Things Fall Apart

Matt discusses Chinua Achebe's landmark novel Things Fall Apart with Yawa Agbemabiese (Bard Highschool Early College, DC) and Carla Stephens (Bard Queer Leadership Project, Borough of Brooklyn Chair for History and Culture at Bard Microcollege Brooklyn Public Library). 

Transcript

Matt Park
He mourned for the clan which he saw breaking up and falling apart, and he mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia who had so unaccountably become soft like women.

Welcome to the Bard Sequence Seminar Podcast. Today, it's Things Fall Apart. 

I'm Matt Park, Director of the Bard Sequence, and today I will be your friendly moderator and panelist. And I am joined by Carla Stephens and Yawa Agbemabiese. Carla, would you mind introducing yourself?

Carla Stephens
I would not mind. Thank you, Matt Park. I'm Dr. Carla Stephens, the director of the Bard Queer Leadership Project and soon to be the Borough of Brooklyn Chair for History and Culture at the Bard Micro College in the Brooklyn Public Library.

Matt 
And Yawa?

Yawa Agbemabiese
I want to thank you for having me here today. It's pleasure and an honor to be here. I'm Yawa Agbemabiese and I am a faculty at Bard Early College in DC in special education and also teach in global social sciences.

Matt 
And thank you to you both. Full disclaimer, we are not here as experts who are here to have the final say on what Things Fall Apart is quote really about. Instead, we are going to talk about the text and what it means to us and why we value it. We are going to ground our readings and evidence from the text. But if we do a decent job, you should be walking away from this with as many questions as answers.

We are also not here to summarize the text for you because whether it's a podcast or an essay, you should not spend your precious time giving your audience a literal summary of something that they need to read themselves. Read the thing, please. 

And we're going to start off with five minutes of context. So Yawa has graciously volunteered to provide some background context information on Chinua Achebe and on things fall apart. So without further ado, Yawa.

Yawa 
All right, thank you Matt. So you can't put Chinua Achebe in five minutes. I just was like, when I was doing my research on him and I'm like, wow, what a great, great honor to have this opportunity to introduce him in the text. So, without further ado, and this is a part where I kind of read a little bit, so please excuse me just a little bit. So Chinua Achebe, again, a Nigerian novelist, poet, and professor, born in November 1930 in Nogiri, Nigeria. He is widely regarded as the father of modern African literature. 

So Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart in 1958 in direct response to colonial portrayals of Africa. Narratives that depicted African cultures as uncivilized or voiceless. Through this novel, Achebe reclaimed the African story using English, not as a surrender, but as strategy to speak back to the empire using his own language with clarity and cultural rootedness. Achebe, again, had five children with his wife, Christie Achebe. His family has continued his legacy of scholarship and public engagement. His daughter, Nwando Achebe, is respected historian and professor of African history. 

So in 1990, Achebe was involved in a tragic car accident in Nigeria that left him paralyzed from the waist down. After the accident, he relocated to the United States and later joined the faculty of Bard College in New York, where he taught for over 15 years. His presence at Bard was deeply impactful. We love Bard, I love the idea that he was at Bard College. So he's impactful in the classroom and the broader intellectual community. He continued writing, lecturing, and mentoring until his passing in 2013. 

Historically, this novel that we're going to discuss, Things Fall Apart, was published during the final years of British colonial rule in Nigeria, which I think is very important. Just two years later, in 1960, Nigeria gained independence. Things Fall Apart captures the moment of upheaval, reflecting the collision between traditional Igbo society and the increasing influence of British missionaries and the colonial administration. Achebe's work directly responds to narratives like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which famously cast Africa as a mysterious, formless, dark continent. In contrast, Achebe presents an insider's view of a society that was rich in structure, tradition, and meaning before the fall. 

So this book, Things Fall Apart, was an immediate, immediate success. It has since been translated into over 50 languages and remains one of the most widely read books in modern literature. It is a cornerstone in world literature, courses, post-colonial studies, and high school classrooms globally such as mine. Achebe's voice opened the door for countless African writers to share their stories and confidence. His work didn't just shift how Africa was seen,  it changed who got to do the seeing and the tally. 

So more than 60 years later here we are Things Fall Apart continues to resonate the novel advice is to wrestle with questions of identity tradition and power. It implores or explores how colonialism did not just conquer land, it disrupted worldviews, family structures, and the very rhythm of daily life. The book also is a profound meditation of masculinity. On how rigid expectations and fear of weakness can isolate and destroy. Through a Okonkwo, Achebe shows us the cause of upholding a narrow vision of strength, especially in a world that is rapidly changing, but ultimately, this is a story about narrative itself, about the danger of a single story and the urgency of reclaiming one's voice. Achebe teaches us that literature is not neutral. It shapes how we see ourselves and each other. And Things Fall Apart is a masterclass in what happens when a people demand to be seen on their own terms. And that's how I see this text and moving forward in the introduction.

Matt 
Thank you, Yawa. And coming in right about at that five minute mark, that is impressive. 

Yawa
Oh, is that right?

Matt

I'm never able to do that myself. Carla, is there anything you would like to add in terms of context

Carla 
That's amazing, no? Thank you, y'all. That was beautiful.

Yawa 
Oh, thank you so much. It was an honor, actually. I said, you can't put it in five minutes. It's like he has so much to exclaim and so much, his life was not easy.

Matt 
Thank you, Yawa. The only thing I will add is the connection with Bard. So he was a Professor Emeritus of Languages and Literature at Bard College from 1990 to 2009. Bard College founded the Chinua Achebe Center in 2005 in his honor to create dynamic projects for the most talented of a new generation of writers and artists of African origin as well as the Chinua Achebe Fellowship in Global African Studies. And if you were to go to Bard today, you would find that Achebe House, named after him, is still there, and it's where Bard houses its Office of Sustainability. So I just wanted to throw in a little bit more there about that historical connection between Bard and Chinua Achebe that's important to me and I think important to us as Bardians.

And so now it's time for another round of introductions, this time to the text itself. How did you first meet? Things Fall Apart, if you remember. Does that matter? And how do you feel about this text and your meeting of it?

Carla 
Alright, ready to go. So, I don't remember the first time that I read the book. It was a long time ago. I remember that it was recommended to me and that I read it for pleasure and that I loved it. At that time, I loved most was Achebe's foreshadowing. Like he was a master of foreshadowing. He just pulled me along through the book. We start with the title, Things Fall Apart. And so the whole way you're watching as things are, he's building a world and it's falling apart. You know, we meet Ikemefuna and he's introduced as the ill-fated lad. And so it was like, what happened? I legendarily ill-fated because the whole, you know, people of Umuofia are talking about this ill-fated lad into the future. And so just over and over again, you see, the gaffs that a Okonkwo makes and the transgressions against the culture. And you're just feeling this tragic ending coming from the very beginning of the novel. 

So that is the first thing that I loved about it. And then I became a teacher and I used it as literature and providing cultural context within a historical, within a history class. And so I paired it with another Nigerian's work, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's childhood memoir called Aké, that is also based in Nigeria a little later than Things Fall Apart. It was around the Second World War. As well as one or two of the short stories from Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo who talks about early post-colonial Ghana in No Sweetness Here. 

So Okonkwo is such a vividly drawn and memorable character. And so I recently wanted to honor Achebe and Okonkwo in my Afrofuturist writing. So I have a character who's a fighter in my story named Okonkwo and the champions of the story, Anubis and Cheops share his ambitions and his understanding of successful manhood. So I was really excited about this opportunity to read Things Fall Apart and to reconnect with a Okonkwo and kind of see if I got it right because I was writing these characters from memory. And later on we'll talk about what kind of reaction I had to meeting a Okonkwo again.

