A Postcolonial study of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: Foregrounding Elements of Hybridity

The aim of this article is a postcolonial study of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) regarding Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial concept of hybridity. The novel portrays the hybrid nature of colonial encounter between African and European culture and its effects. Remarkably, European discourse works through the medium of the binaries to maintain the dichotomies of self/other and colonizer/colonized. Furthermore, Bhabha as a great postcolonial thinker shatters the purity of cultures and the supremacy of one over the other to highlight cultural hybridity and cultural difference. Accordingly, the researcher attempts to analyze the different cultural elements of hybridity such as language and religion in Igbo society as well as Achebe’s own writing style. It is mainly discussed how the European missionaries by imposing their culture, language and religion over the Africans try to marginalize and destroy the indigenous people’s traditions. In this research, Bhabha’s idea of third space is shown through the use of Pidgin English and also the process of hybridization is exemplified in the method of representation changing with the coming of Europeans from narrative to satire: each representative of a culture. It indicates that the villagers cannot escape the pervasiveness of colonialists’ satiric reductive discourse and finally the Umofians with all their complexity and integrity are falling down. Moreover, Achebe believes that cultures affect each other. Consequently, by juxtaposing the incompatible cultures of Europe and Africa, Achebe emphasizes cultural hybridization. Although Europeans believe that oral cultures are unable to be developed because they lack the proper tool, namely literacy, Achebe by imbuing the European literary form with the rhythms of African traditional life makes his own way. He uses hybridity in his choice of European art form of novel and skillfully decorates it with African oral traditions. Achebe by using the narrative history of Okonkow, the protagonist, and subsequently the Igbo attempts to compare a society before and during the coming of Europeans and represents how they fall apart. In addition, Achebe has used the balanced treatment in giving both the strengths and defects of African as well as European value system. In the end, what is significant is that no culture can exist without the presence of the other. Similarly, both Achebe and Bhabha maintain the hybridized cultural encounter between the colonizer and colonized which is considered as strength in most postcolonial writings

کلیدواژه ها:

Africa ، hybridity ، language ، satire ، Bhabha