The Sacred in Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease

Chinua Achebe's works reveal the sustaining relevance of "the sacred" to his audience and invite his readers to consider the metamorphosis of sacred tropes from traditional to colonial times. The mask in Achebe's novels Things Fall Apart and No Longer At Ease is one of a number of tropes which represent the shifting of the locus of "the sacred" from community to individual. This trope, and others like it, reflects upon the way in which European influence has directed the social significance of spirituality through the process of colonization. Through the examination of these tropes, one should develop a critical awareness of the relationship between the sacred and the profane in the Modern context of No Longer At Ease, observing the once-sacred symbols which come into being as metaphors for the displacement of traditional Igbo eschatology and the contemporary presence of a widening gulf between the individual "the sacred."

The conflict between "the sacred" as traditionally defined by the Igbo and that which has been imposed by European colonial rule can best be illustrated by MirceaEliade's suggestion that "the sacred is equivalent to a power"; and, ultimately, it is the possessor of this power who is afforded the luxury of constructing reality (12). When read critically, one notes that Eliade prompts the reader to form narrow conclusions concerning what he refers to as the "archaic," "primitive" man who, much like the community represented in Things Fall Apart, is surrounded by the essence of spirituality in every aspect of daily life. More completely, Eliade states,

The man of the archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proxim...

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...sloyal to their own traditional definition of "the sacred," and, therefore, implicate each other in a web of ambiguity and corruption.

WORKS CITED

Achebe, Chinua. "The Igbo World and Its Art."Hopes and Impediments. New York: Anchor, 1990. 67.

---. No Longer At Ease. New York: Fawcett, 1990. 20, 24, 54, 55, 120, 121.

---. Things Fall Apart. Oxford: Heinemann, 1986. 65, 100.

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans.Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper and Row, 1961. 12, 13.

Monti, Franco. African Masks. Trans. Paul Hamlyn. London: Cameo, 1966. 9, 10, 47.

Rogers, Philip. "No Longer At Ease: ChinuaAchebe's 'Heart of Whiteness.' " Postcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai, Walcott. Ed. Michael Parker and Roger Starkey. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995. 54.