Matt 
Thank you, Carla. I also don't remember when I read Things Fall Apart, though I imagine it must have been in undergrad. Certainly none of my teachers in high school would have recommended it or assigned it. Africa did not exist in the history classes that I took in high school, except, you know, you started in Egypt and you talked about pyramids, and then you talked about the slave trade, and then I think you talked about, you the Boer War or some such thing. But that's about it. I mean, that's all I remember from high school. And so certainly no literature teacher or history teacher went over Things Fall Apart. So it must have been undergrad.

I remembered the relationship between Okonkwo and his father, Unoka, as being a much bigger part of the book than it actually was upon rereading it. And so in my mind, that was one of the key features that I really reacted to when I first read it was this kind of father and son relationship. And I think that has probably more to do with what was on my mind at that point and my own kind of what was going on in my head.

I didn't love it the first time I read it in the way that I actually loved it when I reread it. Having reread it now, I have a much actually deeper appreciation of the novel that I think that I had when I first read it. And one of the reasons for that is that I'm a much better reader than I was as an undergrad. As an undergrad, I was a lazy reader. I was a quick reader. I was reading for the main point for the big theme and not doing a lot of close reading and not really thinking too deeply about some of the things that are in this novel that are actually way more complex than I realized and I didn't pick up on it. 

I think one of the other reasons I didn't love it as much is that the critiques that are in this book by the time I was an undergrad in the year, you know, 2000 had at that point been widely disseminated. And so what Things Fall Apart, has to say has been imbibed by everyone. And so at that point, I had kind of read other versions of Things Fall Apart in every author who was writing about Africa because it's inherent in there, because they have also read a Achebe and it has informed them and what they have to say. So I didn't find it as novel because I had already read historians who were saying these kinds of things other artists and authors who were saying these kinds of things. So I think it was less impactful for that reason. 

And then the other reason for me is that I tended to gravitate towards other African authors. So Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o was very influential for me and more in the vein of magical realism. Stuff like Ben Okere's writing was really important for me. And so Things Fall Apart doesn't really fit in either of those kinds of modes that I was really interested at the time. So I, you know, I liked the book well enough. I thought it was interesting, but it didn't have the same kind of impact that it had on me rereading it for this podcast. It is kind of where I fall.

Yawa 
So, when I first fully read Things Fall Apart, I was teaching online at Asheshi University during COVID. And so I didn't know I was going to be teaching it. But all of sudden, it appeared this is one of the texts you have to teach. But the beauty of that is that I had such bright students in the classroom in Asheshi University that were all from Africa, all throughout the continent. And they were very bright. And so I'm reading this text, but not really, I'm grasping it but not really because this is my first time reading it. So what I did what was really amazing was that I used writing and thinking prompts to guide students but they taught me more than I taught them so using those prompts in writing and thinking helped me get through the text and really get through the text because it was new to me and I was understanding it, but not really understanding because I am engulfed in an Ewe culture that is very similar to Igbo culture. And they are, I call them cousins, but that experience. And so what I did, I also invited some African literature, some African professors, literature professors into the classroom to engage the students. And it just like bloomed and it opened my eyes and just that kind of scholarship occurring in the classroom was online during COVID was really amazing.

And then I continued to teach it at a Asheshi after COVID ended, then that only lasted me two or three years. But, what I did with that text is also I had to read it again because I wanted to do because I'm so intrigued by this text that and then I love Wangarĩ Maathai from Kenya the Nobel Peace Prize winner so I juxtaposed that text with with Unbowed, I juxtaposed Things Fall Apart, I pulled quotes out and we did a one-day workshop in Writing and Thinking workshop and so that was really amazing and so that's how I came to really more engage in the text. So but the text won't leave me it just continues to you know pull me in. 

So another thing is that we do teach it at our school in DC but I here I am a co-teacher so I'm not a lead teacher so I'm not guiding the text but I'm just listening to students interact with the text and you know them fight through these understanding of the cultural nuances that are occurring in the text, really struggling with it. And I'm like, do they really, really get it? And so it's kind of like to me in some ways frustrating because you hear them say things, maybe others say these things about text. But now I got these students whose level of thinking is not where we probably would really want it to be. But then again, I asked the question as not a lead teacher, but how do we use prompts to get them to really think more critically about what they think, what they think they see, what they think they hear, what they think they know, and those kind of things. And so that shapes my reading the text now. But this reading now is just really powerful. I got to go, I went through it in two days, but things came out to me that I never paid really attention to, because I think many times I rushed through the text. And the two days that I read it, it may seem like it was rushed, but I'm going through it with a fine-tooth comb. And so, but it does remind me of my experiences, the Igbo society and the Ewe society kind of like, you know, my experiences with that help me to understand many of the things that I see spiritually, culturally, with language and all of that.

Matt 
So I haven't taught Things Fall Apart. Carla, do you have any anecdotes in terms of how your students have reacted to it when you've taught it?

Carla 
One of the surprising things that happened in Newark is that
one of the Ghanaian students, his name almost fell out of my mouth, but he, because I was so surprised. First, he told me that they'd read the text in eighth grade, so he'd read it before. But the thing that surprised me is the fact that he talked about the positive impact of Great Britain and how, and he talked about the educational system that Great Britain brought and how important colonialism was for, in a sense, civilizing Ghana and I, it was, it was amazing and it was surprising and, and wonderful to hear that. 

I can't say I was sad because I didn't get to, this because he's allowed to have his own mind and his own thoughts and his, his own beliefs. So I, I was just so surprised by that. And, you know, we had a wonderful time going through the text. I taught Things Fall Apart again in my Africa in World History class this past semester, whole different group of students at Bard College at Simon's Rock. In BHSEC Newark, I was teaching year one students. And was that the first or second year that the school existed? So that was either 2011 or 2012. And now teaching it in 2025 with students in rural, Western Massachusetts in an independent school was a very different experience. Yes, I was like, did I have any African students? I did actually have a couple of African students. They didn't speak as much as other students. And I didn't have that same kind of experience. 

I taught the other African texts that Matt will be very familiar with, that I taught was the Epic of Sundiata. And so as I talk about more later in the podcast, I was viewing things fall apart through that historical sense that you talked about, Yawa. Through this moment and that Achebe is writing or this book is being published in 1958. who is he talking to? Yes, he's talking to the British. Is he also talking to Igbo people? Is this text, you know, an effort to shape national culture at this moment when Nigeria is freeing itself from British colonialism is a question that was running through my head this time, which was not a question at all when I taught in Newark. when both of you, well, Matt, when you talk about having met this book in 2020 I mean in 2000, I was like, oh my gosh, now I'm feeling my age. I was like, oh wow. So it was much fresher. I didn't have all of the background that you had on the text the first time that I read it. was a revelation back in the 1970s when I read it.

Matt 
Carla, I did not mean to make you feel your age, 

Carla 
It's okay.

Matt

But the Igbo proverb does say when a younger one washes his hands, he can sit with the elders. So here I am, I've washed my hands and we can sit and talk.

Carla 
Welcome!

Matt 
So your response actually gives a great segue into our next prompt, which is our rereading and how has the text changed upon your rereading of it. And I'm thinking particularly of the Ghanaian student that you talked about because upon rereading this text, I was really impressed at just how humanist it was and the way in which Chinua Achebe deals with Igbo society in a way that does not turn it into the Garden of Eden, right? So he does not see Igboland as the Garden of Eden, which was somehow disrupted when colonialism arrived. He paints a complex and nuanced version of that society in which it has its own issues. It has its own hierarchies and axes of oppression, if you can call them that. And yet he remains so clear-eyed about what was wrong with colonialism and the fact that at the end of the day, whatever the colonialists said, it was fundamentally based on violence and exploitation. 

