Fundamentalism in Ibo and Christian faiths

Transcription

1 Fundamentalism in Ibo and Christian faiths Submitted to: Ms Kim Written by: Raya Pomelkova Course: English Gr. 12 Date: May 01, 2005

2 Things Fall Apart and Purple hibiscus both deal with British influence on Africa. In both novels people are highly driven into Christian religion. There is little oppression and most people are following traditions from both Christian and Ibo faiths. But there are people like Okonkwo and Eugene, who are protagonist and antagonist of these novels, who display fundamentalism in their religions. Things Fall Apart and Purple Hibiscus show that fundamentalism in any religion leads to madness, violence and ultimately death. First of all, fundamentalism leads to madness of a person. It takes up all the space in a character s brain and he/she cannot accept that the truth might not be what his/her religion tells him/her it is. When the character is faced with the truth, his/her brain becomes a war ground between his/her beliefs and beliefs of others. The character, due to his/her strong beliefs, cannot cope with the information provided. He/she becomes confused and depressed or even truer to his/her faith, which leads to madness. In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo doesn t accept the Christian beliefs and tries to block them out from his life. The simplest example of this is when Obierika comes to visit Okonkwo in his exile, he tells Okonkwo that white men came to their land and Okonkwo suggests that they are albinos (p.120). It gets worse when Okonkwo, after hearing that his men killed a white man and more white men returned and killed almost everyone who went to the market in that village that day, insists that they were warned that danger was ahead. They should have armed themselves with their guns and their machetes even when they went to market (p.122). He doesn t accept the idea that it all could have been done peacefully if his people haven t killed the first white man. But Okonkwo s madness comes to its peak when his own son Nwoye turns to the Christian faith, because it seems more appealing to him and gives him answers that he cannot find in Ibo religion. When Okonkwo finds out about what happened he hits Nwoye three times, lets him go wherever he wants and never speaks of him again (p.132). Instead of trying to understand his son, A sudden fury rose within him and he felt a strong desire to take up his machete, go to the church and wipe out the entire vile and miscreant gang [the Christians]. But on further thought he told himself that Nwoye was not worth

3 fighting for. Why, he cried in his heart, should he, Okonkwo, of all people, be cursed with such a son? He saw clearly in it the finger of his personal god or chi (p.133) Okonkwo cannot accept the fact that people are all born with different traits and person s characteristics also depend on the way a person was brought up. Instead of looking for flaws in Nwoye s bringing up, he blames his personal god (or what white people call bad karma). It shows how much he is dependent on his faith. Eugene in Purple Hibiscus on the other hand is pro-christian, but even though it is a completely different religion, fundamentalism drives him to insanity too. He turns into fury even if his daughter eats a little bit of food before eating painkillers, so they would digest normally (p ). He sees sin in everything people do except prayer and work. He is so strict in his religious beliefs that he even made schedules for his children in which the only resting time for them is reading newspapers or listening to the news reports on the radio. They had no friends time in their schedule (p.24). He goes as far as not letting his children eat or stay for more than 15 minutes at their grandfather s house, because he is not Christian, therefore in Eugene s theory his place is full of sin (p.61). Therefore, fundamentalism in any religion leads to madness. Fundamentalism in religion also leads to violence. In Things Fall Apart the main character, Okonkwo, is a violent man by nature. That is why he took up wrestling and eventually became the best wrestler in all six villages. But, due to his beliefs, his violent side spreads out to all aspects of his life. In Ibo faith men are believed to have much more power than women, which ultimately leads to disrespect for women and in Okonkwo s case to violence. He beats up his wives constantly. When one of his wives left her obi without telling Okonkwo where she was going to, he walked back to his obi to await Ojiugo s [his wife] return. And when she returned he beat her very heavily. In his anger he had forgotten that it was the Week of Peace, (p.25). It shows that not only he has disrespect for women, but he also chooses wrong ideas from his faith to make stress on. Also, when men from his village decide to kill Ikemefuna, who have lived with Okonkwo and his family for three years, for the religious purpose, Okonkwo has a choice of

4 not being a part of the killing, but he joins the procession anyway, which leads Ikemefuna to the desert. When one of the men raises his machete and hits Ikemefuna with it, Okonkwo looks away, but as the scared boy runs towards him with a cry of help, dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak, (p.53). This deed of his shows how Okonkwo fears to be weak, to not be a perfect example of a man by Ibo beliefs, to be like his father, who was overall an outcast, because he lacked manly qualities. When Okonkwo s wife Ekwefi, whose children all died in their infancy stage, tries to protect her daughter Ezinma from dying and consults a man who was famous in all the clan for his knowledge in these matters (p.71), Ezinma takes a long time to find her mother s buried infant (which is suggested by the ritual), wondering around the Evil Forest and the village for quite a long time. Okonkwo collapses on her, saying if you bring us all this way for nothing I shall beat sense into you (p.72), implying that Ezinma not serious about this ritual and doesn t want to be a part of it at all, which brings up anger in him. In Purple Hibiscus, Eugene is also a very violent character. When, after spending a holiday at their aunt s house, his children come back home and tell Eugene that their grandfather, who was not a Christian, died in his sleep in that house, Eugene gets furious. He forces both Jaja and Kambili to step into the tub in the washroom and pours boiling water on their feet for sleeping in the same house as a heathen (p.194). Afterwards, Eugene finds out about the painting of their grandfather, which was given to Kambili by her cousin Amaka. He tears it up into little pieces and when Kambili tries to protect what was left of the portrait, because it is the only things that is left of him that she has, Eugene beats her with his feet almost to death. She ends up being in the hospital for quite some time and finishes the school year there (p ). Through out the whole book Eugene also beats up his wife several times for arguing with his true godly ways, one time causing a miscarriage. Therefore, it is evident that fundamentalism leads to violence. The last but no least, fundamentalism in any religion eventually leads to death. In the end of Things Fall Apart Okonkwo feels that he lost his influence on people of his native village after

5 being in exile for seven years. He tries to re-establish himself as a leader by suggesting a war on white people and even kills one of the missionaries to prove his point (p.176), but what he doesn t see is that his people became more liberal while Okonkwo stayed the same. He cannot help feeling that his men betrayed Ibo traditions, so he commits suicide by hanging in a demonstration of rebellion against change. Because he died a shameful death, he must be buried like a dog (p.179) according to Ibo customs. After all, his religion betrayed him. Unlike Things Fall Apart, Purple Hibiscus doesn t end in Eugene s suicide. What happens is that his wife gets so tired of him using violence on her and her children for even their tiniest flaws, which all people have, that she poisons her husband to break free from his religious dictatorship. To people outside of his house Eugene was perfect, but at home he was a merciless dictator. His over obsessive mania for perfection was ruining the imperfect peoples lives, but in the end it only ruined him, because he wanted people to be what he wasn t himself. Therefore, fundamentalism leads to a shameful death. Fundamentalism in any aspect of peoples lives makes people closed-minded and ignorant to the feelings of others, but it is fundamentalism in religion that leads to madness, violence and eventual death.

6 Work Cited: 1. Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart, Published by Borzoi Book[1992] 2. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus, Published by Anchor Books[2004]