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Quayson, Ato
2021.
Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature.
Article contents
Achebe’s Evil Forest: Space, Violence, and Order in Things Fall Apart
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2018
Abstract
This essay argues for reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as an intervention in the political philosophical discourse on the structural relation that links violence and order. This argument is built on the evil forest as the means through which violence is instrumentalized and brought under a system of value and order in Things Fall Apart. In the figure of the Evil Forest as the center of a legal and narrative economy built on the management of violence, Achebe introduces an African paradigm of law and order that rivals Hobbes’s state of nature, challenges Hegel’s notion of African unreason, and, thus, serves as the grounds on which the order inherent to the African world can be made visible.
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- Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , April 2018 , pp. 176 - 192
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- © Cambridge University Press 2018
References
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6 Things Fall Apart is set in a region consisting in a network of clans. When I use the word clan in phrases such as “clan power,” “clan world,” “clan order,” “clan law,” and so on, I am referring to Umuofia because it is the primary setting of the novel, but I am also, more generally, referring to the clan as an abstract idea of a political community. The same goes for “Evil Forest.” Although each clan presumably has its own Evil Forest, I use the term to refer to the abstract concept of the space in the novel’s political imaginary.
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