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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2018
This essay argues for reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as an intervention in the political philosophical discourse on the structural relation that links violence and order. This argument is built on the evil forest as the means through which violence is instrumentalized and brought under a system of value and order in Things Fall Apart. In the figure of the Evil Forest as the center of a legal and narrative economy built on the management of violence, Achebe introduces an African paradigm of law and order that rivals Hobbes’s state of nature, challenges Hegel’s notion of African unreason, and, thus, serves as the grounds on which the order inherent to the African world can be made visible.
1 Achebe, Chinua, The African Trilogy (New York: Penguin, 2017), 113 Google Scholar.
2 There are other occurrences of the forest as a paradigm of narrative space in the African literary canon. Wole Soyinka builds his theory of Yoruba tragic aesthetics on a similar spatial concept, which in “The Fourth Stage” he calls “an area of terror.” There are also the magical “grove” in The Ozidi Saga (1991), the tikoloshe-infested forest in Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka (1925), the “savage and frightening . . . forest” in Mongo Beti’s Poor Christ of Bomba (1956), the “endless forest” in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), the savage expanse of J. M. Coetzee’s “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee” (1974) the “forest of Shadows” in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), the “aquatic forest” in Nnedi Okorafor’s first-contact sci-fi novel Lagoon (2014), and the animal-infested Johannesburg of Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City (2010).
3 Gikandi, Simon, Reading Chinua Achebe (Oxford: James Currey, 1991), 48 Google Scholar.
4 Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe.
5 Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe.
6 Things Fall Apart is set in a region consisting in a network of clans. When I use the word clan in phrases such as “clan power,” “clan world,” “clan order,” “clan law,” and so on, I am referring to Umuofia because it is the primary setting of the novel, but I am also, more generally, referring to the clan as an abstract idea of a political community. The same goes for “Evil Forest.” Although each clan presumably has its own Evil Forest, I use the term to refer to the abstract concept of the space in the novel’s political imaginary.
7 Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe, 48.
8 Samatar, Sofia, “Charting the Constellation: Past and Present in Things Fall Apart,” Research in African Literatures 42.2 (Summer 2011): 62 Google Scholar.
9 Samatar, “Charting the Constellation: Past and Present in Things Fall Apart,” 65.
10 Olufunwa, Harry, “Achebe’s Spatial Temporalities: Literary Chronotopes in “Things Fall Apart” and “Arrow of God,” Critical Survey, 17.3 (2005), 49–65 Google Scholar.
11 Olufunwa, “Achebe’s Spatial Temporatities” and “Arrow of God.”
12 Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe, 48.
13 Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 19 Google Scholar.
14 The study of the Evil Forest in this paper is limited to Things Fall Apart, even though the spatial formation appears in The Arrow of God. This is, in part, due to the monumentality of Things Fall Apart in the African novel canon and in Achebe’s oeuvre.
15 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 144.
16 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 112.
17 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 113.
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19 Nwabueze, “Dead Bodies in Nigerian Jurisprudence,” 79.
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22 Colson, Elizabeth, “Places of Power and Shrines of the Land,” Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde 43 (1997): 51 Google Scholar.
23 See Colson, “Places of Power and Shrines of the Land.” The little house bordering the ancestral grove is “scrubbed” and decorated with “many-coloured patterns and drawings.”
24 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 113.
25 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 16.
26 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 95.
27 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 16.
28 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 30.
29 Achebe, The African Trilogy.
30 Achebe, The African Trilogy.
31 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 52.
32 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 25.
33 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 16.
34 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 94.
35 Achebe, The African Trilogy.
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41 Okoye, “History, Aesthetics, and the Political in Igbo Spatial Heterotopias,” 82.
42 With a few exceptions, the word bush generally refers in the text to domesticated forms of forestlike terrain. It is usually a space where everyday activities like wood fetching, rodent hunting, and walking take place.
43 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 113.
44 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 5.
45 Achebe, The African Trilogy.
46 Achebe, The African Trilogy.
47 Achebe, The African Trilogy.
48 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 68.
49 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 144.
50 Stanley Okoye, Ikem, “Fieldwork and the Text Preceding the (Question) Mark: Prolegomena for a Response to Mudimbe’s ‘African Art as a Question Mark,’ ” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 39 (Spring 2001): 51–52 Google Scholar.
51 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 27.
52 Agamben, Homo Sacer.
53 Okoye, “History, Aesthetics, and the Political in Igbo Spatial Heterotopias,” 82.
54 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 113.
55 Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe, 49.
56 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 27.
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59 Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 7.
60 Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 16.
61 Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 6.
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63 Achebe, Chinua, “Work and Play in the Palm-Wine Drinkard,” Hope and Impediments (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 103 Google Scholar.
64 “From an agricultural point of view, the yam is a very extravagant vegetable to grow. Each tuber requires a full square yard of land, which, in itself, is a big demand. For seven or eight months, regular attention must be given to its care, absorbing much time and labour. If wages had to be paid, it is doubtful whether a yam farm would pay its way, let alone yield profit.” Thomas Basden, George, Niger Ibos: A Description of the Primitive Life, Customs and Animistic Beliefs of the Ibo People of Nigeria by One Who, for Thirty-five Years, Enjoyed the Privilege of their Intimate Confidence and Friendship (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), 389–390 Google Scholar. See also: “Yam, the king of crops, was a very exacting king. For three or four moons it demanded hard work and constant attention from cockcrow till the chickens went back to roost. The young tendrils were protected from earth-heat with rings of sisal leaves. As the rains became heavier the women planted maize, melons and beans between the yam mounds. The yams were then staked, first with little sticks and later with tall and big tree branches. The women weeded the farm three times at definite periods in the life of the yams, neither early nor late.” Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 27.
65 Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 27.
66 Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 13.
67 Korieh, Chima, “Yam Is King! But Cassava Is the Mother of All Crops: Farming, Culture, and Identity in Igbo Agrarian Economy,” Dialectical Anthropology 31.1/3 (2007): 223–224 Google Scholar.
68 Achebe, “Work and Play in the Palm-Wine Drinkard,” 102.
69 Achebe, “Work and Play in the Palm-Wine Drinkard.”
70 Achebe, “Work and Play in the Palm-Wine Drinkard.”
71 Achebe, “Work and Play in the Palm-Wine Drinkard,” 110.
72 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 27.
73 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 16.
74 Achebe, The African Trilogy, 13.
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77 In Achebe’s fictional world, violence appears to be meaningful only in relation to the collectivity. Violence does not seem to be considered as a natural individual right or capacity. Later on in the novel when Okonkwo kills Ezeudu’s son, Okonkwo does not take the fall alone. His entire family is exiled and his material possessions are destroyed. Similarly, in the case of Udo’s wife’s murder, the individual acts of violence are immediately abstracted and given significance at the level of the collective.
78 Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 12.
79 Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 12.
80 Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 5.
81 Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 11.
82 Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 52.
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92 Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, 50.
93 Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, 51.
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96 Rancière, Jacques, “The Politics of Literature,” SubStance 33.1 (2004): 18 Google Scholar.
