Imagine if your parents did not approve of the person that you are in love with and you want to marry and kicked you out of the house because of it. Well that is what happens in the short story “Marriage is a Private Affair” by Chinua Achebe. In the short story, Achebe describes how the Igbo tribe’s tradition of arranged marriage affected one family. His story is supported by another article by Dr. Michael Egbosiuba and how the Igbo’s marriage tradition has changed with modern times.
The author of “Marriage is a Private Affair,” Chinua Achebe, was born in Ogidi, Nigeria, on November 16, 1930. He had five other siblings and was raised Christian by his parents Isaiah Okafor Achebe and Janet Achebe. (Clark) His father made him go to an English speaking school and learn the English language. His father also built the Anglican church in Ogidi. (Clark) When Achebe was younger his mother told him old African stories about the Igbo culture. As he got older, Achebe went to college in Umuahia to become a doctor. (Clark) He soon changed to major in liberal arts because he was drawn to learning about Nigeria's history. He grew in his writing and became very skilled in it. He also liked to learn and write about how Igbo traditions affected the life of a regular human being. Achebe was paralyzed from the waist down from a car accident and unfortunately died in 2013.99+ (Clark)
One of Achebe's most famous writing is the short story “Marriage is a Private Affair.” This story is based on the marriage rights of two ethnic groups in West Africa. It starts off with two people who are in love and are planning to get married. One, Nnaemeka, is from the Ibo tribe and Nene the bride to be is not. Nene wants Nnaekmeka to tell his father that they ...
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Works Cited
Achebe, Chinua. “Marriage Is a Private Affair.” World Literature. By Susan Wittig Albert. Rev. ed. Austin [Tex.]: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1998. 1343-50. Print.
Clark, Emily. “Achebe, Chinua.” Bloom’s Literature. Facts on File, 2014. Web. 10 Apr. 2014. .
Egbosiuba, Michael. “Traditional Marriage of Igboland.” All Things Nigeria. N.p., 2011. Web. 23 Apr. 2014. .
Set in Africa in the 1890s, Chinua Achebe's ‘Things Fall Apart’ is about the tragedy of Okonkwo during the time Christian missionaries arrived and polluted the culture and traditions of many African tribes. Okonkwo is a self-made man who values culture, tradition, and, above all else, masculinity. Okonkwo’s attachment to the Igbo culture and tradition, and his own extreme emphasis on manliness, is the cause of his fall from grace and eventual death.
Achebe’s whisper to feminine strengths in his novel was influenced by his intended 1950’s Western audience. Cobham suggests, as cited by Krishnan (2012), that “Achebe chooses representations of Igbo society that are most easily digested by a Western audience” (p.8). In the 1950’s with the end of World War II and men returning home, women’s value was regarded mainly as domestic housewives and mothers. Catalano (2002) illustrates the atmosphere in 1950’s United States explaining, “the Cold War placed an added emphasis on family unity as a defense against communism, making the role of women as wives and mothers crucial to the preservation of the United States and its democratic ideals” and submits, many “identify the 1950s as the pinnacle of gender inequality” (p45). For the benefit of his audience, the stock feminine characters Achebe made obvious mimicked that of 1950’s United States: the inferior female, domesticate...
Chinua Achebe?s Things Fall Apart is a narrative story that follows the life of an African man called Okonkwo. The setting of the book is in eastern Nigeria, on the eve of British colonialism in Africa. The novel illustrates Okonkwo?s struggles, triumphs, and his eventual downfall, all of which basically coincide with the Igbo?s society?s struggle with the Christian religion and British government. In this essay I will give a biographical account of Okonwo, which will serve to help understand that social, political, and economic institutions of the Igbos.
In this paper I am writing about marriage and infidelity in modern life and the books we have read in class. Marriage is a mutual bond in which a man and a woman decide to be with each other until they die. Infidelity is basically when the man or woman in a relationship cheat on the other person, without them knowing.
Mahin, Michael J. The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper: "An Intertextual Comparison of the "Conventional" Connotations of Marriage and Propriety." Domestic Goddesses (1999). Web. 29 June 2015.
Nnoromele, Patrick C.. “The Plight of a Hero in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.” Chinua Achebe's
At some point in our life’s we come across our parents judgments when we get married to a certain someone we chose or simply choosing to live a different life than what we were raised in. In the two short stories “Everyday use” and “Marriage is a private affair” we come across those similar situations where the grown child takes his or her decisions in life without their parent approval. I will compare and contrast those two short stories and show you the similarities between them.
Achebe writes Things Fall Apart to revise the history that has been misplaced. He writes to the European and Western culture. This fact is evident because the book is written in English and it shows us the side of the African culture we wouldn’t normally see. Achebe is constantly ...
