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Storytelling

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Storytelling

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  1. The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery. … This continued until the Africans themselves, in the middle of the twentieth century, took into their own hands the telling of their story." -- Chinua Achebe, "An African Voice"

  2. Storytelling How does the text combine European linguistic and literary forms with African oral traditions? How does Achebe’s incorporation of oral elements into Things Fall Apart contribute to the projects of telling one’s own story and creating a new view of the world?

  3. Oral & Communal Storytelling Traditions • Ibo words/phrases 1. Agbala 2. Chi 3. Iyi-uwa 4. Kotma 5. Nnaayi 6. Ogbanje 7. Uri • Proverbs • Fables & tales

  4. Achebe writes in a 1974 essay, "Chi in Igbo Cosmology": "Since Igbo people did not construct a rigid and closely argued system of thought to explain the universe and the place of man in it, preferring the metaphor of myth and poetry, anyone seeking an insight into their world must seek it along their own way. Some of these ways are folk tales, proverbs, proper names, rituals, and festivals"

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  6. Short Writing Assignment • What are the effects on you as a reader (a student of a certain race and a particular linguistic, ethnic, and national background, attending a high school in the United States of America at the beginning of the 21st century) of the cultural contrasts in the Part One of Things Fall Apart? • How does the inclusion of untranslated foreign words and unexplained cultural concepts affect your reading of the novel and your understanding of and relationship to the Igbo culture being presented? • Achebe explains the danger of not having one's own stories through the following proverb: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” How does this idea relate to Achebe’s storytelling techniques?

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