And yet, Achebe does say, right, that when colonialism first arrives, some people in Igboland are happy because they are growing cash crops and making money and money is coming in and some of the people who had been excluded from the Evo hierarchy are happy because this presents to them an alternative form of authority that they were not able to get, especially those men who were not considered manly enough, not considered violent enough, they were pushed to the fringes of society. He talks about society that had slaves. He talks about a society in which there was domestic violence.

And he doesn't cover these things up. He doesn't feel the need to present a sanitized version of Igboland. He just lets us understand that these are human beings in a human society. And he's up for all of the complexity that goes along with that. And so I was, the reason why I appreciate this text more upon rereading it is it's just an incredibly complex humanist text. And it is, you know, although it does land in a place where it has a point of view, and that point of view is the horror that was colonialism. And yet there is still within that broader narrative or that broader conclusion, lots of places for us to find nuance and to see that the characters in the story are human characters and they're not just stand-ins for simplistic ideas.

Yawa 
Absolutely. And I want to piggyback on what you said. It's not a perfect society or a perfect union, as they say, that he paints the picture of. And so there are some nuances and things that could be troubling. But I think it's like to me, any society has their ups, their downs, the positives, their negatives. So in me rereading the text, I really, for some reason, the women really poked out to me. They really stood out to me more than language and how Achebe uses, look at his repetition, right? He wants Ezinma to be a son, so he says it over and over again. But there's also something he did too that I found in chapter 12 where he doesn't call Nwoye's mother by her name in this text, not really, but he repeatedly says Nwoye's mother. And then he, for some reason, Ekwefi is really, I think she's really interesting. I really find her to be resistant and just full of energy, some kind of way she's different from me. So that stood out to me. And the third wife, you barely hear about her. She's in the backdrop. But there's also something about, of course, the language that we see. 

But in terms of the political social context with colonialism, the violence and arrogance of colonialization even came more powerful to me. And the reason why I say that, you all, is that, like in chapter 23, when the Okonkwo and the five men go to see the district commissioner's office, they go into the presence. For some reason, they put their weapons down, a reminder of what the Aztecs did when the Spanish came in. They just were blindsided. But it also reminded me what's happening today. For some reason, the trickery, like people going to court for their immigration papers and they're arrested. So, the humiliation that Okonkwo and the men did and how they were lowered to a lower level in their own land, by outsiders, really stood out to me this time more than ever because I'm seeing it on TV. I'm seeing those visuals on TV. And so that scene stirred something in me in chapter 23. It felt too real, too current, and that's part of Achebe's literature, I believe.

Carla 
Wow, that's powerful, Yawa, thank you. So what surprised me through this reading is how much I disliked Okonkwo. In earlier readings, I had greater empathy for him. I think in part because it seemed that Achebe made excuses for his behavior. That was my interpretation. Like, suggesting that he didn't mean to be cruel. He says, "Perhaps down in his heart, Okonkwo was not a cruel man, but his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and weakness. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father." That was on page 13 in my edition.

And then Achebe also kept showing us that Okonkwo was considered such a great man because his hard work and determination. So he won titles and, you know, he served with the elders. And because of those positive aspects of his personality, his toxic masculinity could be overlooked. Achebe wrote, "If ever a man deserved his success, that man was a Okonkwo" So in my first readings, as I said, you I wanted to honor a Okonkwo in my own writing, but this time I just had a hard time liking him and I had more curiosity and empathy for his father, Unoka. And I also had questions about Okonkwo's mother, who we don't really hear very much about until the very end. And we don't really hear about her. We hear about circumstances around her. And I wondered about what the loss of his mom when he was a young child, what kind of impact that had on a Okonkwo, because as Matt told us, we hear about what kind of impact his father, who was at the center of  Okonkwo's growing up after his mom passed, but, you know, I just keep, you know, kept going back to for the first time this question of his loss of his mom when he was a child.

Matt 
I also noticed that on my rereading with Okonkwo. I was especially struck at how much the things that he said sounded like what's coming out of the right wing kind of manosphere in America today. You know, he says that men today have become too effeminate. There are no warriors left anymore. You you need to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. The old ways are disappearing and that's a terrible thing. We need to bring them back. Women, children, and inferior males should all know their roles in society. And on a number of occasions, he calls men effeminate and puts them in their place. And he feels like the ways of the past and the ways of traditional religion are the surest guides to right action in the present. And that's really what you hear. That message is kind of dominating the political sphere in America today. And I think Achebe is just a brilliant theorist of masculinity and of a particular kind of hegemonic violent masculinity that Okonkwo represents. And I think he is, because Achebe himself, and I'll get into this a little bit more in the next prompt, but he's a man of letters and he's not a man of violence and he's a man of peace. And I think that allows him to see through this other kind of masculinity. 

Yawa, I'm so sorry, I cut you off. Let me yield some time to you here.

Yawa 
You know, I hear this thing about hegemony and the nurturing of a mother, the absence of that, and the impact that it may have had on a concubine, because he seems like there's some kind of resentment going on in his whole being in his, because he's always saying it over and over again, something about they act like a woman or even wanting someone that is a woman to be a male, but this whole resentment or this absence of what could have made things different in his life. But I like how, you know, I never really looked at a Okonkwo for me. This reading kind of went to the backdrop for me. It was, it's weird, but I don't know why, but I like, you know, what you all are seeing in there. Cause I'm like, wow, wow. He is kind of like, but I feel like I know him because especially when I go to different villages in Ghana, feel like maybe I shouldn't say this, but I kind of know him and met him in Ghana. In this place I spend summers and that's what brought me. When I see him it's like I know him. And I see them and I get it why there is this really amazing for it to come alive for me like that. And I think you brought that out, Carla, so that you met in this way of thinking patriarchy societies. They're still there. And then what we're seeing, like I said, is even if I turn on the news today, I'm seeing some resonances of like, should women go into the army? They should be mothers and nurturers. They should be women or least roles that they're supposed to

Matt 
All right, so let's move on to our takes. So what is your unique reading of this text and why does it speak to you? I'll go ahead and start. For me, again, I was kind of alluding to this before, but I'm really interested in Achebe as an author, as a man of words and what that means. And in particular, this kind of division between words and deeds. A lot of this novel is really about the power of words and those who know what to do with that and those who don't. 

Achebe talks about the proverbs of Igboland as the palm oil with which words are eaten and there is again this kind of stark divide between Okonkwo and those characters who do use quite a bit of words, who do use proverbs and who use words to move things in a particular direction in society without resorting to things like violence.

This is really relevant to me today because I do feel like today we are awash with words. And there is a lot of conflict in society today over particular words and what they mean and what they signify and how we identify. So recently I went to a conference in Texas and I put my feet in the body of water on its eastern coast. Were my feet in the Gulf of Mexico? Were they in the Gulf of America? Does it matter? Have we come to value words so much that we actually have de-emphasized deeds? Or are we in a place in which we can't even agree on what a deed is anymore and what a good deed is and looks like? Because anything that is a good deed will be seen by some as politicized and as actually not a good thing. Or can I just kind of walk out on the street corner and kick a puppy? And if I'm politically in agreeance with certain people, they will say, yeah, you should kick that puppy. These are kind of questions which I have. 

And this kind of brings me to the connection between Okonkwo and the district commissioner, of all people. And it's interesting to me that in this text, they both hate words. The district commissioner complains about the Igbo people and quote "their love of superfluous words," which he finds infuriating. And this is in fact the same critique that Okonkwo uses of his father's words. He also found it infuriating how much his father talked and how much he used words instead of action and instead of hard work. 

