Ecocritism In Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart
According to Aswin Prasanth,
African writers are in a “state of nature,” in perfect harmony with environment. Their literature has therefore a rural orientation on the one hand and despise of urban background on the other. There is an inherent longing for lost rustic serenity in African literatures. In African literatures, the celebration of nature and wildness is more dynamic than in any other literatures. This celebration is part of community life. African communities have close relationship with nature and conservation ecology is part of everyday practice. Writers like Amos Tutuola, Camara Laye, Mongo Bette, Ferdinand Oyono, Cyprian Ekwensi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, Alan Panton, Ben Okri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Ama Ata Aidoo and J.M. Coetzee have attempted to demonstrate these facts through their works (59).
The above assertion is obviously true, considering the affinity the African had with his natural environment, before the advent of colonialism. This relationship is captured by Achebe in his novel Things Fall Apart, where we see the natives struggling against the white settlers in an attempt to rescue their natural environment from desecration. And before the term Ecocritism was coined by William Rueckert in 1978, African writers had already started decrying the rape of their natural environment, by foreigners. For instance, “Okara‘s poem “Piano and Drums” is a subtle nostalgia of the primal life of Africa before foreign intervention, and the exploitation of Africa‘s natural environment” (Ayinuola 42). He also adds that, ““The Fisherman‘s Invocation” and “The Call of River Nun” are poems that have a leaning towards the purity of the natural environment of the Niger Delta before the
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