colonialism. It will explain why the
process that led them to embrace essentialist ideas of collective identity did not have the
expected outcome, while arguing that postmodernism, with its promotion of play, ambiguity and
hybridity and its acceptance of people from the margins, such as the previously unappreciated
and mistreated interracial subjects, has changed everything we thought we knew about identity,
culture and the world at the dawn of a new crosscultural globalized community. What I am
1 As far as Achebe’s text is concerned, I will be discussing the Western/European colonization process. The
decolonization process has been thought to start after the two World Wars and was marked by the fall of the British
Empire in the 20th century.
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particularly concerned with in this paper is suggesting that all forms of culture are hybrid, that
there is no pure culture and, thus, trying to discover our identities relying solely on our ‘own’
heritage which is completely distinct from someone else’s becomes a futile dead-end process. I
would also like to address the issue of community which, due to the influence of postmodernism
and Jean Luc Nancy’s theory, has been redefined as a notion that is in a perpetual state of
undecidability and interruption.
The first text I will focus on, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, shows to the public
what it means to be a black African in the colonial/postcolonial world. Written in the 1950s, a
time of extreme significance for black people in Britain’s ex-colonies and the beginning of the
Nigerian literary movement which sought to promote African tradition, Things Fall Apart2 was
intended to be a novel that would confront influential novels like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness which, according to Achebe’s point of view, presented Africa as a place of decadence
that could never be equal to Europe in terms of culture due to its primitiveness,
underdevelopment and inability to present its tradition adequately. TFA is the story of an African
community which faces change and yet, survives, proving itself to be resilient and full of
possibilities that the European reader could never imagine.
The use of postcolonial theory by critics like Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon and Leela Gandhi
will help me show the complex relationship between colonizer and colonized and the need for
redefinition of certain concepts after the end of colonialism. In Postcolonial Theory: A Critical
Introduction, Leela Gandhi characterizes postcolonialism as “an ongoing debate between the
competing claims of nationalism and internationalism, strategic essentialism and hybridity,
solidarity and dispersal, the politics of structure/totality and the politics of the fragment” (ix). As
Okonkwo’s story unfolds, we start to realize that there is no unproblematic way in which these
2 From now on Things Fall Apart will be referred to as TFA.
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opposing notions could be combined. Rather, in the globalized world of the postwar period the
global and the local come together as fragmented, and hybrid identities replace essentialist
preconceived ideas about who we are.
The easiest way for Achebe to promote an African way of thinking would be to embrace
the doctrines of Pan Africanism, a very prominent movement during the 1950s which suggested
that only by retreating to African history and discovering a lost glorious past could the
repressed African people from the ex-colonies as well as the black people from the United States
of America discover their true identities and face the threats posed to their existence by Western
civilization. However, while reading TFA, the reader realizes through Okonkwo’s, the
protagonist’s, ordeals that this process would have negative results. Instead of resorting to an
easy, unproblematic, nationalist propaganda, Achebe in TFA offers a much more complex
statement about culture, identity, self and others.
Reconceptualizing History in TFA
The history on which Okonkwo desperately clings ultimately fails him. What makes
possible a critical reading of Achebe’s novel –and the nativist movements more generally-is an
understanding of official History as a documentation of the past determined by the power
relations and the interests of the present. Jonathan Friedman makes a relevant remark on history,
a notion to which many people who desire to find their identity in the past have resorted and
many nativist movements have employed in an effort to further their political agenda, by stating
that:
Making history is a way of producing identity insofar as it produces a relation
between what has supposedly occurred in the past and the present state of affairs.
The construction of a history is the construction of a meaningful universe of
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events and narratives for an individual or collectively defined subject. And since
the motivation of this process of construction emanates from a subject inhabiting
a specific social world, we may say that history is an imprinting of the present on
to the past. In this sense, all history including modern historiography is
mythology. (118 my emphasis)
If history constitutes a human creation and not an undeniable reality based on facts, then the idea
of retreating to a past where things were less complex and more defined is problematic, as the
past has been defined by the subjects and conditions of the present.