Okonkwo also prefers violent masculine stories as opposed to the quote unquote foolish folk tales and trickster tales that would be told by his wives to his children and he wishes Nwoye would not spend nearly so much time listening to these kinds of folk tales about the tortoise and all these kinds of things and listen more to his war stories about the, what was it, the 12 men he decapitated and the skull that he drinks out of. And the district commissioner at the end of the book, he is pulling together his own narrative of violence, which he is gonna call The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, right? There certainly aren't going to be any womanly folk tales in there. It's going to be about conquering and subduing. And so I'm not quite sure where to go with this. know. Words perhaps can sometimes interrupt or frustrate attempts to exercise power. Chinua Achebe as author certainly felt like they could. I'm going to read a quote from 2008 from him. He said, "I grew up among very eloquent elders in the village or even in the church, which my father made sure we attended, there were eloquent speakers. So if you reduce that eloquence, which I encountered to eight words, it's going to be very different. You know that it's going to be a battle to turn it around, to say to people, that's not the way my people respond in this situation by unintelligible grunts and so on. They would speak. And in that speech that I knew I wanted it to be written down."

So again, Achebe is a man of words and what he really wanted to chronicle in Things Fall Apart, as well as many of his other writings, are the way in which his people used their words and spoke out and raised their voices against what was happening, even if they weren't able to stop it, even if they weren't able to, through military or martial might defeat the forces of colonialism, he wants to really chronicle these are the words that we used, this is the way that we spoke out. We were not silent, we were not grunting on the sidelines as history happened around us. 

And again, in our society today, I am thinking about this and I'm wondering if words can even do that anymore in a situation in which we are so saturated with them. In which the internet is so ubiquitous and there are so many voices out there. Can one voice or voices cut through that and lead people to action? What is the situation that we find ourselves in today and how is that either similar to or different from what Achebe is talking about in Things Fall Apart?

Yawa 
So thank you. Thank you for that. Because again, reading this text kind of puts me into a modern place. Many things, language and how we use language in how it's interpreted or not interpreted, who's saying it, who's saying it for a reason and for purpose. 

But my take on this, Things Fall Apart is that it's hard to land on just one interpretation of maybe the points that he's making. Because it's so like I think someone said it's not simplicity, right? It resists it. And so the text is deeply rooted in social cultural, social, political, all these kind of things, meanings. So I come to it not just as a reader, but as someone who has maybe studied some ways, cultural practices and lived it a little bit in an African society, especially among the Ewe in Ghana. And then my experiences in America. So when I read Achebe's portrayal of Igbo society, I don't just see exotic traditions, I see structure, spirituality, and survival, right? 

So there's one passage that stood out to me, and I don't know, something that, there's glimpses that we missed, but it stood out to me this time. So it's in chapter 12, and it's during a marriage ceremony. Earlier in the text, Achebe talks about the first wife where, I told you the women stood out to me for some reason this time, I don't know why. But you can hear her ankles, her brass anklets on her ankles, right? And so, and then he talks about this bride that's wearing brass anklets that rattled. And sometimes you can gloss over a text, but for some reason that popped out to me because what happened is that the brass anklets, like somebody might read this and think it's just a little anklet on her, you know, like we may put a little gold jewelry on our ankle, right? No, these anklets come all the way up your shins and they something they're heavy and the girls are taken into a place to go through a ritual to put those on and get married and get prepared for marriage. And so he talks about that, but he glosses over it. 

And how do I know that? You go, how do you know that, Yawa? So in my anthropology class with Dr. Ciekawy at Ohio University, we studied a book, a documentary called Monday's Girls. And they show us how Igbo girls go through these rituals in order to get prepared for womanhood. And so that was something that stood out to me in chapter 12. But again, Achebe doesn't explain it. He mentions it, that his wife has it, that Okonkwo's wife has it.
This one he really says you could see it for me, I saw it a little bit more, but it also. means that outsiders may misinterpret it, interpret or overlook these moments or these nuances that he's bringing up. From a colonial Christian perspective, these practices are often labeled as savage or uncivilized, pagan. So, you know, there's this conflict going on now. Do girls still have to go through this in order to just become married, you know, just to get a suitor? 

But again, you know, again, thinking about this, I have friends and colleagues who are of Igbo culture and many embrace their cultural traditions, but there's this conflict that's occurring with these. I'm Christian. They have to say I'm Christian as if it makes them more civilized. They don't want to be seen, I think you said it to Carla, the young guy in the classroom said, they brought to me education and Christianity. Leave me alone. But if he were to go back to his village, his village is going to go to church on Sunday. And then on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, they're going to go somewhere into the culture of the traditions. But they have to be seen as Christianity because it makes them educated and more accepted in a world where we are, where they exist.

So that's why this book still matters. It reminds me that culture carries its own internal logic, its own way of organizing life, morality, gender, and spirit, which we all exist in. And while some may run to Christianity to escape what they perceive as rigid traditional structures, Things Fall Apart, ask us to think critically about why those structures were labeled as oppressive in the first place and by whom, right? Who caused it oppressive? Like girls like I'm not going to, see girls in Ghana like I'm not going through that ritual. No way. It's oppressive to women, but in the real society, it spirituality structure and those kinds of things. And so that's what the colonials brought into the myths to cause that conflict. And I would say in many ways it still exists.

Carla 
Well, so I'm not sure that my reading is so unique, but I thank you both and Matt, I wrote my notes about having to think about words and how Achebe talks about words in the text because that's a new view that gives me an opportunity to read it again through a new lens. 

But the lens I use, as I mentioned earlier, came from my African world history class. taught a college class and I taught a high school level class. And in the college class, we read Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. And in his chapter on national culture, he wrote about the importance of art, including literature in inspiring revolutionary spirit and preparing colonized people to build a national culture after liberating themselves. So, as Yawa told us, Things Fall Apart was published in 1958, two years before Nigerian independence and I was wondering how this text contributed possibly to building a national Nigerian culture, which seems impossible, or just focused on Igbo culture in an independent Nigeria. 

How much of this writing or when Achebe was writing, was he thinking about the British gaze or, how it would be received by the British or how it would be received by his own people. And, you know, there's so many questions as we've said and examples about manhood and you know Yawa's talking about the the role of women, I have a lot of thinking about that. You know including Okonkwo's repeating the fact that he wished and Ezinma was a son. Really interesting to me what he was seeing in his daughter that made him keep thinking that and saying that. And the comparison of women's crops to King Yam, and yet, we have this priestess of the Oracle of the Hills and Caves. How much political power does she have? And the goddesses Ani and Amadiora, the thunderer, as opposed to like, you know, the Norse god Thor, we've got a feminine power that is the thunderer. I thought that that was fascinating. 

And Achebe takes us to the end and asks that question about why the most common name is Nneka, mother is supreme. And so there's so much, as Matt has told us, there's so much nuance and complexity in thinking about the role of gender and gender roles within this society. It looks very kind of straightforward in its patriarchy except it isn't. Of course it isn't. And then the family and community values, the value of work ethic that is both Nigerian and British, particularly during the Victorian era, the idea of diplomacy that Matt was talking to us about and the respect for elders and for deities. It's so much that as I went through each of these kind of values, I'm how would the British be seeing this? How would the traditional Igbo people be seeing this? And how would the, how would it be seen in the post-colonial Nigeria? And so that's kind of the lens that I was looking at the text through in this reading.

Yawa 
You all are really impressive. Carly, that's so impressive. The text that you read or you teach, I'm so impressed with it. Like, Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth. I tried reading it. So, you know, in grad school, I had to read it overnight. And I didn't grasp as much as I want, but I can see how those kind of readings that you experience and how it's informing. You all are like, I feel like, you know, real red. And so in African knowledge, in African literature. And this is probably one of the only books that I've not, there's a couple other that I've read, but like Purple Hibiscus or something like that. But that informed how I see the text. But thank you for that.

