Read/reading: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.
Okay, so Perks doesn’t quite qualify as “silly”, but it’s a bit lighter reading.
Things Fall Apart wasn’t quite what I was expecting. On the one hand, there’s a clear winner by the end (white people, having fun), but the book focuses more on the journey to that point. It seems more like a clash of cultures than an express judgement on colonialism, and that came as something of a surprise; having heard this exalted as the first true postcolonial text, that it contained some degree of nuance was refreshing to see.
I never really studied postcolonialism over the course of my degree, so I’m necessarily ignorant on the subject, and therefore can’t judge how true-to-life this book is. There are some very ugly (I was going to say primitive, but that would condescend) attitudes towards women on the side of the black protagonist and his village, and an almost casual attitude towards violence - I won’t spoil the explicit details, but a number of deaths occur throughout this novel, and the vast majority are committed by Nigerians against Nigerians.
It suspends judgement, though, and maybe that’s what the postcolonial literary movement needed - not something that took an explicit position, but one that just laid out a surrogate for the colonisation of Nigeria in bare terms. In that respect, it’s impressive. And wonderfully written, but that almost feels like an afterthought.
The idiosyncracies of teenagers are going to seem very superfluous after reading this.
