Paper 2 Blog post

Literary works often show men and women struggling to resolve problems and not succeeding very well. To what degree do you find this to be true in Things Fall Apart?


In Things Fall Apart, there's a distinct difference between the problems men and women suffer and this is done for the purpose of showing the most possible authentic version of the Igbo community however, it can be argued that the depiction of the two genders could have been less discriminant  with the author achieving his intended purpose.

In Things Fall Apart, Achebe showed Okonkwo as a male chauvinist and the purpose of doing this was to show how he was only capable of understanding his culture on a surface level and the Igbo community had female societies which played a significant role, not necessarily as significant as the male societies but the female societies were of a respectable level and an example of this would be how the men consulted the oracle of hills before a war. Keeping that in mind, if the true purpose was to show how the community in itself didn't have the same/similar beliefs as Okonkwo, why were the men who died without a title called 'agbala?' Agbala is a term which means women so if some one with no respect, dignity or authority is referred to as a women, it automatically equates the existence of women to a deragatory level and this clearly shows that either Achebe had a sense of discrimination within himself or that he failed to portray the subtle distinctions between Okonkwo and his community in an appropriate manner. This shows that the male members of a community, such as Okonkwo, struggled to resolve these issues such as gender discrimination or even acknowledge and define it as an issue because the society as a whole didn't seem to have any objection with the term agbala being used for titleless men and from that it can be deduced that contrary to popular belief, Okonkwo was a reflection of his society to a great extent.

 Furthermore, the book didn't mention the women having any problems/issues with their gender being equated to disrespectful levels so even the people who were the centre of this problem didn't acknowledge and this leads to the struggle in resolving this problem in the Igbo community because the issue needs to be addressed first in order for it to be resolved; therefore I find it to be true that literary works, such as Things Fall Apart, often show men and women struggling to resolve a problem, in this case the treatment of different genders, and not succeeding very well simply because the problem isn't recognised by the parties involved, even the people it concerns. 

Okonkwo's tragic fall was caused by the his gender superiority. I believe that along with his tragic fall, the society's tragic fall was also caused because of the unawareness of persisting issues because as mentioned previously, the people in Igbo community weren't aware that gender inequality was an issue that existed and according to Achebe, the audience was supposed to detect this problem mainly within Okonkwo and not the society but there were instances which indirectly showed that Okonkwo wasn't the only with that flaw. Achebe only portrayed some aspects of the society so if the community was blind to such a blatant issue such as gender discrimination, it can be concluded that they may have been unaware of the other existing issues which lead to their downfall along with the other obvious reasons such as European colonization, otherwise referred to as civilization.