Content uploaded by Harry Omobokun Olufunwa
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Harry Omobokun Olufunwa on Apr 15, 2014
Content may be subject to copyright.
Achebe's Spatial
Temporalities:
Literary Chronotopes
in
Things Fall Apart
and
Arrow
of God
HARRY OLUFUNWA
Human perception is most commonly shaped by the ostensibly
'concrete' nature of things, that
is,
by their existence at specific moments
of time and in particular locations in space. In spite of longstanding
philosophical enquiry into the issue of 'whether
time
has a continuous or
discontinuous structure',' there is clearly a close correspondence
between the progression of time and movement in space.
Indeed, time itself may be said to assume essentially spatial
dimensions: it is often conceptualised as a movement from one
moment to another, regardless of whether such movement is
perceived as being linear or cyclical. As Aristotle observes, 'when
some time is thought to have passed, some movement also along with
it seems to have taken place.'^ Time expands into past, present and
future, the development of such stages strengthening the impression
of temporality combined with spatiality. In imagining the present for
example, notions of the here-and-now almost inevitably conceive of
the 'here' as 'this space' and the 'now' as 'this time', with each term
reinforcing the meaning of the other: space is located in time; time
moves in space.
The literary chronotope (literally, 'time-space') is a concept which
shows how such temporal and spatial assumptions play important
roles in determining the nature of fictional genres, particularly their
themes and structures. According to Mikhail M. Bakhtin, the Russian
philosopher and literary theorist who first developed the chronotope
as a tool of literary exegesis:
In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are
fused into one carefully thought-out concrete whole. Time, as it were,
thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space
becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and
history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the
artistic chronotope.'
© CS 2005
50 Critical
Survey,
Volume
17,
Number 3
Chronotopes are thus distinguished by the presence of spatial and
temporal markers of various kinds which combine in different
ways
to
produce specific effects. This article is an examination of two novels
by Chinua Achebe from the point of view of the chronotope, and its
main aim is to show the ways in which a chronotopic analysis helps to
explicate the issues raised in his texts.
In his seminal essay, 'Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the
Novel', Bakhtin sets out a typology of major chronotopes which
emerge from the various configurations of time and space in specific
fictional genres. They include the chronotope of encounter or
meeting, in which characters are in the same place at the same time;
the chronotope ofthe road, which represents the temporal and spatial
progression of characters over a given area, and the chronotope ofthe
threshold, involving their arrival at life-altering situations with the
potential for either progress or disaster."* To these can be added the
chronotope of memory, which is the act of recall and prediction in
which the human mind goes back in space and in time to recall the
past, or forward to anticipate the future.^
These chronotopes cannot be regarded as constituting totally
discrete, watertight categories because they all involve the mediation
of the notions of temporality and spatiality in closely interrelated
ways.
The chronotope ofthe road, which is associated with movement
over time and in space, cannot be considered apart from the
chronotope of the threshold, which involves the traversal of critical
intersections of time and space, or from the chronotope of encounter,
which has as its purview the presence of disparate elements at
particular loci in time and space.
As given above, Bakhtin's definition of
the
chronotope appears to
contain certain notions of time which, although universal in their
essential particulars, are in some important respects different from
many indigenous African notions of
time.
Indeed, as John S. Mbiti
claims, '[t]he linear concept of time in [European] thought, with an
indefinite past, present and infinite future, is practically foreign to
African thinking.'^ Given that the 'mode of perception and
apperception of time reveals many fiindamental trends of society',^
and since Achebe situates his novels firmly within
an
African cultural
context, there is a corresponding need to establish what African
concepts of time are.
Discussing the nature of temporality among
the
Yoruba of present-
day West Afiica, Wole Soyinka notes, 'traditional thought operates.
Achebe
's
Spatial
Temporalities
51
not a linear conception of time but a cyclic reality.'* It is, he claims,
so significant in its continuing influence that it is in fact 'a reflection
of that same reality which denies periodicity to the existences of the
dead, the living and the unborn.'^
This
sense of an integrated temporal
completeness, rather than simply 'time as duration','*' is the
distinguishing feature of African perceptions of time. Past, present
and future do not constitute separate stages which succeed one
another in a rigid sequentiality, but are in fact indicative of a
complexly realised continuity manifested along different temporal
and spatial planes.
This idea of cyclical time, which Bakhtin sees as inherently
unprogressive - '[tjime's forward impulse is limited by the cycle',"
he states - is from most African perspectives, indicative of an
integrated wholeness which the essentially incomplete and
neverending linear time does not possess. African worldviews do not
commodify time, and its patterned cyclicity works to prevent the
development of the adversarial relationship implied in notions of
being 'too early', 'too late' or 'just in time', which are expressions of
a chronologically specific interpretation of time that is often absurd in
traditional Afi-ica.
