Paper #2: Prompt

Question: To what extent has an awareness of context enriched and enhanced your understanding of Things Fall Apart.

The novel Things Fall Apart is based on the story of Nigerian community, culture, tradition and belief, especially Igbo ethinicity group. The novel proceeds its story relatively quick -- starts from the era where everyone lives and depends on each other within society to the era where they begin to deal with opressors. By studying critically into Igbo's system and uniqueness, understanding of the context and story of Things Fall Apart is enhanced, and would allow reader to follow along why the the characters act in particular aspect.

When talking about awareness of Igbo's culture and tradition within society, we could see that Igbo people heavily rely on personal ambition in order to gain wealth, status and power -- as seen in the novel where Okonkwo has very fierce, harsh and hardworking personality. He rarely shows his weaknesses because Igbo's tradition, especially when dealing with men, is considered men as leaders and relied with personal God. For people who have powerful personal God would have strong and brutal personality. By undestanding Igbo's context, it allows us to understand why Okonkwo has such a low morality. It allows us to understand that everything that foces Okonkwo to have this personality is shaped by the uniqueness of culture. Someone who does not have any understanding of Igbo's context would misinterpret the story, for instance; some student might prejudge Okonkwo to be bad, unacceptable or swagger character in society. This might lead to another meaning of the novel that the author is trying to express, resulting to debate or controversy about the context of the novel.

Furthermore, understanding the context of Igbo people would allow audiences to appreciate the way novel is leading, and reasons behind dialogue and difference between masculin and feminine. Some action done by man to woman in the novel is realistically unacceptable -- where we see that Okonkwo often beats his wife when he is angry. However, knowing Igbo background is helping readers understanding how Igbo people value themselves and nature.

Meanwhile when looking at the context within the novel itself, it shows that the way characters react and proceed the stroy leads their community falling apart. By interpreting (have some awareness about the context) the story where pure and guiltless Ikemefuna was killed by the circimstance of Igbo culture, it seems that everything running afterward was tuning badly. The aspect of Igbo's culture is changed -- superstition has become less powerful to the Ibo people. Furthermore, having awareness in the mind makes readers understand clash between Ibo culture and White colonizer. We could be able to see how new religion is spreading, old religion is threatened. Readers could be able to understand the reason why Ibo culture is falling apart; it is because Ibo people themselves. Circumstance and old beliefs of Ibo culture act as two-edged sword because, while one is trying to follow and preserve tradition, another see it as old fashioned since Ibo tradition belief has no further development in order to seek a better quality of life. It rarely has equality between men and women which further develops why Ibo women prior start to convert thier religion. Moveover as seen in novel that Ibo culture teaches their men to be harsh and fearless warrior, it stabs themselves because the way they treat White colonizer was brutal -- where we can see when Okonkwo chopped messenger's head with machete-- which leads to the falling apart of its culture because of his impatient and personal characteristic shaped by culture. I think by having awareness of the context of the novel, we could interpret and understand small element of the culture, context and dialogue shown in the story much more better. We could be able to identify the reasons behind context and characters.