The Proverb of “Tortoise and the Birds”in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

曾納 （四川西華師范大學外國語學院 637009）

The Proverb of “Tortoise and the Birds”in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

曾納 （四川西華師范大學外國語學院 637009）

Abstract:Chinua Achebe employs a host of narrative proverbs in his novel Things Fall Apart which has become the distinctive quality of the fiction.This paper seeks to analyze the proverb of “Tortoise and the birds” in the hope of unfolding the deep-layer cause of the tragedy of the hero.

Key Words:Chinua Achebe; Things Fall Apart; proverb

In terms of proverbs, Chinua Achebe, the foremost African novelist, has once said: “They are like dormant seeds lying in the dry-season earth, waiting for the rain.In Igbo they serve two important ends.They enable the speaker to give universal status to a special and particular incident and they are used to soften the harshness of words and make them more palatable” （qtd.in Shelton 86）.

In Things Fall Apart （1958）, his first novel, Achebe employs a host of narrative proverbs which has become the distinctive quality of the fiction.According to Polycarp Ikuenobe, “[t]raditional African societies are founded on, and sustained by, the idea of communally shared beliefs, practices, and values” （118）.Proverbs,as one form of the “communally shared” speech, are inevitably able to reveal the cultural attitudes and the system of values of the society in which they exist.Thus, Achebe’s development and use of proverbs in his novel Things Fall Apart can never be seen as the ends in themselves, rather, they support plot, characterization and theme.

The action of the story could be located in the 1880s and the hero is Okonkwo Unoka, a powerful wrestler and warrior of the Umuofia clan who spends his life reacting to this family shame by over-asserting his manhood.Through hard work and perseverance, as well as rigid conformity to traditional values, Okonkwo acquires wealth, wives, and status; but the white men,colonialists and missionaries, come and conditions change.Too infiexible to adapt to these different situations, Okonkwo commits suicide.In developing the story line, the author employs many a narrative proverb, or the story-within-the-story which emphasizes the several aspects of Okonkwo’s problem and behavior and most importantly, each narrative proverb is a vital tributary to the main flow of the narrative.

There are a minimum of 29 proverbs in the novel（Shelton 87）, of which 9 are narrative proverbs.One of the narrative proverbs, which is about the story of a tortoise and a flock of birds, seems most interesting for it is the fullest text of a traditional folktale in Things Fall Apart.However, it looks the most irrelevant to the novel.What we are going to do is to unearth the function of the story and how it helps to build the narrative of the whole text.

The proverb goes like this: Birds are invited to a feast in the sky and Tortoise decides to join the birds, but he cannot fly.So he borrows feathers from the birds.Then he hatches a scheme: each guest to have a new name to party.Every bird takes a new name and Tortoise assumes the name “All-of-You”.In the party,Sky hosts present food to “All-of-You,” meaning the birds.However, Tortoise （“All-of-You”） eats the best food and meat which irritates the birds and they strip him of their feathers.Without any choice, Tortoise decides to risk a free fall from the sky and he sends Parrot to request wife to mass “all the soft things”,but Parrot spitefully asks her to bring out “all the hard things”.Tortoise then falls on hard things and his shell is broken up.Later medicine man patches up the shell.That is why Tortoise’s shell is not smooth.

This story is told by a mother （Ekwefi） to Ezinma her only child, which explains why tortoise shell is rough, hard, and uneven, but interesting though this incidental information may be, it is not the main reason why this elaborate tale is included as a subtext.The more substantial reason is moral; it dramatizes the evil of extreme egocentrism.As a typical trickster tale,“Tortoise and the Birds” serves numerous purposes in the novel.

The hero is an individualist whose relationship to his community has many points of ambivalence.Okonkwo shares the tendency with Tortoise towards an overwhelming sense of the ego which brings him into conflict with the group.The fate of Tortoise the egoist prefigures Okonkwo’s fall in Things Fall Apart.It is this propensity to be individualistic that Tortoise shares with the hero of Things Fall Apart and that makes the tale in relation to the novel.Okonkwo offends his society numerous times and is seriously punished on every occasion.Just as Tortoise falls to pieces at the end of the folktale, Okonkwo Unoka commits suicide in his moment of defeat.

Okonkwo Unoka’s overwhelming weakness is his arrogance, including his overassertiveness of individual passions and obsessions.And he is capable and an achiever, but he cannot be “All-of-You,” he cannot fill the place of the Umuofia clan.He cannot impose his will on it.His glory is secure and well-based in those actions in which he is in full accord with the will of the group, but when his actions are at odds with the will of the group, he risks isolation and ultimate defeat.This is particularly the case in the final episode of Okonkwo’s tragic life.While the clan is deeply involved in the search for a fitting response to the threat of imperialism hanging over it, Okonkwo kills a court-messenger, hoping by so doing to wage a war.But the clan has not come to a decision and so Okonkwo is isolated and true to his character decides on suicidethereby cutting himself off further from his people.

The tale of “Tortoise and the Birds” should clarify the dilemma of why the champion of tradition should be abandoned by the very people he is trying to save.Such a question suggests that the people of Umuofia are careless of their deeper interests by not standing by their bold leader at a critical point.On the other hand,a different set of questions could be posed, such as:How much of Okonkwo’s actions stem from inner personal drives and how much from communal consensus? How much from the impulse to set up Okonkwo Unoka, to restore his place in the clan after his exile and to reestablish his interrupted ambition to become “one of the lords of the clan”? The story of “Tortoise and the Birds” helps to explain the apparent dilemma.When Okonkwo assumes the role of “All-of-You,” he alienates himself from a world he so passionately attempts to sustain.

Leopold Sedar Senghor, the dean of African letters in French-speaking Africa, comments as follows in his preface to Birago Diop’s New Tales of Amadou Koumba:

The traditional African narrative is woven out of everyday events.In this it is a question neither of anecdotes nor of things taken from life.All the events become images, and so acquire paradigmatic value and point beyond the moment.（qtd.in Jahn 211）

Thus, it is safe to say that Achebe’s narrative proverb, or the story-within-the-story stresses the plot and problems of the novel and lead realism to the dialogue.Because his main audience is the European reader and the African who is literate in English,Achebe’s employment of proverb-laden speech thus serves his need to communicate, not to fellow Igbo, but to outsiders who do not know Igbo culture or language.

Works Cited

[1]Achebe, Chinua.Things Fall Apart.London: Heinemann, 1958.

[2]Ikuenobe, Polycarp.“The Idea of Personhood in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.” Philosophia Africana 9.2 （2006）: 117-31.

[3]Jahn, Janheinz.Muntu: The New African Culture.New York: Grove Press, 1961.

[4]Shelton, Austin J.“The ‘Palm-oil’ of Language: Proverbs in Chinua Achebe’s Novels.” Modern Language Quarterly 30.1 （1969）: 89-111.