Since
African notions of time are usually expressed
in inherently communal terms - as age groups and market days, for
instance - it is less open to individual manipulation, and conversely,
individuals are less likely to be manipulated by it.
In Achebe's Things Fall Apart, for example, Okonkwo's wives
notice that one of the egwugwu, or masked spirits, 'had the springy
walk' of their husband, who is himself nowhere to be seen. The
women, however, realise that this seemingly familiar egwugwu is in
fact 'one of the dead fathers of the clan.''^ Although some
interpretations of this scene claim that Achebe 'makes it quite clear
that the egwugwu are ordinary men','^ the central idea is evident:
Okonkwo is there, yet he is not; he is present at the proceedings not
as a human being but as an ancestral spirit, and even so, the presence
of the human is clearly discernible in the 'springy walk'. Ancestral
past, human present, the spirit realm and the human world are
temporal and spatial categories which seamlessly intersect and merge
in the person of an individual in an all-encompassing harmony. This
is in accordance with the way in which Achebe continually stresses
the 'tripartite relationship between the subject, culture, and time.""*
Another example of the harmonious integration of ostensible
opposites can be found in the notion of
chi
in Igbo cosmogony. As a
52 Critical
Survey,
Volume
17,
Number 3
concept, chi has been subject to much debate, not least due to the
different connotations it assumes in varying
contexts.
Achebe himself
identifies two sets of meanings: one is usually translated as 'god,
guardian angel, personal spirit, soul, spirit double', the other as 'day,
or daylight'.'^ However, he claims that in broad terms 'we may
visualize a person's chi as his other identity in spiritland - his spirit
being completing his terrestrial human being; for nothing can stand
alone, there must always be another thing standing beside it"^
(emphasis his). Chi is therefore in a significant way the affirmation of
a symbiotic spatiotemporal relationship between human and spirit,
and between free will and destiny. It is the integrated
comprehensiveness of cyclical time that makes this duality
complementary rather than contradictory.
As a literary genre, the African novel symbolises the tension
between African and Western notions of time and space, especially as
they manifest themselves in an African setting. Being a written rather
than an oral narrative, it acquires a temporal specificity and a spatial
concreteness which stand in contrast to its nearest indigenous
equivalent, the folktale, whose content and form often depend on the
context of storyteller, audience, and the circumstances in which it is
being told. It is significant that Emmanuel Obiechina locates the
principal elements of this contrast within the framework of time and
space:
The novelist can only make sense of individual lives by placing events and
incidents connected with them within temporal and spatial dimensions.
Within the folk-tale, the essential factors are the moral lessons conveyed
by the particular story and its entertainment value.'"
The fixedness of the novel, its realisation as a finished artifact,
contrasts with the fiuid flexibility of African oral narrative genres, a
distinction which is in part the result of the differing spatial and
temporal considerations brought to bear upon them. Since it is a
literary genre whose antecedents (for many Africans, at least) are
Western, the novel form implicitly carries within it westem notions of
spatiality and temporality, such as the various assumptions and
revisions of the unities of time, space and action which seem to be
almost inbuilt features of the form. The English novel for instance,
has essentially bourgeois roots, and its corresponding emphasis on
empiricism, individualism, national consciousness and social
propriety were often expressed in overwhelmingly temporal and
Achebe s Spatial
Temporalities
53
spatial terms, as can be seen in the chronological and geographic
comprehensiveness of early prose narratives like
The
Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe.
The significance of these influences on the African novel is
strengthened by the nature of the genre's audience, which consists
mainly of a
literate.
Western-educated elite who are, for the most part,
eager converts to Western cultural values, including those shaped by
Western notions of time and space. Among the better-known
examples in this regard are the adoption of Westem ideas of 'personal
space' (the nuclear family and individual property, for example) as
taking precedence over African views of the pre-eminence of
'collective space' (the extended family, communal property), and
chronologically-specific time, as opposed to activity-centered time.
As a person and as a novelist, Chinua Achebe symbolises this
tension between African and Western notions of time and space to a
remarkable degree. He is a product of a missionary-based education,
one aimed mainly at producing good Christians. However, he was
also raised within a still-vigorous indigenous cultural tradition. Thus,
he has developed a familiarity with both African and Westem notions
of time and space, which is seen in his work. It is perhaps this dual
heritage which John Updike has in mind when he speaks of the
educated African as having 'lived a synopsis of history', having
'outgrown pre-history so quickly that nothing has had time to die; the
village gods, the Christian God and the modern absence of God
coexist in him.''^ This is an intriguing argument, but one which makes
too much of a concession to the impact of a linear concept of time,
even though its notion of temporal coexistence fits neatly into cyclical
time.
