Things Fall Apart: Part 1
A Rumination about Faith, Literature, Growing Up White, and My Own Ignorance, in Three Parts
I was accepted to Duke Divinity School for a graduate degree in 1996, when I was 19 years old. I’d completed a Bachelor’s Degree summa cum laude in English with a focus on literature, but it was a high school assignment that affected my theological understanding of “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats. In my last two years of high school - IB English with Mr. Walsh - I read Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, which takes its title from the Yeats poem.
NOTE: My greatest struggle in life* - not motherhood, my weight, mental illness, teaching in this era, current evangelical Trumpsters - is exploring and wrestling with the privilege of my racial identity. I am hopeful that, by sharing my thoughts here, I will encourage and empower other persons in my position to consider their own privilege and therefore their higher calling to responsible representation and the return of equitable power. This is both a personal and a religious calling for me. Consider, if you will, that Martin Luther King, Jr. found his seat of power first from his (our) God, secondly, from his geographical locus and personal lineage. Nevertheless - the Christian faith has a great deal to answer for, in terms of racist beliefs and policies.
* Having written and re-read this passage, I should be honest that my greatest struggle is to make enough money to provide for my children as a single mother on a teacher salary. I want to remain authentic in my discourse here on Substack, so I think this is a needed caveat.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart “showed the devastating effects of colonialism on a Nigerian village in the late 1800s.” He was a fierce critic of Joseph Conrad and the depictions of Congolese natives in Heart of Darkness.
And here I must confess - I throw off my scholarly academic credentials. I could give you an exegesis on the pericopes invoked by Yeats. I could analyze Achebe’s narrative technique. I could synthesize the similarities, the differences between the two, in order to provide a clear context for the racism present in both “accepted literature” and theology.
But.
Instead I want you to know about a tiny girl.
Blonde. Skinny. Dressed in garage sale clothes.
She was bussed to an elementary school whose student body was primarily Black.
Where she was the one made fun of, because she was poor. Extremely poor.
Me.
White trash. In the whitest sense of the word. As a child, that was all I knew.
That I was poor. And white. It was the early 1980s. I was 5, 6, 7 years old. My friends were Ramona Quimby and Sally J. Freedman and Cam Jansen (click!). These characters lived extravagant lives: well-fed, adequately clothed, and prepared with the essentials needed to explode into whatever mischief they found themselves in.
Although my book friends were engaging, they didn’t ensure my empathetic development. By the late 1980s, when I was 10, 11, 12 years old, I still didn’t understand my own privilege. My little brothers were born, and in addition to One Fish Two Fish, The Going to Bed Book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, I read to them a book I myself fell in love with: Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters (written by John Steptoe who tragically died at the age of 38.)
A long time devotee of Andrew Lang’s color-coded Fairy Books, I recognized the fairy tale pattern of Nyasha and Manyara. Their interaction was similar to the interactions of the daughter and stepdaughter in Charles Perrault’s “Les Fées” which Andrew Lang included in his Blue Fairy Book. Don’t mistake me: Steptoe did not take the storyline from Perrault. I simply mean that Steptoe’s African tale showcases the fable-like quality that shares similarities with stories told worldwide.
And yet, I understood that Mufaro’s daughters were speaking to a reality that was, at least in its true form, hidden from me. Mufaro’s daughters in their homeland experienced one thing. Mufaro’s daughters in American children’s literature experienced something quite different. It reminded me of my elementary school friends.
You see, I understood the difference between my hair and Nijeri’s. I recognized how Antoine had to be careful in the way he spoke to me, in spite of the fact we were eight years old. I don’t know that I could have explained those underlying truths. I just knew “that’s how things were.” (“Things” fall apart.) I understood that getting subsidized hot lunch was necessary for me but a punishment for my Black classmates. I understood that Janessa’s “A” on a test was better than my “A.” (And, dude. She totally deserved it. She kicked my ass at math. I merited a “B” - maybe.) So, I understood about imbalances.
I didn’t understand enough.
As an adult, I carry the shame of not understanding. Not knowing what it meant to be Black in a world where your intelligence, accomplishments, financial success were not only overlooked but still not even considered in the measurement of personhood. I confess this sin daily.
We moved from my hometown in 1990, and relocated a couple of times before I ended up in a high school where I completed my junior and senior years. Thus, it was around 1992 when I read Things Fall Apart. Achebe introduced me to the issues at the heart that was both darkness and colonialism. From there, my college experience furthered my true education regarding the balances of power in society.
Please tune in next week for the second installment of this rather lengthy but deeply personal reflection. I welcome your feedback, your comments, questions, and even rebukes. I accept all voices, and especially those voices that have been quashed by a white patriarchal paradigm. I am here to listen.