Matt 
And Yawa, think, you know, one of the things that I've come to realize again, as I've become a better reader later in life is the power of couching your ideas in fiction and in dramatis personae, right? Which, know, Fanon is a straight up philosopher and he's giving you straight up philosophy and the way in which he does that can be difficult, I think, to to revolve some of those ideas around my head sometimes. And so I think one of the great things about Things Fall Apart is it does achieve a philosophical goal in the end, but it does so through literature. And this is one of the things that Bard Seminar helped me to realize, which is I came into Bard as a historian and someone who is used to reading historians and philosophers who tell you what it is, right? This is my thesis, this is my evidence, and here's, I'm going to prove it for you and you just need to understand it. 

And contrasting that with a novel, which complicates and frustrates those goals by couching them in real human characters who do real human things and are more complicated than that. And so, I think this again is one of the reasons why things like Things Fall Apart have grown in my estimation over time as opposed to more philosophical tracks in which the author just gives you their philosophy, here's what it is, you know, and in very kind of a very detailed way outlines that. 

Carla, you have also once again provided me with a great segue for our next frontier, which is our close reading. So when you were talking about how would this have been received by the British, that's really what I was thinking about in my close reading. And so for me, I wanted to do a close reading just of the fact that there's a glossary of Igbo words and phrases in this text, as well as the way in which whenever Igbo words or phrases are used in the text, Achebe often includes contextual bits around that term to help define it for the reader. 

And that clearly tells me that he saw an international audience for this text from the very beginning. And not that it was primarily for an international audience or only for an international audience. I think he certainly meant it for Igbo to read as well, for Nigerians to read as well. However, I think it's pretty clear that he wanted this to go overseas and to tell the story of the village, of the Igbo people to the world. And the fact that he's taken such great care to make sure to define these words when they are used, I think shows that he has that audience in mind from the beginning. 

And in particular, I focus on the term efulefu or worthless man for those men who were at the margins of society. And so at one point, I believe it's Okonkwo who says, "if a gang of efulefu decided to live in the evil forest, it was their own affair. When one came to think of it, the evil forest was a fit home for such undesirable people." And the reason why I wanted to close read that particular line is because those are the kind of men in society that I kind of most strongly identify with. I don't think I would have done well in Igbo society. I'm not a traditionally masculine manly man. So, you know, I'm also, and again, Carla, you can attest to this as well as anyone, I'm a huge pain in the butt and I don't always, you know, do what I'm supposed to do in a given structure with a given set of rules and I tend to kind of follow my own North Star. And I'm very skeptical of the idea that things are the way they are and you just need to fit in and perform your role and perform traditional values and things like that. So, I think I identify with those efulefu as much as anyone else in the text, just kind of given who I am and the way in which I see myself moving through life and trying to honor my inner truth more than necessarily trying to honor some of the rules of the various facets of society that I kind of find myself in. So that's kind of my close reading. Yawa, Carla, what did you read closely?

Carla
So, Achebe gave me a question and it is related to your evil forest. So on page 32, Achebe tells us the result of deceased people being thrown into the evil forest instead of being buried. So, and he wrote and the quote is, "Their clan is full of the evil spirits of those unburied dead, hungry to do harm to the living." And we'd already learned on page 18 that Unoka was an ill-fated man. He had a bad chi, which I also, the word chi was very interesting. It's like, well, how did Japanese jump in here? He had bad chi or personal god and evil fortune followed him to the grave or rather to his death. he had for he had no grave. So is Achebe implying that Unoka's evil spirit literally as well as psychologically haunted a Okonkwo? So, the levels of, of the no cause, you know, impact on his son and just kept getting. 

So well, Matt, when you said at the beginning, this is the thing that stuck with you, the relationship between him and his father. There's a reason for that because there's layers and layers and layers of, of seeing a Okonkwo as, you know, trying to be someone different than his father was and trying to make his son someone different than his father was. And so then you have this intergenerational trauma bringing us back to the 21st century. You see this trauma that gets passed down and the impact that the trauma has on Okonkwo and then on Nwoye. And that trauma starts, as you say, Matt, from the fact that his father just was an artist. And there was no place in the society that valued art enough that his father could make a living being his full artistic self. So that's another complexity that as Matt has suggested is, you know, what Achebe puts in, you know, having us think about how to value art in society and value artists, value artists enough to support them if artists actually important to your society. And again, we live in a society where culture is important, art is said to be important in determining high culture and yet, you know, the systems for artists aren't supported. They can't make a living on their art. But that caused so much trauma that we have three generations that are tragically ruined by it.

Yawa 
That's a good point, Carla, because it brought up a question like, now what? Like, Nwoye is going to be there afterwards. And so how that trauma does go from generation to generation. like, you have to break a cycle in order, again, but that trauma continues on. I wonder if if Okonko's father was traumatized, maybe that's why he was the way he was. We don't know. 

But I did, in my close reading, I looked at chapter 22, where we pretty much, we look at Enoch, right? Enoch is a Christian convert, commits a grave offense, causes grave danger. So the quote says, "one of the greatest crimes a man could commit was to emasculate an egwugwu in public, or to say or do anything which might reduce his immortal prestige in the eyes of the uninitiated." And this is what Enoch did. You wonder like, why Enoch? Because I don't know about you. Have you ever seen those egwugwu?

They come out and they just exist and they just doing what they do. I'm like, wow, that's powerful. And it is spiritual. And so later in the text, they go to the church where they built on their land. so they said, we cannot leave the matter in his hands because he does not understand our customs. says we do not understand his, but he could not save his church. When the egwugwu went away, the red earth church that Mr. Brown had built was a pile of earth and ashes. And this is what I like with the Achebe, so he goes, and it's like this afterthought, he goes, and for the moment, the spirit of the clan was pacified like this thought and for the moment the spirit of the clan was pacified that's on page 191 so you know I'm looking at this and I'm like to me that's very powerful spiritually so you got is you know in terms of a Christian would they believe that such a thing could happen, where the the colonizer, those who were there did they believe that this could ever happen because that was highly powerful so, what stands out to me is how Achebe weaves the clash of cultural codes into the structure of this scene. The lines between spiritual, political, and communal life are blurred. 

Especially in Igbo society. to attack one is to attack all. So here are these, I think that's just a really powerful scene for me in this clash of cultures, clash of belief systems. Maybe they, even I didn't think it would really happen because he decided to convert to Christianity, he goes, this stuff is nothing. They will never get me. We have over here our belief system and no longer believes what he was raised in. And so when you see it, it's real. He's like, this is real. And so in terms of even Achebe's use of language and how he weaves this whole chapters to get us to understand, what he wants me to understand, let me put it in me, what he wants us to understand is like, this stuff really exists. Like, are you crazy? And then like it just exists. people are like, that's again, that's why I think in terms of like I'm experiencing what people who are from various African traditional cultures, they run to Christianity because there are these consequences as well in both, consequences in the end. 

So they think that, and I've heard someone say this also to me is too strict. So they run to Christianity. Christianity gives them forgiveness. It gives them opportunity to repent in the, and it's just in words, like maybe you have to say a prayer or something, don't know, Hail Mary or something, I don't know, but in this culture you probably would have to go through some rituals, some cleansing, the whole community is involved, your mother, your father, everybody is impacted by your one sin. And so that really, just that whole idea that Enoch did that was, and then the consequences of it I think is even more powerful.

Matt 
Thanks, Yawa. I think it's also the idea of a chi also adds to the complexity because in addition to these gods that everyone believes in, again, you know, the thunder god, the god of the earth and things like that, everyone has their own personal chi, which makes it such a fascinating and complex belief system. You know, I don't know of too many systems in which you have your own personal chi as well as the kind of communal gods that everyone believes in. So I think that is kind of fascinating and it makes for a really interesting concept of religion that we in the West, if you are part of the Abrahamic faith, certainly don't really have. It would be a great sin for me to believe in a chi as well as God Almighty.

