In Africa, body modification is a sign of prosperity, wealth, power, and even is a way to show a person’s life story. The art form has been used for centuries and holds massive amounts of cultural significance for African tribes. The village of Umuofia in the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is no exception. The Igbo use tattooing as a way of reflecting the character and life experiences of a person in a way that is visible to the people around them. In the novel, Okonkwo was the epitome of manliness because of his athletic prowess and his position of power within the clan, emphasized on page 26 of Achebe’s work, “ “He was talking about Okonkwo, who had risen so suddenly from great poverty and misfortune to be one of the lords of
As an overly proud clan leader who is keen on keeping his family’s name pristine, Okonkwo is a man prone to rash decisions resulting in failed judgement calls and violence. Although Okonkwo’s primary concern is to avoid being like his failure of a father Unoka, actively avoiding one’s fate by exploiting power can lead to their downfall. Achebe uses Okonkwo’s anger-fuelled violence to illustrate that failing to accept your fate a leads to demise, additionally giving Achebe’s representation of violence a prophetic meaning. As Okonkwo’s acts of violence and their resulting consequences grow, he eventually loses capability of decision making, providing a crescendo toward the conclusion
He has a masculine demeanor that sets him apart from the other men in the tribe. For example, Achebe wrote, “ Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements” (Page 3). Despite conflict, Okonkwo grew up to be a noble member of society. The traits Okonkwo possesses have largely attributed to his perspective of home.
The relationship of Okonkwo to his Igbo society in Achebe's Things Fall Apart was one of pure being. Okonkwo displayed the finest examples of human qualities of what it took to be an Igbo man. Okonkwo strives to be strong, masculine, industrious, respected, and wealthy. This was Okonkwo's inner struggle to be as different from his father as possible, who he believed to have been weak, effeminate, lazy, shameful, disgraceful, and poor. Okonkwo achieves great social and financial success by embracing these ideals. He marries three wives and fathers several children. He has a farm with a barn full of yams, his obi, and a hut for each wife. He was also a well respected clansman. Nevertheless, Okonkwo would find that he was unable to adapt to the changing times as the white man came to live among his people. It was this unwillingness, stubbornness, to change from his Umuofia upbringing and his ambitious and fiery demeanor that eventually brought about Okonkwo's undoing.
The protagonists of this novel, Okonkwo, is an especially masculine leader in the Indu tribe in Nigeria. The novel starts off with some background information that Okonkwo was forced into independence at a very young age, mentally isolating him from other children and his family. Okonkwo reflects, "I began to fend for myself at an age when most people still suck at their mothers’ breasts." (Achebe, 9). Immediately this statement causes great sympathy for Okonkwo because of his parents terrible nurturing skills, as well as the lack of childhood that Okonkwo got to experience. Not only does it cause sympathetic feelings, but it also allows the reader to see Okonkwo's heroic qualities that he acquired at such a young age. Similarly to Winterson, Okonkwo put in effort to remove himself from the isolation that his family forced him into as well as making the reader feel compassionate towards
Okonkwo’s fear leads him to treat members of his family harshly, in particular his son, Nwoye. Okonkwo often wonders how he, a man of great strength and work ethic, could have had a son who was “degenerate and effeminate” (133). Okonkwo thought that, "No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man" (45).
Okonkwo, a fierce warrior, remains unchanged in his unrelenting quest to solely sustain the culture of his tribe in the time of religious war in Achebe's book, Things Fall Apart. He endures traumatic experiences of conflict from other tribes, dramatic confrontations from within his own family, and betrayal by his own tribe.
Okonkwo is a man who uses violence to prove he is a man to the igbo men and he starts to be controlled with violence. But by noticing how violence changed his relationship with his family. The great thing about “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe is that he presented Okonkwo as a hard-working man and a loving person. But most of Okonkwo success is tied to the fact that he doesn't want to turn out like his father.
Chinua Achebe challenges the social expectations of men through the protagonist Okonkwo. n the opening of the novel, readers learn of Okwonko's strength as "the older men agreed it was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights," which immediately draws readers into a world of competition. However Okwonko's status in the community was not only a result of his wrestling ability, but also because he "had risen so suddenly from great poverty and misfortune to be one of the lords of his clan." Okwonko is haunted by his father Unoka, who died a man with many debts. He grew up knowing the clan thought his father was a failure because of his soft and happy nature, and the pain fused to his spirit as "his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness," but not just any fear for "it was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw."
by Chinua Achebe, Okonkwo depicts his masculinity in many different ways, even if it hurts the people closest to him. He feels it is necessary to display his manliness so he does not end up like his father Unoka. “He had no patience with unsuccessful men. He had no patience with his father” (4). Okonkwo correlates virility with aggression and feels the only emotion he should show is anger, leaving him no way to cope with the death of his culture.
In the paragraph on page 94 near the bottom, Achebe reveals the desperation that Okonkwo has fallen into because of his banishment. Okonkwo up to this point in the book has proven to be warrior-like in his approach to all things in life, but now we see that he has lost the battle of achieving the greatness, leaving him with a broken spirit.
While in his prime, Okonkwo is one of the leaders of the Igbo community of Umuofia. Mr. Achebe describes Okonkwo right in the first line of the novel. “Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond”. (Achebe 1) Right away we learn that Okonkwo is a very well
It is important to note that Achebe was a product of both traditional Igbo society and the colonizing British culture. Therefore, the narrative is influenced by two strikingly opposed philosophies. The tragic hero, Okonkwo, may have been crafted to express, not only the Igbo philosophy of harmony, but the outsider interpretation of a seemingly paradoxical belief system. Achebe's representation of Okonkwo may symbolize the collision of these two conflicting philosophies.
Okonkwo sees his father’s gentleness as a feminine trait. He works hard to be as masculine as possible so that he will be the opposite of his father and overcome the shame his father brought to his family. Okonkwo deals with this struggle throughout the entire book, hiding the intense fear of weakness behind a masculine façade (Nnoromele 149). In order to appear masculine, he is often violent. In his desire to be judged by his own worth and not by the worth of his effeminate father, Okonkwo participates in the killing of a boy he sees as a son, even though his friends and other respected tribe members advise him against it. (Hoegberg 71). Even after the killing of Ikamefuna, Okonkwo hides his feelings of sadness because the emotions are feminine to him. He goes so far as to ask himself, “when did you become a shivering old woman” (Achebe 65), while he is inwardly grieving. The dramatic irony of the secret fears that Okonkwo has will open the reader’s eyes to how important gender identity is to him. This theme is also presented among Okonkwo’s children. He sees his oldest son, Nwoye, as feminine because he does not like to work as hard as his father (Stratton 29). When Nwoye eventually joins the Christian church, Okonkwo sees him as even more feminine. On the other hand, Okonkwo’s
In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Ibo proverbs reveal Okonkwo’s character, especially his ambition, self-reliance, and respect for elders.
The author Chinua Achebe, in the novel, “Things Fall Apart,” shares the extreme diversity between the female and male characters residing in Umofia. Okonkwo, the male leader of the tribe, carries qualities such as power and manliness, as all men are expected to. As for the females they are commonly referred as being weaker for child bearing and more responsible because they are expected to cook, clean, and take care of their children. Although the traits of the Igbo culture vary in the determination of the sexes, both genders share both positive and negative aspects of their community.