AP English, Revisited

I finally finished Rebecca, a book that I first read and loved when I was eighteen years old. I've already talked about it here, so there's not much to say except that rereading it has been a disappointment. For some reason, Rebecca lost all its appeal for me: instead of seeming rich, romantic, and relatable like it did in high school, it struck me this time as long-winded, sensational, and inauthentic. (I will say, though, that I was happily surprised by the ending, which I didn't remember at all. What a final paragraph!)

This weekend, I started reading another book that I haven't revisited since high school: Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The novel is about the Igbo people, an African tribe that lived in Nigeria in the 1860s. It follows the life of Okonkwo, a rich and successful member of the Umuofia village who is riddled with fears and insecurities.

The first half of the novel describes Okonkwo's rise to eminence and relative happiness, but the second half (which I haven't started yet) tells of his fateful fall and the arrival of the first white missionaries in Nigeria.

 
In high school, I found Things Fall Apart to be flat, unsophisticated, and disturbing in its brutality. I think that I never gave the novel a chance: I assumed that we were reading it to be cheaply multicultural, and so I never looked beyond its anthropological details or its deceptively simple narrative style. I never stopped to think that my AP English teacher taught the novel alongside Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and The Canterbury Tales on purpose!

This time around, I've realized that Achebe is incredibly smart about people and their motives. Even though he's writing about a time and culture that is different from my own, I recognize his character types, their fears, desires, and ambitions. Instead of seeing Okonkwo as a wife-beating jerk with some real anger issues like I did in high school, I now see him as someone not unlike myself: I, too, have been known to work hard and act tough because I fear looking like a failure.

Anyway, I'm delighted that my opinion of this book has changed. Not only am I enjoying rereading it, but it makes me feel like I'm growing up a little. I can see a depth and sensitivity in Achebe's writing that I missed before. He reminds me of Dostoevsky and Jane Austen in that they all write honestly about the faults and foibles of real people. They understand that each individual is a mixed bag of rages and loves, fears and braveries, failures and successes.

I'm teaching Things Fall Apart in class over the next few weeks, and I'm excited to talk about it with my students. I wonder if they will love it, hate it, or feel indifferent toward it. We'll spend our class time talking about tragic heroes, Achebe's battle against racism and colonialism, and the importance of oral storytelling to the Igbo, but I'm most excited to talk about my students' experience of reading the novel. I hope that they will do a better job than I did of reading the novel for the first time; I hope that they will see the complexity behind its simple surface.