“The Second Coming” and its influence on Things Fall Apart

In his 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe includes an Epigraph of the poem, “The Second Coming,” written by William Butler Yeats to further drive in the purpose of his novel: Humanize non-western cultures and explain the horrors of Imperialism that are foreign in the eyes of the western world to justify the atrocities committed against these innocent people. Achebe describes the cultural practices and the hidden failures of the Ibo tribe that mirror practices of western culture in order to normalize their existence in the complex network of the world. He outlines the extravagant wedding ceremonies and the prices often paid for marriage, a practice that happens in many wealthy families and monarchies praised by members of western civilization. He also includes the extreme misogyny and accepted abuse that is featured in both Ibo culture and 50s American culture as well as the patriarchal gender roles pushed by both western and Ibo culture by Okonkwo’s resentment of Ezinma’s female sex and her personality of strength and toughness unusual to the assigned female gender role. He also speaks about fables of the Ibo tribe such as the story of the tortoise that took advantage of the birds and felt the consequences of his actions in order to show the history of spoken mythology to the reader.

For context, “The Second Coming,” was published in 1919 from the country Yeats currently resided: Ireland. Yeats wrote the poem, depicting current affairs in Europe as the Rapture, the return of Jesus Christ in order to bring salvation to his believers and damnation to his doubters in the form of anarchy and destruction. Upon the creation of the poem, Europe was the center of major calamity. World War I destroyed the entire landscape and virtually wiped out an entire generation of men, the Influenza pandemic caused those who did not die in the war effort to die of disease, and Ireland was in the midst of a war of independence. Everything in Yeats’s life was unsure and it was terrifying. This contextual analysis enables us to understand the fearful tone Yeats injects into the speaker of the poem, and the feeling of impending doom via the Rapture he puts in his words.

The idea of referencing this poem also influences the way we comprehend the plot of the novel. The title, Things Fall Apart, is a reference to the line “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…,” which is mirrored the structure of the novel itself. The chapters in the novel begin with a reasonable, possibly extensive length when life is mundane and as it had always been for the Ibo tribe. However, as more bad things start to happen, the chapters shorten in length and change more frequently. The division of the plot development of the novel mirrors the level of chaos that ensues as the story continues. As things fall apart, and the center cannot hold, it breaks down into smaller fragments, each progressively getting shorter, yet more painful to read. The final, and shortest chapter of the novel depicts the abrupt culmination of Okonkwo’s life and, symbolically, the abrupt culmination of the Ibo tribe. As soon as Okonkwo’s spirit is crushed, the mission is complete, and the imperialists have defeated any strength and will to resist. While this is the end of the novel, like “The Second Coming,” it is the beginning of a horrible series of events in which the people are enslaved and suppressed for the economic gain of Europeans. “The Second Coming” ends with the mention of Bethlehem, a city notorious for the birth of Jesus Christ, symbolizing a beginning. However, “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born” references the birth of something truly sinister unto the world. This is mirrored in Things Fall Apart as the slow injection of western Imperialism into Ibo culture. Once the Injection is complete, after Okonkwo takes in his own life, the poison that is European Imperialism infects the African continent and irreparably damages it. The novel does not cover the series of events after Okonkwo’s death, similarly as “The second Coming” ends with the birth of the beast in Bethlehem, and does not cover the calamity is foreshadowed through the entire poem. However, both the novel and the poem describe the slow rise of power and the culminating events of peace in their respective timelines.

In Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” he depicts the chaos as a beast, that is, “moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.” Yeats’s anthropomorphism of the chaos and destruction of the world gives us a more intimate understanding of its progression, describing its movement as slow, and how it shadows the earth. Since Achebe included the epigraph of the poem in his novel, it is obvious that the entire poem would apply to the novel. Achebe uses Yeats’s anthropomorphism of chaos to connect the human destruction of the African continent in the name of civility in his novel to the chaos and destruction of the world mentioned in the poem. The entry of the British Missionaries was methodically planned in order to weaken the infrastructure of the Ibo tribe, and prevent any resistance when British government took over. The Imperialism was slow in order to avoid battling in the places it was invading. The British knew that they would not be able to fight violent wars of suppression in their spheres of influence, so they had to weaken the loyalty of members to the tribe before they implemented their regimes. Achebe wrote this piece of history into his novel by writing about Nwoye’s conversion to Christianity. While many people discuss his conversion as a piece of human nature to question their beliefs, the main purpose of writing this into the novel is to demonstrate the heinous actions of European Imperialism and clarify the story of how it occurred. Imperialism was not a story of military excellence and flex of dominance on the part of Europeans. It was an act of cowardice and pure evil that left the entire African continent with a partially industrialized society only used by the Europeans to extract wealth from each country for the time being with catastrophic effects on these countries’ function. Nwoye’s act of betrayal from his father, for whatever underlying reasons it may have been, was injected into the story in order to show the effectiveness of the slow-burn takeover of Imperialism. Many people believe Imperialism to be this military forceful takeover, but the truth is that Europeans slowly weakened the sense of Identity in these nations in order to make a takeover much easier.

The plot of Things Fall Apart begins with a simple way of life to achieve its purpose of humanizing cultures that are not represented in main stream media of the Western World. Since many of these cultures are not well understood, they are often made out to be uncivilized and justified cases of conquest. Achebe’s novel tackles those assumptions about foreign cultures by displaying common practices in order to familiarize people with the practices of cultures many of his audience may not have previously understood. Consequentially, this helps us humanize this culture and connect with the characters. Achebe uses his connections and epigraph to Yeats’s “The Second Coming” in order to emphasize the true, cowardly nature of Imperialism.