beautiful_boater [he/him, any]

I row my boat around the lake and look good doing it.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 3rd, 2023

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  • I think that it was supposed to be mostly a commentary on the negative aspects of the norms and societal expectations, along with the shame from his father causing him to act that way out of deep insecurities. Because his fixation with honor and masculinity was so heavily focused on how he was seen in the community and not giving an opening for people to see him as weak or feminine, that is hammered home in his own internal justifications for his actions.

    Spoiler for people that haven't read it.

    Thus why when colonization started undermining his own perceived position and status in the community, and people wouldn’t follow him in resistance, he killed himself



  • I will preface this by saying that I haven’t read it again in over a decade, but I remember mostly liking it on my second read. I switched schools mid high school, so I had to read it twice for school. I didn’t like it the first time, I think I was too young and not interested in interrogating it much the first time I read it, but enjoyed on the second reading.

    As you mentioned, it did try to portray precolonization Igbo culture as Achebe understood it. And I thought that it was a brave choice to focus on a lot of flaws and issues with precolonization society, where many characters are some shade of moral grey. Though this does lead some people to think for the same reason that it downplays or softens the problems of colonization, despite that being the titular “things fall apart”, but I obviously feel that wasn’t what Achebe intended. I think that Achebe was trying to portray the motivation for the various downtrodden and Nwoye to go along with Christianity and colonization.

    I wish we had more portrayals of precolonization societies in literature.












  • Sorry to nerd out, but this reminds me of a senior grad student when I was a first year physics grad student. He was talking about the “order of magnitude” class that some professor was able to set up as a fun class for fulfilling his teaching requirements. It involved calculating or estimating order of magnitude values and putting them in units of something you can relate to (e.g. distance in terms of football fields, or your height, energy in an hour of air conditioning, etc.). In the spirit of this class, this guy used his dick for length and then came up with some other size unit to convert to for homework he had to hand in. The diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is 5 * 10^19 of this guy’s “dick units”, apparently.