Updike appears to assume that different time-stages are
incorporated into the psyche of the educated African in roughly equal
measure, and are consequently similar in their effects.
What is probably more accurate is the idea that the simultaneous
presence of two often contradictory concepts of time has led to a state
of 'temporal flux','^ an ambivalence which is manifested in different
ways,
most obviously as culture conflict, and the consequent difficulty
of determining what is culturally appropriate in an exceptionally
dynamic society. Achebe's fiction demonstrates an awareness of
human lifespans as measured in African age groups as well as
European calendar years, and physical space as perceived in Westem
notions of extent and expansiveness, as compared to African notions
of rootedness and depth. This duality of perception is present in
54 Critical
Survey,
Volume
17,
Number 3
Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God and, by extension, in the
chronotopes that characterise them.
Both novels are particularly suitable for chronotopic analysis
because they span the era of British imperialism, a form of
domination identified by Edward Said as 'an act of geographical
violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored,
charted, and
finally
brought under control.'^" Colonialism as a type of
subjugation was a spatial imposition because it involved the conquest
of ethnic groups and political entities, and the consequent deprivation
of African and other indigenous people of control over their
'territory', a concept which, as Michel Foucault notes, 'is no doubt a
geographical notion, but it's first of all a juddico-political one: the
area controlled by a certain kind of power.'^' Accompanying spatial
dispossession was the curtailing of temporal freedoms as well, for in
addition to the forcible introduction of new temporal concepts such as
chronological time and the seven-day week, the time of native peoples
was no longer their own, subject as it was to colonial requirements.
The aftermath of such disruption was cultural chaos, with old values
losing much of their force and the new ones which were to replace
them being only imperfectly understood. Consequently, few things
could be perceived as fixed or certain, and this created a cultural
fluidity which permitted the selective application of social mores in
different contexts. This is the genesis of what Anthony R. Gimeratne
calls 'indeterminacies of time and space',^^ which he claims are a
prominent feature of contemporary postcolonial fiction.
Many of the chronotopes in the novels of Chinua Achebe emerge
from his sense of the spatial and temporal ambivalence of this era -
what he calls a 'crisis in the soul'^^ - and the tensions inherent in
making the alien genre of the novel serve his purposes. This article
organises the more prominent chronotopic motifs of his novels around
the major categories of chronotopes that have been identified by
Bakhtin himself and by other researchers of the chronotope in fiction.
In Bakhtin's own estimation, the chronotope of meeting is
'probably the most important.'^"* It is fundamental to plot
development and is closely linked to motifs such as 'parting, escape,
acquisition, loss [and] marriage',^^ all of which play significant roles
in the exposition of the events being narrated. At the most basic level,
it is characterised by the interconnectedness of temporal and spatial
markers, the occurrence of disparate elements converging in the same
place at the same time. Indeed, the very notion of the chronotope
Achebe's Spatial
Temporalities
55
itself implies a meeting of
sorts,
the intersection of the notions of time
and space.
In the texts under focus, the chronotope of meeting assumes a
fundamental importance, not just in encounters between individual
characters, but also between cultures, and between characters and
their fates. Often, these manifestations of meeting are bound together
to form a complexly-realised portrait of individuals and communities
at specific points in time.
Things Fall Apart, as its title suggests, examines the fragmentation
of a community and its culture, a process which partly results from
the spatiotemporal consequences of its encounter with British
colonialism. In the words of Simon Gikandi, 'Umuofia's attempt to
represent itself as an organic and unchanging community is always
confronted with, and often challenged by, temporal and spatial
progression.'^^ A character observes that the white man 'has put a
knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart'
(Apart, 162). The things that hold this community together are most
clearly realised in the encounters of its members within the familiar
context of their culture: the assemblies of the various umunna, the
adult males, which are the centerpiece of traditional Igbo democracy;
the religious ceremonies and festivals through which the people
commune with their ancestors and deities, thus reaffirming their sense
of solidarity; the primal contests of young men on the proving-ground
of the wrestling arena.
Communal and ritual encounters such as these are encapsulated in
the person of the novel's central character whose achievements
exemplify the worth of such ties. Valiant warrior, successful farmer
and skilled wrestler, Okonkwo is symbolic of triumph over adversity,
seen in his determination to overcome life's obstacles, and
conceptualised as his chi's apparent affirmation of his aspirations. In
this regard, chi is representative of the meeting of Okonkwo's human
and spirit elements, and their arrival at some form of consensus on the
path that his life is to take. It is this culture, and this man, which
encounter another culture, one with a very different set of values, and
it is a meeting that gives rise to the notion of culture conflict.
