Chinua Achebe, 1960
This is the sequel to Things Fall Apart, which I taught to my sophomores half a dozen times. I found it in a Little Free Library box and thought I’d give it a look.
Things Fall Apart was a historical novel, set at the end of the nineteeth century shortly before and then shortly after British missionaries established a presence in what would become Nigeria. It focuses on Okonkwo, one of the leading figures in the Igbo community of Umuofia; physically gifted but somewhat simple-minded and emotionally stunted, he finds that in this new era of colonial rule his country no longer has a place for him. By contrast, his son Nwoye is one of the region’s first converts to Christianity, and his son, Obi, is the protagonist of No Longer at Ease. This is no longer historical fiction; it is set in the then-present of the late 1950s, with Nigeria still under British control but on the verge of independence. The novel opens with Obi on trial for accepting a bribe; in short order we flash back to a slightly younger Obi fulminating to a friend against corruption in Nigerian society, so apparently he has fallen far is a short time. Why does Obi break bad?
The answer turns out to be very simple. When I was in grad school I once went to the first session of a class that the list of course descriptions had called “American Novel: Sentiment and Sensation”, only for the professor to announce that at the last minute he had completely changed the focus of the course and that it was now called “American Novel: Money”. In prepping for the class, he had become convinced that this was the primary theme of realist literature: not romantic love, not relationships between family members, not self-actualization, but simply the anxiety over how to keep enough money coming in to be able to survive. Or if survival is no longer a concern, then to be able to keep living in the manner to which one has become accustomed. It makes sense that this would be the primary theme of realist literature because for most people it is the primary theme of real life. Certainly it is the primary theme of Obi’s life. As a youngster, he is at the top of his class, which brings him to the attention of an organization called the Umuofia Progressive Union. Its goal is to get as many men from Umuofia as possible into government jobs, for surely the community would benefit from having friends in high places. To this end, its members front the funds to send promising students to Britain to get university degrees, which essentially guarantee not just minor clerkships but positions in what had historically been European posts. They encourage Obi to study law, but Obi finds that idea distasteful. Seeking a degree as a means to an end? What an insult to the purity of scholarship! He gets a degree in English. Still, when he returns to Nigeria he quickly secures a job in the education ministry, and just like that, he has a handsome income. And he has the opportunity to supplement that income with bribes. Men come to him offering money in exchange for securing a family member a spot at an elite school; Obi, committed to doing his part to make Nigeria a more ethical society, turns them down. Women seeking school admissions offer him their bodies; he turns them down too. A friend says that, sure, actually interfering with admission decisions after getting paid off is unethical, but if you know that the applicant has already been admitted, you don’t have to do anything and are no longer participating in a quid pro quo. So why not just take the money, or the sex? But Obi refuses—at first. As time goes on, he finds that while his paychecks are impressive for his time and place, his bank balance somehow seems to dwindle rather than grow. Every time he turns around, he’s hit with some new expense. Today it’s his income tax bill. Tomorrow, the registration for his car. Then the insurance for his car. Then the car needs new tires. Family and other obligations also pile up. He needs to make an installment of his repayment to the Umuofia Progressive Union—in effect, his student loan. He also has to pay the tuition for his younger brother’s next term at school. His mother dies; he pays for the funeral. His fiancée needs a medical procedure. His dental resorption returns and all the surgery and reconstructive work that go along with that cost the better part of ten thousand dollars, so he has to put his second novel on hold for close to a year, yet again, to take on enough tutoring work to pay for all that. Oh, wait, that one’s not him—it’s me. But in any case, the day comes when Obi absolutely, positively needs fifty pounds, and a man comes to his office hoping that fifty pounds might buy his son a good word to the board of education. Cue the bromine and the barium.
