Most Meaningful Takeaway

I think the most meaningful takeaway in my group would be when we discussed the question, “How do you think  Achebe maintains a cultural voice?

Before hand, we discussed a wide array of questions that  expressed how empowering literature is and how it can be utlized to represent your culture and influence and or inform people about the story written in that text. However this question asks how does Achebe, although writing a very balanced novel about the colonization of Africa by the missionaries in english, still maintains a cultural voice. In relation to that, my group gave many answers such as how Achebe still uses proverbs, and folktales through out the book. The author describes and contextualisez these folktales and proverbs for the reader to acknowledge and understand this aspect of a culture. Folktales and proverbs are specified to one culture because it is almost like Jargon. Only your community understands this and have word connotations linked to them. These words and phrases are used to depict how the Ibo people view their world. Therefore Achebe still invoked a variety of the african culture, illustrating how he grew up within an African environment and expresses the beauty within a culture that only Africans percieved before this novel. Also, we discussed the utilization of symbols within things fall apart.

 The mother of Spirits which is what the egwugwu worship. The Mother of spirits is a representation of the clan of Umofia, and the climactic seen where the egwugwu is unmasked, “she mourned the death of her son as if a great terror was coming.” The egwugwu was part of our discussion, in which they are a symbol to serve culture and independence as a whole. This brings me to religion. Achebe maintains a cultural voice because throughout the novel, the egwugwu serves as repected judges of Umofia and they do rituals and perform as spirits of the Umofia people’s ancestors which is what Umofia clan worships

Lastly, the Achebe maintains a cultural voice by using the essence of time. When we read the book “thing’s fall apart,” we recognised that Achebe uses to express the culture of Africa through flashbacks frequently throughout the novel. Perhaps this is a form of literary writing used by Achebe to convey africans in a cultural voice by their time and the values of it as well. Achebe grounds the book in nature  and is very simple. By simple, it was discussed amognst us that many of these actions that the African people or missionaries commit are left to be decided by the reader themselves. He laregly emposes of emotions, which perhaps could mean that Achebe expresses his writing soley based on the perspective of Igbo people and that is how he maintains a cultural voice.