In Arrow of God, the central conflict stems essentially from a
failure to meet, a spatial displacement with temporal consequences.
The New Yam festival, which signals the beginning of the harvest
season, cannot be announced because Ezeulu, the Chief Priest of Ulu
and the community's timekeeper, is in the wrong place - in colonial
56 Critical
Survey,
Volume
17,
Number 3
detention - when he should be in Umuaro, and consequently, the start
of three lunar cycles pass by unacknowledged by him. It is a
spatiotemporal disjunction that symbolises the wider displacement of
a culture in a period of crisis in which things are no longer what they
once were. The various ritual assemblies of
the
community still take
place, but are tainted by rancour and discord because it is riven by
rivalry between powerful deities and their respective chief priests.
This antagonism stems mainly
fi-om
competing perceptions of the
true temporal status of the pan-Umuaro deity, Ulu. The community
set it up at a specific time and in a particular place, in response to a
definite problem (Abam slave-raiding) which it resolved forever.
Ulu's supporters recount the deity's coming into being at a timeless
period, 'in the very distant past, when lizards were still few and far
between',2^ thereby endowing it with incalculable age, and by
extension, great
power.
Even though the six villages predate Ulu, the
Umuaro creation myth has the 'priesthood of Ulu firmly implanted at
its very heart.'^* Consequently, Ezeulu conceives of the deity as a
divine creator, 'the god who founded their town and protected it'
(Arrow,
15).
Ulu's timelessness, linked as it is to the eternal resolution
of the problem for which it was established, is thus the basis of a
spatial pre-eminence. Ulu's detractors, on the other hand, point to its
status as a human creation, imply that it is temporally irrelevant
because the end of Abam depredations has caused it to outlive its use,
and limit its founding to 'rememberable' time, within the bounds -
and therefore the limitations - of human memory. Thus, the Chief
Priest of Idemili claims 'every boy in Umuaro knows that Ulu was
made by our fathers long ago. But Idemili was there at the beginning
of things'
(Arrow,
4).
Colonial incursion brings this rivalry into sharp focus, for it raises
once again the issue of a crisis point in Umuaro history and the need
for an extraordinary means of resolving it. Ezeulu's downfall signals
the end of Ulu's era and the rise of another belief
system,
one that is
radically different, but in similar fashion draws its strength from the
immediacy and coherence of its response to a particular problem in a
definite place and at a specific point in time. Indeed, as Neil ten
Kortenaar remarks, what is shown is 'not the collapse of one religion
and the triumph of another but the flexibility of
Igbo
beliefs.'^^
Meetings, encounters and confrontations in both novels all take
place within the context of an era whose own outstanding chronotope
is that of the threshold. The advent of colonialism put the continent on
Achebe's Spatial
Temporalities
57
the verge of momentous change, and a sense of this is reflected in the
chronotopes of
the
threshold which characterise the novels. Some are
depicted as specific periods, such as the New Yam festival, while other
threshold chronotopes represent particular locations: the obi (father's
hut),
the ilo (village playground), the marketplace and the Evil Forest.
The chronotope of the threshold, like all other chronotopes, is an
intersection within an intersection. Within the framework of the
meeting of space and time, the threshold signifies the critical
intersection of the two notions in a particularly resonant way. It
represents the point at which change - whether as improvement or as
catastrophe - is at its most imminent. The point at which life-altering
decisions are made, this chronotope signifies both freedom and
limitation. In this regard, it is not surprising that as central characters,
Okonkwo and Ezeulu ultimately become interstitial
figures.
As suicide
and lunatic, each man has moved fi'om the displacement of
exile
and
detention into the dreaded realm of absolute isolation, beyond the
spatiotemporal boundaries of his patently communal society.
The New
Yam
festivals in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are
essentially celebrations of the agriculturally determined traditional
Igbo New
Year.
The sense of an integrated completeness inherent in a
cyclical new beginning is seen in the fact that it is as much a
reaffirmation of the old as a welcoming of the new. Thus, in Things
Fall Apart, it is marked 'to honor the earth goddess and the ancestral
spirits of the clan'
(Apart,
37); in Arrow of
God,
the festival 'reminded
the six villages of their coming together in ancient times and of their
continuing debt to Ulu who saved them from the ravages of the
Abam'
(Arrow,
201-2). As a reminder of the past, a celebration of the
present and an expression of hope in the future, the New Yam festival
marks a significant intersection of the already interwoven stages of
time in the cyclical matrix. It is also a spatial intersection as well, for
it is a ceremony that brings the community - and even 'gods and
men'
(Arrow,
202) - together.
