Things fall apart

My Rwandan book club (a mix of Rwandan and foreign women) recently read Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s great book, Things Fall Apart, published in 1958. It’s a story of the clan, nine villages, spirits and the priestess oracle who carries a child on her back all the night and into her cave and then returns her to her bed; a story of the warrior afraid to be weak like his shiftless indebted father, of twins abandoned at birth in the evil forest, and the murder of the boy given to the village as settlement for another murder. There’s drumming, drumming, drumming, wrestling matches, yam planting, yam harvesting, yam festivals, fifty pots of palm oil for the bride’s family, earth goddesses, ancestral spirits and a woman whose dead child comes again and again to her womb only to die again and again.

And then there’s the white legislators, the white fathers, the conversions, the killing of the sacred python by the son of the priest of the snake cult. The warrior is alone, dangling from the tree where he has hung himself in despair. The son of the priest of the snake cult rips the mask off one of the ‘egwugwu’, the ancestors of the clan who emerge from mother earth through tiny ant holes. This is a great crime, this kills an ancestral spirit and the village is confused. “That night the Mother of the Spirits walked the length and breadth of the clan, weeping for her murdered son. It was a terrible night. Not even the oldest man in Umuofia had ever heard such a strange and fearful sound and it was never to be heard again. It seemed as if the very soul of the tribe wept for a great evil that was coming – it’s own death.”

In the last chapter, the voice changes, is now that of the district commissioner. He is mulling over the suicided warrior, thinking about whether this story would merit a paragraph in the book he is writing. He has already decided on the name of his book, The pacification of the primitive tribes of the lower Niger.

In Christian Rwanda men dress decently for church, the women look smart. On the weekends people walk carrying their bible. Christian Rwanda, a place where the church and its priests sanctioned the murder of those seeking shelter in holy places, sanctioned grenades, machetes, guns and bulldozers, sanctioned the death of those judged other, less than. The pacification of the arrogant Tutsi of the Rwanda hills.

Me, I want the ancestors to emerge from the earth and weep for their murdered children and for the evil to come. I am wanting the spirits today, wild fierce ones who will wail like the Mother of the Spirits, wail loud enough to bring forth grief, to bring forth hearts broken by our threatened diminished world, the soul murdering conditions of life, the animals annihilated out of existence, each lost life form. I am wanting drums and wild dancing and clacking masks that bring the ancestors to life and animate the landscape and break open my own heart into grief and sorrow for what is wounded and what is being destroyed: raped women trying to find a way to go on, children with horror locked deep in their psyche, rivers reduced to dirty trickles of sickly water, weather that confuses the farmers about when to plant, people who live in fear, in poverty, in a dumb place of forgetfulness about who they are and where they come from and what their true nature is.

I want the ancestors to come back and occupy the cities and the farms and the bits of remaining forest; I want them bold and terrifying, confident and strong. I want them to bring us to tears and then to tell us how to get up, how to go on, how to remember, how to be together in peace and love, with truth and justice. How to break the rules. How to reoccupy the wild.