And so I think that's just a really fascinating of this belief system. And it is contrary to this idea that you often encounter in Western discourses on Africa, which assert that there's kind of no individualism and that there's nothing beyond the communal or the village level. And so what the Chi really shows us, I think, is the high degree to which these societies were composed of individuals who had their own personal deity that they had to honor and contend with and engage with, as well as the larger communal and village and sometimes state networks that they were also in enmeshed in. So I think that she also adds to that and makes it fascinating. 

I am also very interested in the egwugwu. I'm going to talk about them in a little bit in one of the other prompts, so I'm going to save that. But I think I also agree that they are so fascinating. I've seen one in person come out in the Gambia and it was during a New Year's festival. And these days it's much different and it's a big celebration and the people that I saw weren't really afraid of it in the way in which there is a certain level of fear that is associated with, you know, Things Fall Apart in which they come out and they are the ancestors, but they can also be very dangerous and you definitely don't want them to catch you not where you should be or doing something wrong or not giving them their proper deference. So there is a level of fear that is in the text that I didn't see in, you the 2000s when I was in the Gambia and things are quite different. But there was one occasion where I did get to see one come out and wielding machetes and dancing and with drummers supporting and all of that kind of stuff, which was incredible.

Yawa
Yeah, and in this reading, it kind of stood out to me as well. It's like sometimes they would come out in the market, you could see people run and they feel like they're safe and they run back. Like, we're OK. But I thought that was interesting how he, that was kind of playful for me the way he said it and he introduced it in the text, but how the people, how they would react to those entities or when they would come out.

Matt 
Thank you, Yawa. I don't have a great believing in doubting. Does anyone else have a really good one they want to share? If not, I'll move us ahead. 

Yawa 
Now I have one.
Okay, so here's one I have and it comes from chapter 16 where a white missionary declares, your guys are not alive and cannot do you any harm, replied the white man. They are pieces of wood and stone. So this statement captures the colonialism and the missionary mindset. So believing standpoint, the missionary is expressing the Christian worldview, which typically regards idols or physical representations of divine as false or powerless, right? So Christianity, especially in its more evangelical form, emphasizes faith in a singular unseen God and often rejects material symbols of divinity. 

So in doubting that claim, Christianity itself is full of ritual objects and sacred symbols, the cross, the Bible, the statues of saints, candles, communion elements, and even the reverence given to church buildings and altars. So these items are deeply symbolic and often treated with the same reverence of Igbo people offered to their shrines and ancestral tokens. So the missionary's claim is not just dismissive, it's hypocritical. They said, you all are, you know, you have like these pagan gods or these symbolism. We're going to burn them up. But they also have them as well. So that was a belief and doubt that I have that you can either believe that or you can doubt it because they also have idols that they worship as well.

Matt 
Thank you, Yawa. That is a good one. Again, much better than what I was thinking about. But I do have a really good add, delete, rewrite, so I'm going to move us there. So you can add a new section to the text, delete an existing section, or rewrite a section. Which do you choose and why? 

So I'm going to read from the text first, and then it'll be pretty clear, I think, what my ad is here. So quote, "Once upon a time, Tortoise and Cat went to wrestle with yams. No, that is not the beginning. Once upon a time, there was a great famine in the land of animals. Everybody was lean except cat, who was fat, and whose body shown as if oil were rubbed on it." And then Agbala comes out and interrupts the story, and it is never finished. We deserve to hear the end of this story. I want to hear the end of this story. It sounds terrific. It sounds absolutely fascinating.

Cat and Tortoise wrestling against yams, the two tricksters tag teaming the king of crops, like the two feminine, quote unquote, feminine heroes who are tricksters teaming up against the manliest crop there is in a battle royale. It's like a literary crime not to finish this story. And I need to hear how this one goes. I did like Google this to see if this was a well-known Igbo folktale that I could find online to see how it goes. I was not able to find it, unfortunately. I don't know if this is a well-known folktale or if this is something that came from the mind of Chinua Achebe. And, you know, obviously Chinua Achebe has passed at this point and cannot finish the story, but God, I want to hear how this story goes. So that's my ad. I would love to hear that folktale. It sounds fascinating.

Yawa 
That's awesome Matt, yeah, I'd love to hear it too. So I in terms of rewrite I didn't rewrite anything I Didn't know I guess I just didn't have anything to rewrite and then I do like the ending I probably wouldn't rewrite it either as curious as I am about maybe what happened to Ezinma and the family after a concubine's death where they banished From the village. How were they seen did they run to Christianity? Just you know the concept of forgiveness like I'm going to go away now and go into Christianity just because the consequences are too tough.

But I do admire the power of the ending. The scene where the district commissioner enters the obi, right? And unaware of what has just happened, just ignorant to it. And the men are sitting there because they're deep in their cultural belief system and probably having discussions about what to do, what steps are next. They know what happened. It is a moment of irony and erasure. So a concord, a man so full of conflict and contradiction becomes reduced in the commissioner's eyes, even at the very end. Maybe if I change anything, I would change that. Commissioner's Eyes to a anecdote. He says a possible, he'd probably write a possible paragraph in his book. It's brutal, you know, so I probably, I guess if I would write any, rewrite anything, I don't know how I would rewrite it, but maybe how the commissioner reacts to a Okonkwo's death and how he sees it. 

Because I think the the colonizers were real good at keeping records. They were real good record keepers and they were real good at writing stories about other people. And so I probably would rewrite. I don't know, even though I think it's powerful, I just didn't like it. 

Carla 
Well, as I kind of mentioned earlier, something that I would like to do is to add a scene, maybe a memory, perhaps that a Okonkwo has of his mother, maybe a scene about her comforting him as he cried from some small herd or him trying to comfort her from some larger herd that poverty had created. Or even her telling him, you know, one of those women's stories that Nwoye really loved and, you know, kind of providing some context for why he, you know, was so against Nwoye's love for those kinds of stories. Maybe because at some point when he was a very small boy, he used to enjoy his mother telling him stories. So I just want more of Okonkwo's mother's presence.

Matt 
Thank you, Carla. I'm realizing now that this is a big gap in my own reading of the text, which is I had never thought about his mother at all, and, the text focuses so much on the father relationship and at no point having read this text now, you know, only a few times, but having read it, you know, more than once, I have never sat there and said, well, what was going on with mom? Literally that, that thought did not cross my mind once. And so thank you for that. that, is something that I've never thought about for before, which now is like running crazy in my mind, which is like, Matt, why didn't you ask any questions about mom? And that's terrific. Thank you for pointing that out. 

One other thing I will point out in terms of an ad, rewrite, delete, is that someone actually did a bit of an ad on this, which is there is a book called The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger by Jude Okpala, who wrote a collection of stories about African womanhood. And obviously, they took the title of that book from the end of Achebe's novel, but instead of it being a colonialist discourse, it's about telling stories of African womanhood from the perspectives of African women. So someone took that title from Achebe's novel and said, I'm going to write that. So that is an interesting ad rewrite delete that is not just us talking on a podcast, but someone who actually wrote a book from that, is really, really cool and wanted to give that a shout out. I haven't read it, but it definitely sounds like something I should get my hands on and read in the future.

All right, we're almost to the end now. We are up to the movie. So imagine you are casting a movie based on this text. What are some characters that you feel you would have a good actor analog for? Who would you choose to cast them and why?

Yawa 
I'll take this one first, because I do watch a lot of Nigerian films. A lot. I know, Carla, you shocked. So I watched the good ones and the, what's that?

Carla 
Excited.

I'm I said I'm excited. I've got zero for this, so I'm really excited.