As a chronotope of the threshold, the festival proposes both
positive and negative kinds of change: it determines the extent of
adaptation within the context of traditional culture and thereby marks
off" the outer limits that are breached as a result of colonial incursion.
In
Arrow
of
God,
for example, it is the refusal of Ezeulu to declare the
day of the festival which triggers the crisis that exposes the limitations
of the traditional culture and consequently gives Christianity the
opportunity to make inroads. The New Yam festival is literally the
58 Critical
Survey,
Volume
17,
Number 3
threshold over which the church successfiilly steps in its campaign for
the soul of Umuaro. Because it is a victory over the temporal
limitations of Umuaro, it also indicates the emergence of a new
concept of
time,
a new beginning that will forever change the state of
things in traditional society.
Just as there are chronotopes of the threshold that occur mainly as
time periods, so are there chronotopes that are situated within an
essentially spatial
fi-amework.
This is the case of the obi, 'the large
living quarters of the head of the family'
(Apart,
192) in the two novels.
In
Things
Fall Apart, the spatial configuration of Okonkwo's compound
is simultaneously a testimony to his achievement and an authentication
of his manhood: 'He had a large compound enclosed by a thick wall of
red earth. His own hut, or
obi,
stood immediately behind the only gate
in the red walls. Each of his three wives had her own hut, which
together formed a half-moon behind the
obV
(Apart,
17).
Positioned directly behind the only entrance to the compound, and
therefore the hut through which every visitor to the household must
pass,
the obi symbolises Okonkwo's pre-eminence as family head and
protector. Poised on the threshold of the homestead, the obi elicits
acknowledgement of
its
owner's status from all who go through it to
enter and to leave. It is the place where .many of the rituals of
everyday courtesy occur; it is where the head of the family takes his
meals and receives visitors; it is where his ikenga, 'the symbol of
paternal authority and masculine powers',^*' is normally kept; it can
only be inherited by the eldest son. The obi is thus quintessentially
masculine space, and, as the site where 'the extended family
coheres',^' it is also the locus of almost everything that affirms
kinship in traditional Igbo society.
While Ezeulu's own obi performs broadly similar functions in
Arrow of God, it has an additional purpose, indicated by what Gerald
Moore terms its 'special architecture.'^^ 'Built differently from other
men's huts, [it has] the usual ... long threshold in front but also a
shorter one on the right' (Arrow, 1). This dual-threshold obi is a
strikingly literal example of space shaped to meet the requirements of
time:
in addition to the usual threshold over which every visitor
passes, there is another threshold which Time itself must traverse, its
passage in lunar cycles ritually acknowledged by Ezeulu as Chief
Priest of Ulu. Being near-synonymous with the identity of
its
owner,
the obi cannot be ignored, as one character points out: 'We do not by-
pass a man and enter his compound'
(Arrow,
111).
Achebe's Spatial
Temporalities
59
As a chronotope embodying both freedom and limitation, the obi is
the place where the negative effects of colonial intrusion are most
clearly manifested. Like an impudent stranger, colonialism attempts
to bypass the owner of the obi by supplanting his values with alien
ones.
Householders like Okonkwo and Ezeulu who resist or attempt
to negotiate terms, are destroyed.
The ilo, or village playground and the nkwo, or marketplace
(significantly, also the word for 'market day') are like the obi in that
they also represent spaces which are symbolic of culturally defined
notions of self-perception, but on a more collective scale. As a place
which is 'almost as old as the village itself and where all the great
ceremonies and dances took place' (Apart, 43) the ilo in
Things
Fall
Apart is an indication of the collective soul of traditional Igbo society.
Elizabeth Isichei identifies the traditional Igbo market as 'an
institution which marries the dimensions of space and time'^^ and in
so doing emphasises its status as a threshold marking the boundary of
indigenous temporal and spatial categories.
In the novel, the ilo and nkwo constitute the backdrop against
which Okonkwo is realised; they are the spatial and temporal
fi-amework within which his rise to fame and eventual tragedy are
worked out. His triumph over Amalinze the Cat which sets off" his
ascent to greatness occurs on the village ilo; it is in the nkwo that he
finds that he has acted alone in beheading the messenger. Ilo and
nkwo are thus the poles between which Okonkwo's fate is charted. In
Arrow of God, the marketplace is the place where Ezeulu's pre-
eminence in the life of Umuaro is made most clear as it is the location
of
the
sin-expiation ceremony of the Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves.