Since history is a human creation, many critics have turned our attention to the question
“who creates history and why”. In TFA, Okonkwo frequently recalls his past glorious battles
when he enjoyed the admiration and respect of his clan. However, the significance of these
battles for his clan as well as their reception by its members are presented to us from Okonkwo’s
subjective point of view. Okonkwo, consciously or not, seems to further his own agenda in a way
similar to that of a historian who writes history. On a global scale, the issue of history has led to
an “inevitable confrontation between Western intellectual practices of truth-value history and the
practices of social groups or movements constructing themselves by making history” (Friedman
141). Many nativist movements from the ex -colonies have adamantly denied the dominant,
Western view of history as the representation of the past has been altered or entirely fabricated to
solidify the dominance of the West. However, what the colonial subjects tend to forget is that
they too construct their version of the past in an effort to overturn the current oppression they are
experiencing.
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Instead of helping resurface the past of a community to ensure its survival since historical
objectivity has been proved to be a construct, Achebe, as I suggest, problematizes the concept of
community itself which has constituted one of the most pivotal terms regarding human
socialization. Achebe highlights the problems within the supposedly homogeneous Igbo
community (and every community of humans for that matter) through Okonkwo’s tragic fate in a
way which brings to our mind Jean Luc Nancy’s critique of the concept of community in his
seminal work The Inoperative Community. Nancy claims that the construction of human
communities revolves around the idea that community is thought to be based on homogeneity
and harmonious co-existence and its members’ primary goal is to return to the time when the
communal ties were strong. This longing for a past period of harmony has been used as a means
of propaganda by some very dangerous political formations such as fascist political parties which
is why Nancy urges us to be highly suspicious of its use. Regardless of the reason why we tend
to retreat to the past when harmony and order are sought, the negative outcome of this process is
unavoidable due to the false assumption that the only solution to contemporary instability and
identity crisis would be an authentic past, as evidenced in TFA by Okonkwo’s story.
The process of retreating to an idealized past to find their identity is bound to fail as it
presupposes that the ‘home’ or identity which colonial subjects so desperately try to recover,
according to the paradigm of Europe, actually exists. The need of people from minority groups
for stability and a fixed identity which could lead to their immersion to a more empowering past
is an attempt on the part of the disenfranchised to cope with the oppression of the West and is
perfectly understandable considering the years of suffering and silence they have endured. As
Gayatri Chakravotri Spivak claims in an interview with Angela McRobbie “[m]inorities and
national liberation movements often appropriate ethnographic essentialism as a strategy to
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authenticate their own experience, as a form of reactive resistance to the Eurocenter” (Spivak
qtd. in Lavie and Swedenburg 12). It seems extremely difficult for marginalized groups of people
to be able to resist the possibility of ‘home’, a privilege they have been deprived of for so many
years, even if finding ‘home’ rests on an essentialist ideology which is based on false
assumptions about human nature. Therefore, Lavie and Swedenburg suggest that “essentialism is
a process of appropriating the concept of fixity of form and content from the Eurocenter for the
margin’s recovery and healing” (12). What the two novels that I discuss here strongly suggest is
that no identity is inner, pure and unproblematic, a notion that applies to the identity of
Westerners as well. The privilege that Europe and the Western world have enjoyed is the
outcome of favorable political, economic and social conditions, not a gift from nature which they
deserve to enjoy.
The problematic, essentialist interpretations of the concept of community have proved
particularly influential on understandings of the nation, which makes the search for a new
definition for these terms extremely important as they have the power to provide a voice for the
underprivileged. The discussion on the importance of the nation, nationalism and the ways that
nationalism has often been misinterpreted and connected to essentialist ideas that glamourize the
past will inevitably lead us to the work of Frantz Fanon and his much acclaimed essay “On
National Culture”. Fanon acknowledges the need underprivileged people have for a national
identity that would tie them together and help them face the imperialist tendencies of the West.