Yawa 
I watch them on Prime, they even come on Netflix, I watch them on YouTube, I've been watching them over, I just love, I like them. So I would insist on Nigerian actors for one, to play.

to get the intimate connection, I think, in language cadence and cultural nuances of the story. So for a Okonkwo, there's an actor that I admire, there's a couple of them. One is Wale Ojo. Y'all can Google him. He's a Nigerian-British style, but I see him in a lot of the films, especially the more modern films. So I think he's a man of pride, fear, and he could play that crumbling world of a Okonkwo.

He has external strength that I like and internal vulnerability. love the way he speaks, especially when he's like in Nigeria, not the British films. But I really like that. And then for Enzima, I found someone I said, Zainab Balogun. She's a Nigerian actress known for her depth and intelligence on screen. She's very beautiful because they say Enzima is very beautiful, especially as she grows and she's becoming all the suitors are after her, right? And this young lady, this actress is also someone I think could play the favorite child of a Okonkwo I think very very well 

And then Obierika I think that's how you say it a Okonkwo's thoughtful friend which we you know he's there for a Okonkwo throughout the story and there's someone called O.C. Ukeje. I think he's quietly intense, he has quiet intensity. I think he has that a lot. And a reflective presence that would ground the story and offer a beer as a moral anchor. Just is old presence again. I'm probably gonna watch a Nigerian film today, sorry, because I have time and I can't because I want some break. So I'm glad to be back watching films again. I have a couple lined up. And so I think these actors rooted in Nigerian identity and storytelling traditions will bring emotional authenticity to the screen. And so therefore it does. There's a lot of my head like to talk about like this. I had so many actors and actresses for all the roles, but those three I just made.

Matt 
Thank you, Yawa. 

Yawa 
What about you? Carla doesn't have any, Matt, do you have some?

Matt

I do, and I should not have let you go first, because now I can't follow that. Because I really don't, I really haven't seen much Nollywood at all. I certainly do watch films by African filmmakers, but they tend to be the ones that achieve a higher degree of international success. I am a bit of a film snob and so I, you know, I kind of tend to not watch a lot of the more, the things that are actually more popular that more people are watching. I tend to really enjoy avant-garde cinema. And so mine is more Hollywood than Nollywood for sure. 

So I came up with two. I came up with one that's definitely not going to work and then one that I actually could see being made. So the first one is a courtroom drama and it's Nine Angry Egwugwu. And it's so instead of 12 angry men, it's the nine masquerades are, know, since they deliver justice in the village, they could be the jurors and it could be a case in which they don't agree. So you have these nine masquerades all like sequestered in a room trying to figure out who is guilty and who is not guilty.

I think the reason that it won't work unless you get non-famous actors is that like actors do not want to wear masks and will not wear masks for the entirety of a film. So I think if you were actually to cast famous people in those roles, you wouldn't be able to get anyone because they need their face to be showing because they're big Hollywood actors and they won't agree to do that. 

So what I'm actually going with is I love horror movies. And so I'm going with a horror movie called The Evil Forest. And so The Evil Forest, I decided also that anyone I'm going to cast in this has to have been in a horror movie or a horror adjacent movie in order for me to cast them. 

So obviously directing it, I have Jordan Peele. That to me is a no brainer. For Okonkwo, I have Tony Todd who was the Candyman. He's in the most recent Final Destination film. He's been in a ton of horror movies. Young Tony Todd is kind of a skinny guy, but he's really tall. And then as he gets older, he actually gets like really jacked. So he could be both young and old Okonkwo, both the kind of young skinnier version and the bigger, more physically imposing version. 

For his wise friend, Obierika, I have Dwayne Jones, who was in the original zombie movie, Night of the Living Dead. So he is an OG horror star. So I'd like him to be in there. For the twin roles of Cielo and Agbala, I've got Pam Grier. For Unoka, I have LL Cool J, who is in that shark movie. He was in a horror movie. Was it Deep Blue Sea, I think? I think that was it.

For Ekwefi, I have Aliyah, who is no longer with us, but I'm allowing myself to cast some actors and actresses who are no longer with us. So Aliyah, bringing her back. For Ojiugo, I have Naomi Harris, who was most famously in 28 Days Later, the zombie film. For Amalinze The Cat, I have Ving Rhames, see him get into a wrestling match. 

And then I did cast the two white missionaries for Mr. Brown, David Lynch, who recently left us, again, RIP. He would definitely be in my film. And then for Mr. Smith, I would really love to see a crazy Willem Dafoe performance, in terms of the crazy missionary who gets everyone like, who starts off all of the drama that leads to the dramatic conclusion of the film. So, that's my horror movie casting. That's what I'm going with.

Carla
That is really incredible, Matt. And I may disagree with you. I kind of like the idea, your first idea as well. We have a lot of famous people who do animated films. So why wouldn't they, you know, jump at the opportunity to be angry masquerades, you know? Or it could be an an animated film as well but I actually like both of these ideas. That's pretty amazing.

Matt 
That's a good point. I had not considered voice acting, actually. You're right. Maybe it does work. Damn.

Yawa 
Animated, animated sounds awesome.

Carla 
Yes!

Yawa 
And you can bring people back. You can bring people back and you can make them younger. I watched a whole film with one guy playing two roles in the whole film. So you can do all kinds of magical things in film today. can break you. 

Matt 
Was that Sinners, the vampire movie? 

Yawa

Sinners, yes!

Matt

Sinners was so good.

Yawa

So, All things are possible.

Matt
So, I'm gonna do Sinners in a future podcast actually. So we're gonna read, first we're gonna read some classic vampire texts like Dracula, and then we're gonna end up actually doing Sinners as a companion piece to that. So I definitely wanna get that on here. Sinners was so much fun. I really enjoyed it.

Carla 
One of the texts that I used in my college African world history course is Louise White's Speaking with Vampires. It's a, now I'm looking around for it and I'm getting ready to move. So I don't have my books on my shelf so that I can can look at the full title. But it's about the concept of vampires during colonial Eastern Africa. Colonial period in Eastern Africa. It's a pretty amazing text. 

Matt
I do love that one, actually. I really enjoyed it. I think it's a difficult read, and I think some of her theorizing can be difficult to enter into, especially at the undergrad level. I think I would not assign it with most high school students unless I excerpted some things. But I actually do like that text. We read it in grad school. A lot of my colleagues did not like it as much as I did. And maybe that is because I've always been such a horror head and so interested in vampires and the occult and things like that, that I was kind of predisposed to be fascinated by this text. But a lot of my colleagues didn't love it as much and they felt like it didn't accomplish what they wanted it to accomplish. It's definitely a text that I enjoy and think is interesting and has some things to say.

Yawa 
I just want to ask one question because you brought something up to my mind. But I just want to ask you both on teaching Things Fall Apart grade level, would you start, would you teach it to 10th graders or would you wait till they get to seminar or 11th or 12th? Because we were teaching it to 10th graders and I'm not sure if it's productive for whatever. What do you think?

Carla 
As I mentioned, I did both. Yes, this semester, this past semester, I taught it to 10th graders. Previously, I taught it to year one students. And it was the context and the text that I taught around it that made the difference, not Things Fall Apart itself.

Yawa 
Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. Thank you for that. Matt, what about you?

Matt
would say both. It makes a lot of sense in a world history class. I do think that will then shade the students reading of the book to look for those historical aspects of it and a bit of a more just kind of primer on what was colonialism, what were African societies like. So that you're to end up with a more, I think, anthropological reading of it from the 10th grade kind of world history or world literature incorporation. And then I think from a reading in seminar, think that's where you can tease out, I think, more of the kind of nuance and the humanistic aspects of the text and things like that. 

But I certainly think it could be useful in either place. I think it depends on what you want to get out of the text and the level at which you want students to be able to engage with it. But certainly either is good. And again, if there's anything that this podcast suggests is that great texts should be reread many times, right? And you would hope, you know, that something like this is something that students would come back to on their own as they become lifelong readers. They would revisit some of these texts periodically and see what's changed as they read it again.

