Celebrating Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

I first devoured Things Fall Apart in secondary school. By then I had already tasted Shakespeare, and was chewing Hardy and digesting Dickens, at a time I was taking bitter sips of the unfamiliar Lawrence. While the British texts were exposing me to another world beyond mine, I found in the delayed Things Fall Apart something immediately delicious. Everywhere I looked I could see Okonkwos and Unokas, and I could easily relate to some of the experiences depicted in the novel. Since one of the ways a few of the village school-age children accessed worlds afar was through books, we found Things Fall Apart useful in depicting a life that we could relate to. Of course, there was the occasional romance novel that circulated from hand to hand until we all read it. But Things Fall Apart was different.It portrayed familiar characters. The youth related to Nwoye easily, and felt for the "unfortunate lad" Ikemefuna. But what struck me most was the incident of the spirit medium that took Ezinma to the cave. This was terrifying to any child, especially one who lived in an environment that practiced some of the rituals mentioned in the novel. Yet there was a folkloric element in the story similar to the tales our elders had always told us as a way to immerse us in the moral fabric of the society. The difference is that the folk tales were purely oral, hence subject to the idiosyncratic interpretation and rendition of each different storyteller.