By
Obododimma Oha
In Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, we are
presented by the intervention of mmanwụ the masked spirit of the ancestor,
which the author in his dialect of Igbo calls egwugwu, in the settlement of a
quarrel involving spouses and indeed the entire community. But in the intervention,
other important issues surface. Among them are the idea of the presence of the
dead (the slippery community constituted by humans and spirits), the inner
religious colonial structure in which spirits dominate and rule perpetually
over humans, and the idea of the knowable and the unknowable in philosophy of
the culture in which spirits can be present in the world of humans and have the
final say in the affairs of humans. The idea of what is knowable and what is
considered unknowable in the culture is an interesting one and does engage one’s
attention. This essay tries to engage this discourse on knowability which the
mmanwụ brings up in the settlement.
When the
masked spirit asks: “ụzọwulu’s
body, do you know me?” and ụzọwulu,
answers: “How can I know you? You are unknowable,” the spirit is trying to
test ụzọwulu as a
member of the culture who should know what is not knowable and what is not. In
other words, it is a kind of riddle, the kind that the Sphinx is likely to
ask. In addition, ụzọwulu as
probably an initiate of the mmanwụ cult should know its verbal
signification presented by the mmanwụ and how to respond. Either way, he is
face-to-face with the idea of knowability in his culture and needs to answer
appropriately.
In another
preceding blog article, I had examined signification as the central thing in Igbo masquerading and its communication. I had pointed out that being an initiate
means being fully educated in the signifying practices of mmanwụ and meeting
its communicative competence as an insider. The test from the masked spirit was
therefore mmanwụ signification at work at the ilo with initiates and
noninitiates present.
Achebe in the
narrative tries to assist readers by adding that masked spirits in the culture
address humans as “body,”hence, “ụzọwulu’s body” as a usage. So, that person
deixis should be clear to us and to ụzọwulu. The real problem he must tackle is
in the other part of the interrogative act: “...do you KNOW me?” Two things in
the problem: the verb “know” and the object “me.” If ụzọwulu can tell or
differentiate between this "me" and other “Mes,” he has safely crossed the bridge. So, the knowability
hovers around “me.” Or how can “me” be decoded? ụzọwulu should know that it
is referring to the masked spirit of an ancestor, which cannot be said to be
known in the culture, even if he had helped somebody he knows to put on the
mask. Achebe even points out that one of the spirits has a springy stride like
Okonkwo, such that his closest friends and wives could tell if he is the one.
But none says that it is Okonkwo.
In French, a
distinction is made between the know of “savoir” (know as see, to be aware of
something, to reason out; “connaitre,” or cognitive recognition, to recognize and
“faire ” (knowing as being able to distinguish. That divergence in the little
French lesson (lecon), should not disturb us! The main issue is that our fictional friend is challenged to say if he can say everything he can
recognize. If he can say everything he recognizes, he has stepped into greater
trouble and would have a problem with the spirits, too. His saving grace is
denial, this meaningful to the cult members.
Chinua Achebe
is doing something there, other than just show us how ancestral spirits get
involved in indigenous conflict resolution. Readers of the novel need to look
at Achebe’s sub-text on indigenous clandestine semiotics involving ancestral
spirits. It is power and identity staged at the slippery site of the sign.
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