Three different Western marriage customs have influenced the characters in the story "Marriage is a Private Affair" by Chinua Achebe. It is about a Nnaemeke and Nene. Nnaemeke was an Igbo but Nene was from a different part of the country. They fell in love and Nnameke proposed. Then Nnaemeke got a letter from his father telling him about an arranged marriage that is being planned. Very disappointed, Nnaemeke comes home and tells his father that he will not get married to anybody, except Nene. Nnaemeke was kicked out from his father's house and wasn’t wanted there anymore. Happily married, Nnaemeke and Nene, had two sons. They wanted to see their grandpa and wouldn’t stop asking to visit him. When Nnaemeke's father read the letter about his grandsons he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about them. At last he was beginning to open his heart for his son, daughter-in-law, and his grandsons. The first custom was that the parents arranged marriages for their children. Nnaemeka's father had arranged a wedding for him with a girl from his culture. The second custom was that love was not part of the marriages. All that mattered was that she had to be a good Christian and had the potential to become a good wife. The third custom is that the woman had to be raised from the same culture. Women from other cultures were not welcomed in Igbo culture and families. These three customs had a huge affect on Nene's and Nnaemeka's lives.
In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen shows examples of how most marriages were not always for love but more as a formal agreement arranged by the two families. Marriage was seen a holy matrimony for two people but living happil...
Before the arrival of the Europeans, Achebe did a excellent job portraying how the life of Igbo was before they were forced to oppose their own culture. To support this theme, Achebe included detailed descriptions of social rituals within each family, the justice system, religious practices and consequences, preparation and indulgence of food, the marriage process and the distributing of power within the men. Achebe shows how every man has an opportunity to prove himself worthy to achieve a title on the highest level, based merely on his own efforts. One may argue that the novel was written with the main focus on the study of Okonkwo’s character and how he deteriorates, but without the theme that define the Igbo culture itself, we would never know the universe qualities of the society that shaped Okonkwo’s life. The lives of the Igbo people was no different to the actual lives of the Ibos people back in the early days of Africa. Just like in Things Fall Apart, in actual African tribes there was never a ruler. “Very interesting thing about these villages is that there is no single ruler or king that controls the population. Decisions are made by including almost everyone in the village” (AfricaGuide). Using the theme, Achebe educated readers on by mirroring real African life in her
Chinua Achebe was born in Igbo town of Ogidi, Nigeria on November 16, 1930. His parents were Isaiah Okafo Achebe and Janet Anaenechi Iloegbunam Achebe. In the Igbo tradition, storytelling is part of the Igbo community and that is how Chinua Achebe starts to show interest in literature. In 1936, Achebe enrolled in St. Philips’ Central School even though he did not want to. This school is for religious classes for young children like Chinua, but he was a special child because he only spent a week in there and he was noticed by teachers and wrote down his progress. So, he was moved to a higher level class because of his knowledge or intelligence. One particular teacher saw him as a scholar student because he has the best handwriting and reading skills in class. When he was twelve years old, Chinua moved away from his village, Ogidi, to another village called Nekede and enrolled at Central School where his older brother name John was teaching. In the village, Nekede, Chinua gained respects to a traditional art form about god’s protection by symbolic sacrifices. For example, sculptures and collage.
There are constant struggles between gender, identity, commodification, and class. Among the men and women in many African tribes that still exist today, there are divergences, which will always remain intact because of the culture and the way in which they are taught to treat each other. Chinua Achebe wrote the novel, Things Fall Apart, which is a great piece of African literature that deals with the Igbo culture, history, and the taking over of African lands by British colonization. The ongoing gender conflict is a prominent theme in Things Fall Apart, presenting the clash between men and women of the African Igbo society. Throughout history, from the beginning of time to today, women have frequently been viewed as inferior, men’s possessions whose sole purpose was to satisfy the men’s needs.
Throughout Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, struggle between change and tradition is one of the most relevant issues. The Igbo villagers, Okonkwo, and his son Nwoye all experience this problem in many different ways. The villagers have their religion defied, Okonkwo reaches his breaking point and Nwoye finally finds what he believes in. People have struggled to identify and cope with change and tradition throughout history, and will continue to struggle with this issue in the
Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born on November 16, 1930 to Isaiah Okafo and Janet Achebe in the very unstable country of Ogidi, Nigeria. He was exposed to missionaries early in his childhood because Ogidi was one of the first missionary centers established in Eastern Nigeria and his father was an evangelist. Yet it was not until he began to study at the University of Ibadan that Achebe discovered what he himself wanted to do. He had grown appalled at the "superficial picture" of Nigeria that many non-Nigerian authors were providing. That is when Achebe resolved to write something that viewed his country from "the inside".