Ilo and marketplace as thresholds are also the arenas where
indigenous and Western notions of authority are contested. In Things
Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Umuofia and Umuaro meet in the
marketplace to formulate responses to the outrages of colonialism
and Christianity, and the lack of effectiveness of such responses
indicates the extent to which foreign incursion has debilitated the
culture. In the last of such meetings in Things Fall Apart, their
deliberations end inconclusively, interrupted by Okonkwo's
precipitate murder of the messenger, but even before this catastrophe,
it is clear that the clan is able to do little more than bemoan its own
impotence: 'This is a great gathering .... But are we all here?' (Apart,
187).
The answer is, of course in the negative: ilo and nkwo as
expressions of traditional society's communal essence have been
60 Critical
Survey,
Volume
17,
Number 3
profoundly compromised by the
fi-agmentation
brought about by alien
values which celebrate the individual at the expense of the communal.
It is one of the more obvious twists of fate that Okonkwo's precipitate
killing of the messenger reveals his own sense of appropriate time and
place, and this characteristically individualistic act shows just how far
he has strayed from the norm.
In Arrow of God, gatherings on the ilo and in the marketplace are
affected by a similar disunity which signals inherent weaknesses
within traditional society itself Ezeulu's absence from Umuaro,
which eventually results in spatiotemporal disruption, is partly caused
by those whose dislike of him surpasses their commitment to clan
unity. Thus, his request for advice is flung in his face: 'You tied the
knot, you should also know how to undo it'
(Arrow,
144). Consensus
is aborted precisely at the time that it is most
vital,
and the consequent
crisis reveals the damage only when it is too late to be repaired.
The Evil Forest, as a chronotope of the threshold in Things Fall
Apart, is unique. Unlike the others, it is not in the ordinary sense a
meeting place reflective of traditional Igbo society's communal
instincts; yet it is a zone of convergence and does reflect divinely
sanctioned communal mores. As the recognised site for the disposal
of abominations, it is society's spiritual tip, the place where harmful
matter is isolated and prevented from infecting the community. A
depository for disease, evil magic and culturally unacceptable
phenomena, the Evil Forest is 'alive with sinister forces and powers of
darkness' (Apart, 138), and thereby representative of chaos - the
uncontrolled and the uncontrollable - within the established temporal
and spatial framework of traditional Igbo society.
The Evil Forest as threshold is yet another arena for the battle
between alien and traditional values because its very existence
symbolises those beliefs that colonialism and Christianity have come
to eliminate. This is why the victory of Mbanta's nascent church in
Things
Fall
Apart is essentially a spatial and temporal triumph: the
Christians are given a portion of the Evil Forest, in essence, a 'bad
space', which from time immemorial has been associated with things
considered spatially and temporally abhorrent - swollen stomachs,
osu outcasts and twins; they are expected to die within a specific time
as a result of inhabiting this particular space, but actually embark on
the creation of additional new space from the Evil Forest on the very
day by which they should all have been dead (Apart, 138-40). The
continued existence of the Evil Forest guarantees the integrity of the
Achebe's Spatial
Temporalities
61
beliefs which sanction it; its successful occupation by Christians
represents the fatal undermining of that integrity.
As Sue Vice points out, the principal way in which memory is
represented in the novel genre is through the formal chronotopes of
prolepsis (flashforward) and analepsis (flashback).^" Both establish the
fi-amework, the 'road' along which the human mind moves in recalling
the past or anticipating the future. Such acts of recall and prediction
create a parallel set of space and time coordinates which exist
simultaneously alongside currently experienced reality. In this regard,
the chronotope of memory acquires the characteristics of other
chronotopes in addition to its own. It takes on the joumey element of
the road chronotope, representing as it does movement back and forth
over time and in space; it resembles the chronotope of encounter
because it involves a meeting between the present and the recalled past
or the anticipated future; it also takes on the characteristics of the
threshold chronotope, since memory straddles the recollection of the
past, the understanding of the present and the anticipation of the future.
In a society as communal as that of Umuaro in Arrow of God, it is
unsurprising that individual memory is linked to other individual
memories, as seen in the way in which several characters attempt to
justify the accuracy of their recollections by reference to what they
were told by their fathers. Ezeulu's objection to war with Okperi is
essentially paternal: 'my father said this to me that when our village
first came here to live the land belonged to Okperi' (Arrow, 15).