Yawa 
Thank you for that. I appreciate it.

Matt 
And that brings us to our final prompt, the seminar sequence. Bard's seminar has been conceived of as a sequence of texts that help to guide students on an intellectual journey. What is your sequence with this text and why? I'll start on this one. So I have two. So the first one is The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola. Another Nigerian novel that preceded Things Fall Apart, but did not have the same kind of impact as Things Fall Apart did and was a lot more controversial, particularly because it is a folktale, it is a kind of fairy tale, it is magical realism, and Tutuola uses very non-standard English, uses almost a kind of pigdin or, I don't know what the correct term is, but he's using English that you would not find in a kind of standard textbook. And so for a lot of folks, they were worried that if this was the first African novel people in the West read, they would think this is how all Africans write and speak. They can't grasp proper grammatically correct English. They speak in this kind of pidgin or creolized language.

And so the Palm Wine Drinkard was not able to have that kind of same reception as things fall apart in which Achebe is writing in a much more virtuosic kind of English and in which he's doing a lot of other things which demonstrates that, know, unquote, Africans are capable of writing at that level of English. Today, you know, we're well past that point and we know that people can write in any number of different kinds of English. And, any serious person has to admit that there have been incredibly talented writers from Africa and writers no longer need to prove on behalf of Africans that they can write and speak and things like this. So I think it's always a good time to return to the Palm Wine Drinkard. I think it's a wonderful, wonderful novel. I think it has incredible things to say about colonialism as well. And it's just a it's a phantasmagoria that really speaks to me and the things that I like.

The other text I would pair it with, a non-African text, is one of my favorites, which is Don Quixote. And so in Don Quixote, you have another protagonist who is a man who is lamenting times that have passed him by. And he goes out there into the world to seek out his own version of a kind of masculine life that he feels, you know, used to be available to him and now is gone. And so he goes out and seeks to become a knight errant. And it is another text which is in a certain way tragic, but which intersperses that tragedy with a lot of comedy and a lot of humanism and a lot of commentary on the human experience in life. And so, I think Don Quixote is a really cool companion text with Things Fall Apart.

Carla
I have a sequence, I have two different sequences. The first one is kind of through my Afrofuturist lens. so before possibly Samuel Delaney short story, The Tale of Gorgic from his, The Tales of Navarion, which is set in a fantastical landscape that could be imagined as some medieval empire on the African continent. The protagonist is a young man who early in the story is enslaved in a mine. And then through a mix of good fortune and acquired skill, he becomes a military leader and a black market merchant. And when I teach that short story for my first prompt for students to write a response journal. I used the last line of the short story and so Samuel Delaney wrote, "but for the civilization in which he lived, this dark giant soldier and adventurer with desires we've not yet named in dreams we've hardly mentioned, who could speak equally of and to barbarian tavern maids and high court ladies, flogged slaves lost in the cities, and provincial nobles at ease on their country's estates. He was a civilized man." 

And so we start we start talking about what it means to be civilized with that after reading that text. So it seems that next good step would be Things Fall Apart. And then afterwards, I would have Nnedi Okorafor his Binti trilogy. And in both of these, cases, these scenarios, I want a text, the second text to be a, or the after text, to be something about, by and about women, you know, to kind of have a contrast in an African woman writer and protagonist in particular. So, we've got Binti for the Afrofuturist lens. 

And then through the historical lens, as I did and talked about earlier, I would start with at least part of Wretched of the Earth. And then afterwards, Zenzele, A Letter for My Daughter by  J. Nozipo Maraire which is written by woman about women's lives in Rhodesia on the cusp of liberation, women who participated in the liberation movement, and then women's lives in post-colonial Zimbabwe. One of the questions that the narrator asks her daughters in Zele is, what does it mean to be an African woman? And so, I used this text in my African world history class in one of the prompts. I couldn't figure out what I wanted my prompt to be. first I thought just having the students to substitute what does it mean to be an African man or an African non-gender conforming person. And then I thought, well, maybe I should ask people to talk about what it means to be someone of a gender or a non-gender conforming person that's different from their own understanding, their own identity. So in the course, I asked them to write, to do the easier one, to talk about what it meant to be them or whatever their identity was. But if I really want to challenge them, it would be great to ask them to talk about what it means to be someone in an identity other than their own. I haven't done that, but I love the question. So that's my sequence.

Yawa 
Yeah, I love that question as well. that sequence sounds, both of your sequences sound powerful. I'm like, I need to read more. But I think it's because of my discipline. I'm not, I'm going to say, going back to or moving forward into many of the readings that I could probably do or be engaged in. 

But in terms of the text, Things Fall Apart, I told you about Wangarĩ Maathai and Unbowed: A Memoir because they're parallel in so many ways. But you see this life of Wangarĩ Maathai as a female, as a woman, and all the challenges that she has to overcome as being female in a Kenyan society, even engaged in Christianity coming to the U.S. being educated. Her name is changed and she goes back and has this awakening to really then begin to embrace her name again. So I probably would continue to do that, but I want to consider also Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, because that was one of my favorite books. I read that book, I think, in one or two days. don't know. Because it was an easy read for me. Many of the texts are not so easy, and maybe because of the lens of my exposure or lack thereof. because these three texts, they have themes of family, tradition, gender, spirituality, identity, resistance, and societal change and you can really see it in all of the texts how society changed politically, socially, culturally, generationally and the narrative angles and also each of how they write very different one from the other. You know, Chinua Achebe's book is again not simple, complex and using proverbs, adages and using this whole English language. Then Wangarĩ Maathai is just writing the memoir beautifully. And then here comes Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, which I, you know, gives it a modern flair, right? Still some of the things we see, nuances we see and things fall apart. Masculinity, patriarchal societies, education. And so, and then the legacy of colonialism and tensions between tradition and personal freedom. And then the impact of education and activism like not on just the older people, but on younger people's lives. So I would do that and then thinking about this whole thing about how Adichie calls it "the single story," maybe even pair it up with that whole started out with that, how does, how is Africa viewed, how diverse it is within the customs and traditions. But those are maybe the three, the two that really comes to mind for me in pairing with Things Fall Apart.

In terms of a seminar sequence. think that would be dream for me. And so I would love that. I would beg to teach a seminar sequence class. I think I'm teaching Africa and world history this coming semester. So it's been a while. So when I hear you, Carter, talk about the text, some of the texts you use, I'm like, wow. You know, I'm so impressed. And so both of you. And so I've been writing things down like the palm wine. Is it drunkard? Is that what it is, Matt? 

Matt (01:46:33.029)
So it's Drinkard, which again is a non-grammatically correct version of drunkard, right? I think we would probably say drunkard, but it's drinkard in the text because again, that is a part, yeah, that is a part of the way that the author is playing with and doing interesting things with the English language, right? Again, not because the author doesn't know that the word is drunkard, but because he's playing with it in a certain way that is transformative and interesting.

But let me not, that's it. I'll start talking about that text now and then we'll never get off. So thank you so much. Thank you, Yawa. Thank you, Carla. This has been really wonderful. I really appreciate this opportunity to speak with you about this incredible, incredible text. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Yawa 
It's been an honor. Thank you for having me. I'm just like, wow, I'm going to talk about Chinua and Achebe with two great people that I admire. I admire both of you. And so it's just an honor. And I appreciate this opportunity. I'm like, I'm not worthy. I don't know the text, Chinua Achebe. So it's really an honor to be here, all honesty.

Carla
I completely agree, thank you so much for the invitation, Matt. This has been so much fun and amazing and like a second course for me. again, it's like, boy, now I have to read it again. Which is fantastic.