On Sunday, November 16th, 10 members of Imago Dei’s Literature Discussion Group met at Urban Grinds Café to talk about Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart.” Aside from the north-African names in the novel that no one could pronounce (and no one tried to pronounce), we had a lively discussion about the gradual ruin of the Umuofia tribe in Africa.

Our moderator, Vivian, kept us together with many thought-provoking questions. After each question followed several seconds of thick silence and then someone would answer her, whereupon the steady flow of conversation would begin again. The “main guy” of the story with the name that no one could pronounce (and no one tried to pronounce), was a sad, brutal, and fearful man who simultaneously made us angry yet somehow evoked our sympathy as well. We talked about his motivations and reasons for his actions; we talked about the son he hated and eventually disowned and the son he loved, whom he killed; and we talked about the appearance of the missionaries and the subsequent influence of the church and organized government into the tradition-bound Voodoo religion of the Umuofia tribe, and about how the main guy with the name we could not pronounce fell apart at the end.
His name, apart in liquid letters:
O
k
o
n
k
w
o