Nwaka contradicts him by drawing upon his memories of his own
father: 'My father told me a diffierent story. He told me that Okperi
people were wanderers'
(Arrow,
16). Memory thus becomes as much
an act of ancestral veneration as it is the process of recall; what is
being said and heard in the present is validated by what had been said
and heard in the past. It is a form of retention which is worthy of
keeping, as Ezeulu tells his young son Nwafo: 'A man does not speak
a lie to his son. Remember that
always.
To say My father told me is to
swear the greatest oath' (Arrow, 93). Yet the times are such that, far
from being sustainable, this time-honoured route to recollection is
reversed, and even as he seeks to maintain it, Ezeulu realises that
'[t]he world is changing' (Arrow, 45) and attempts to rely on his son
Oduche for information about Christianity and the system of
knowledge which undergirds it. In doing so, he reverses the
assumptions upon which father-dependent memory rest: in getting a
reluctant Oduche to do his bidding, he is compelled to address him
62 Critical
Survey.
Volume
17,
Number 3
not as a father would his son, but as 'a man would speak to his best
friend' (Arrow, 45). Unlike traditional modes of recollection, which
appear static and unchanging, Ezeulu predicts a perilous and unstable
new reality in which the son rather than the father will be the source
of knowledge, as well as of its validation: 'I want one of
my
sons to
join these people and be my eye there .... My spirit tells me that those
who do not befi-iend the white man today will be saying had
we known
tomorrow' (Arrow, 45-6). The transferral of recollective authority
from father to son is effectively concluded by Ezeulu who demands
from Oduche a nimble retentivity in a new locus of knowledge and
memory - Western education: 'I want you to leam and master this
man's knowledge so much that if you are suddenly woken up from
sleep and asked what it is you will reply. You must learn it until you
can write it with your left hand' (Arrow, 189-90). The tragedy of
Ezeulu, and by extension, of Umuaro is thus, in a significant sense,
that of
a
loss of memory and the paternal reverence upon which it is
based. Sent to discover the secrets of Christianity, Oduche comes into
contact with a belief system predicated upon the rejection of the past
as encapsulated in tradition, and consequently, he
finds
himself able to
do without his father as the primary source of memory. It is
unsurprising that he attempts to demonstrate his acceptance of his
new-found beliefs by trying to kill the sacred python, an animal called
'father' by the community.
In the memory chronotope, the notions of space and time are
manifested quite differently from their appearance in reality.
Particularly as a recollection of the past, memory appears to telescope
space and time, the normal spatial and temporal markers which
measure these notions in reality being either absent or radically
altered in memory, and as a consequence, particular events become
much more marked in their significance. The competing memories of
Umuaro's founding in Arrow of
God
have already been referred to,
and it can be seen that they derive their potency from sharply
contrasting perceptions of the longevity of Ulu and Idemili as deities
in the memories of their respective chief priests. In
Things
Fall Apart,
space and time in Okonkwo's memories are distorted to a great
degree. He appears to be able to remember only his father's
'contemptible life and shameful death' (Apart, 21), a recollection
which so dominates his perception of his father that it obscures
whatever else occurred in his past. Indeed, it is so pre-eminent in his
thoughts that it eventually becomes the sole basis of his behaviour: he
Achebe's Spatial
Temporalities
63
is 'ruled by one passion - to hate everything that his father Unoka had
loved' (Apart, 17). At crucial points in the narrative, he is moved to
act solely by his recollection of what his father had been, and by
implication, what he has to ensure he himself never becomes.
The distortion of space and time in Okonkwo's memory inevitably
carries over to real life; fears and obsessions are transferred from the
there-and-then of the remembered past to the here-and-now of current
experience through the chronotope of memory. The humiliation of the
past gives rise to a fear-driven present and anticipates the frustrations
and disappointed expectations of the future. Unoka, Okonkwo, and
Okonkwo's eldest son, Nwoye, as anthropomorphic representations of
past, present and future, fiise in Okonkwo's memory to provide him
with a stunningly brief flash of insight: 'How ... could he have
begotten a son like Nwoye, degenerate and eff^eminate? Perhaps he
was not his son .... But Nwoye resembled his grandfather, Unoka,
who was Okonkwo's father. He pushed the thought out of his mind'
(Apart, 143).
Okonkwo's obsession with becoming the exact antithesis of his
father makes the uncannily similar dishonour in which both die
almost inevitable. In committing suicide, he undertakes 'an ironic
retour to the space inhabited by his father'^^ confirming that he is,
after all, Unoka's son, no matter how strenuously he makes his adult
life a denial of that fact. Okonkwo's attempts to be unlike his father
ultimately result in the creation of
a
son who does not resemble him.