However, he highlights a paradox in their demand: national identity, in the way it had been
sought at the time he was writing (1960s), seemed to reinscribe the same essentialist, totalizing
notions about the nation that the West had established rather than articulate the oppressed
people’s solidarity without overlooking their heterogeneity. As Okonkwo’s obsession with a
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return to the past is proved to be the cause of his down fall in TFA, Fanon’s articulation of the
nation with emphasis not on a worship of the past or the homogeneity of the primitive subjects
but rather on its political importance and its power to break the economic rule of the West helps
us view the way in which the troubled concept of the nation could actually unite underprivileged
subjects by providing them with an identity which is theirs and not another product of white
imperialism.
Αchebe’s status as a postcolonial writer allows him to criticize Western postcolonial
critics as well and make them arrive at certain conclusions about themselves and the field. At
times blatantly obvious, as in his description of the arrogant District Commissioner, Achebe’s
critique of the alleged superiority of the West forces the Western critic to perform an
introspection. Is their interest in providing a voice for underprivileged subjects genuine or
another effort to prove their privilege? Leela Gandhi suggests that postcolonialism needs to
“diversify its mode of address and learn to speak more adequately to the world which it speaks
for”(x). By bringing to our attention certain similarities between two cultures perceived as
completely different, TFA could help change the scene in postcolonial criticism. The similarities
between European and African culture which are exemplified in TFA urge the readers to distance
themselves from the essentialist notions about the past of certain nationalist movements from
Achebe’s time and open themselves to new possibilities about identity and culture. The readers’
conclusion about the possibility that all cultures could be hybrid is further explored in Leslie
Marmon Silko’s postmodern novel Ceremony.
I decided to analyse both TFA and Ceremony in this paper as I believe that they both
show the reconceptualization that concepts like identity, culture and community need in
contemporary society. The retreat to the past, which nativist movements from Achebe’s time
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proposed, proves the idea of stability regarding those terms to be a façade, a point which Silko’s
emphasis on interracialism and hybridity verifies by embracing undecidability and play. Leslie
Marmon Silko has been characterized as “without question… the most accomplished Indian
writer of her generation” (MacShane qtd. in Chavkin 4). Her influential work Ceremony, which
will be examined in this paper, shows why a critic would resort to such a characterization
regarding Silko’s literary influence. Ceremony serves as an example of postmodern thinking
which calls established notions of culture and identity into question. The effect of postmodern
doctrines on terms that were previously seen as set has been tremendous. In Ceremony, we can
view how the issue of identity redefines the way we perceive the Native- American community,
interracial people, the Western influence and their interconnections in time and space through a
postmodern point of view.
The Possibilities of Hybridity in Silko’s Ceremony
Silko’s Ceremony, what one could characterize as a fragmented story about a fragmented
world, reflects the instability and the shifting of power dynamics the world experienced after
colonialism3, a condition which continues to trouble us to this very day. Smadar Lavie and Ted
Swedenburg attempt to paint a picture of the world Silko describes for us by stating that “the
Eurocenter has been relativized, its assumed homogeneity and inherent superiority have been
fractured, both by forces from without- Third World nationalisms and revolutionary movements-
and by forces within- movements of civil rights, women, immigrants, gays and lesbians” (2). In
Ceremony, through Tayo’s status as a mixed-race person who defies any unproblematic, solid
3 As far as Silko’s text is concerned, I will be talking about the European settlers who moved to the New World and
instigated the expansion of what came to be known as the U.S.A, a process which led to the annihilation of the
indigenous Native-American population.
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definition and makes readers rethink what it actually means to be white or a person of color,
Silko exposes the blow that whiteness has received after the collapse of colonialism and the
inability of Westerners to assert their previously established dominance. Tayo’s presence in
Ceremony confirms that “ [t]he ‘savage’ is no longer out ‘there’ but has invaded the ‘home’ Here
and has fissured it in the process” (Lavie and Swedenburg 2).…