Discussion #1:  Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

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Type out your answers and bring them to  class.

1.  Content Questions

· Who is Okonkwo?  Does he change through the novel?  How?
 

· What is chi?
 

· What are the main traditional foods eaten and cultivated in the story?
 

· Who/what brings change to Umuofia?
 

2. What are the consequences of imperialism in Africa, as depicted by Achebe in the novel?  (For religion, for society, for families, for the characters, for the outsiders?)  Be prepared to compare your ideas for this question to the video we will see in class.
 

3.  Poetry Interpretation:
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)and Chinua Achebe have both contributed to the common use of the phrase “Things Fall Apart” in the public sphere.  Read the poem below, written by W.B. Yeats after World War I.

The Second Coming
 TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
 The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
 Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
 The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
 The best lack all conviction, while the worst
 Are full of passionate intensity.

 Surely some revelation is at hand;
 Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
 The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
 When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
 Troubles my sight:  somewhere in sands of the desert
 A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
 A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
 Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
 Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
 The darkness drops again; but now I know
 That twenty centuries of stony sleep
 Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
 And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
 Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
 

Write down three images or symbols in this poem which can be applied to both our discussion of W.W.I and to Achebe’s book.  Why would Achebe make reference to this poem in his work?
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