It is a pattern of contrasts within which the cycle of social failure
remains constant, and it is the time- and space-bending chronotope of
memory that enables this to be clearly realised.
A chronotopic analysis of Things Fall Apart and Arrow of
God
ultimately reveals that Igboland in the late nineteenth century was
just that: a particular location in space and a specific period in time.
As has been shown, examining the novels within this framework
yields meanings which are surprisingly consistent with the author's
thematic concerns.
Notes
1.
RJ. Zwart, About
Time:
A Philosophical Inquiry into the Qrigin and Nature of Time
(Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Co., 1976), 187.
64 Critical
Survey,
Volume
17,
Number 3
2.
Aristotle. 'Time', Richard M. Gale (ed.). The Philosophy of
Time:
A Collection of
Essays (London: Macmiilan, 1968), 9-23.
3.
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, 'Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel', Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds and trans.). The Dialogic Imagination (Austin:
University ofTexas Press, 1981), 84.
4.
Bakhtin,'Forms of Time
...',248.
5.
SueVice,//i/roc/MciHg5aAA///i (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 14.
6. John
S.
Mbiti,
African Religions
and
Philosophy
(New
York:
Anchor Books,
1970),
21.
7.
A.J. Gurevich, 'Time as a Problem of Cultural History', Cultures and
Time
(Paris:
The Unesco Press, 1976), 229.
8. Wole Soyinka, 'Morality and Aesthetics in the Ritual Archetype', Myth, Literature
and the African
World
{LonAon:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), 20.
9. Soyinka, 'Morality and Aesthetics
...',20.
10.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), 145.
11.
Bakhtin, 'Forms ofTime ...', 210.
12.
Chinua Achebe,
Things
Fall Apart (1958; New
York:
Fawcett Crest, 1959), 85.
13.
Robert M. "^rtn, Achebe's
World:
The Historical
and
Cultural Context
of the Novels
of
Chinua
Achebe (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1980), 35.
14.
Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction
(London: James Currey, 1991), 28.
15.
Chinua Achebe, 'Chi in Igbo Cosmology', Morning
Yet on Creation
Day (New York:
Doubleday, 1975), 159.
16.
Achebe,'Chi', 160.
17.
Emmanuel N. Obiechina,
Culture.
Tradition
and Society in the
West African
Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 122.
18.
Bonnie J. Barthoid, Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean and the United
States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 5.
19.
Barthoid, Black
Time,
8.
20.
Edward W. Said, 'Yeats and Decolonization', Nationalism. Colonialism and
Literature:
Terry
Eagleton
Fredric
Jameson, Edward
W.
Said (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1990), 77.
21.
Michel Foucault, 'Questions of Geography', Colin Gordon (ed.)
Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews
and
Other
Writings,
1972-1977
(Hev/York:
Harvester
Wheatsheaf,
1980),
68.
22.
Anthony R. Guneratne, 'Virtual Spaces of Postcoloniality: Rushdie, Ondaatje,
Naipaul, Bakhtin and the Others', First Online Postcolonial
Conference,
n.p. (14 April-5
May 1997).
23.
'Chinua
Achebe',
Dennis Duerden and Cosmo Pieterse (eds)
African Writers Talking
(London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972), 23.
24.
Bakhtin, 'Forms ofTime ...', 97.
25.
Bakhtin, Ibid., 98.
26.
Gikandi, Reading
Chinua
Achebe,
30.
27.
Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (1964; London: Heinemann Educational Books,
1982),
14.
Achebe's Spatial
Temporalities
65
28.
Bu-Buakei Jabbi, 'Myth and Ritual
in Arrow
of God', Eldred Durosinmi Jones (ed.)
African Literature
Today,
vol. II: Myth and History (London: Heinemann Educational
Books, 1980), 134.
29.
Neil ten Kortenaar, 'Beyond Authenticity and Creolization: Reading Achebe Writing
Culture', PA/L-4 110(1995), 39.
30.
Gikandi, Reading
Chinua
Achebe,
61.
31.
Molly M. Mahood, The Colonial
Encounter:
A
Reading of Six Novels (London: Rex
Collings, 1977),38.
32.
Gerald Moore, The
Chosen
Tongue:
English
Writing
in the
Tropical World
(London:
Longmans, Green, 1969), 153.
33.
Quoted in Gikandi, Reading
Chinua
Achebe,
35.
34.
Vice, Introducing Bakhtin, 14.
35.
Simon Gikandi, 'Chinua Achebe and the Poetics of Location: The Uses of Space in
Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease', Abdulrazak Gurnah (ed.). Essays on African
Writing I: A Re-evaluation (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1993), 8.