The other note I had on No Longer at Ease is this. A friend of mine from grad school, Deep Singh, now a professor at Lehigh who writes about (among many other things) South Asian identity in the U.S., was once interviewed by the Associated Press about the case of a girl who had been kicked out of her middle school in Bountiful, Utah, for wearing a nose ring. The girl was the daughter of a Mormon woman from Bountiful and a Sikh man from India, and wanted to wear the ring as an expression of her cultural heritage. The point Deep made in the article was that we have a weird double standard about this sort of thing. Declare that something is religious and the latitude granted by our institutions is virtually infinite: Sikh students get to bring daggers to school, because carrying the kirpan is a pillar of the faith. But the moment a practice is deemed merely cultural, those protections drop away. Yet No Longer at Ease makes the case that culture is closer to the core of who people are. In one of the key moments in Things Fall Apart, some members of the osu, the Igbo untouchable caste, attempt to convert to Christianity, to the outrage of the other early converts—but the British missionaries insist that, no, the very idea of an untouchable caste is a heathen notion that a true convert must discard. What makes them untouchable? Their ancestors offended the god Chukwu? A Christian shouldn’t believe that this “Chukwu” even exists! Now two generations have passed. Obi’s father—the former Nwoye, now Isaac—is a deeply committed Christian… and yet when Obi gets engaged to an osu woman, Isaac is furious. Obi’s mother, already sick, threatens to kill herself if he marries the osu woman before her disease carries her off. So, by Achebe’s lights, we have it backwards: to the extent that they can be distinguished, religion is a stated, often vociferously stated, allegiance to a set of beliefs—an allegiance that can be adopted, discarded, traded for another. But culture consists of a perspective on the world and a set of attitudes that take root in someone and can’t really be eradicated after that. Culture, in short, is the body. Religion is just the clothes.
Roman Holiday
Dalton Trumbo, Ian McLellan Hunter, John Dighton, and William Wyler, 1953
Sabrina
Samuel Taylor, Ernest Lehman, and Billy Wilder, 1954
I don’t write up everything I watch when I’m “off the clock”, but I recently got a Kanopy account—ten movies per month, free with a library card—and Ellie wanted to watch some Audrey Hepburn movies. These are romantic comedies, in which the narrative interest lies in whether the leads will end up together and, if so, how they will overcome the obstacles keeping them apart. In both these cases, the obstacle is social class. In Roman Holiday, the Audrey Hepburn character is a princess and the male lead is just a common newspaperman; in Sabrina, the scenario is flipped: the male lead is a billionaire captain of industry (he’s even got a car phone! in 1954!) and the Audrey Hepburn character is a chauffeur’s daughter. I suppose it says something that the films consider the wealth disparity surmountable when the man is in the superior socioeconomic position but insurmountable when the woman is. In any case, the moral of the story is that inequality of wealth is not only a scourge on society in general but interferes with love in particular, and that therefore we need to institute a wealth tax and an 82% top marginal tax rate. (Actually, wait—these were the 1950s! The 82% top marginal tax rate recommended by Thomas Piketty would actually represent a cut of ten points for the captain of industry!)
High School
Frederick Wiseman, 1968
I remembered reading about this a few times in my film classes back in college. It’s a documentary about a Philadelphia high school in 1968—no voiceovers, no interview segments, just a patchwork of footage. I find virtually any time capsule interesting, and of course having worked in a number of high schools over the years I was particularly interested in a time capsule of a high school. But otherwise I didn’t get much out of it. Some reviewers argue that, oh, the boy arguing with the school counselor about his detention is a perfect microcosm of the idealistic Baby Boomers coming into conflict with the strait-laced G.I. Generation, but, like, c’mon—there’s nothing uniquely 1968 about that. Identical conversations took place in the counselor’s office when I was in high school twenty years later and you could call it a perfect microcosm of recalcitrant Generation X coming into conflict with a Silent Generation that meekly accepted the values of its forebears, or whatever. And here’s David Denby describing what seems to me like another film altogether: “Many of the teachers and administrators are exercising a bland and frightened dictatorship; their speech is deadened as if any sign of life might inspire the students to break out of control.” Whut? We encounter a wide variety of teachers and they’re generally quite lively in different ways, if not always commendably so. You’ve got the sassy older lady teaching fashion design, who always has a putdown at the ready. On the flip side, you’ve got the teacher fresh out of college who tries to teach poetry through the latest Simon and Garfunkel album, the 1960s equivalent of “Hey, kids, did you know that in many ways Shakespeare was the first rapper?” You’ve got the sex ed teacher whose salty phrasings raise a bit of a stir in an auditorium full of boys not expecting the topic to be handled quite so bluntly. And the discussions between counselors and parents, the club members complaining about the school’s educational philosophy, the pep rallies… this film is now old enough that the kids depicted are in their seventies now, and yet it all felt eerily familiar. The reviewers may see 1968 on the copyright notice and say, “Plus ça change!”, but I saw le même chose.
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