Things Fall Apart by Achebe

  In Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe gives an informative insight into what life in the Igbo culture was like before Europeans arrived and how drastically it changed afterwards. The first part of the story is most ineteresting because it tells a story where all of the characters, the setting, and perhaps even the tone of the story is all non-Western. This aspect of it provides an almost flawless representation of African culture the way it was before whites arrived on the scene.
  The first part also gets the reader well acquainted with the main character, Okonkwo, most notably his pronounced masculinity and his stubborness and fear of appearing too feminine. He continually strive to move up the social ladder out of shame of his father who was weak and lowly. When the second part of the story begins, he is banished to his mother's land and the whole time there plans for his return to Umuofia. Okonkwo is also representative of Igbo culture in general and his death in the third part reflects the fall of the Igbo people and their culture as they knew it. 

The Second Coming by Yeats

      As I've stated before in class, "The Second Coming" one of my absolute favorite poems for a variety of reasons. I find its ancient, meaningful imagery and historical implications very fascinating. The poem is by far one of Yeats' most famous, and it is a perfect example of his complex belief system. Yeats' belief that history works in roughly 2,000 year cycles (gyres) that replaced one another is but strange and enthralling. On one hand, it is easy to say "Wow, he was crazy!" yet at the same it is impossible to ingnore the parallels between what is described in his work and what has happened in the real world.
     While maybe Western civilization most likely won't end completely it is going thru a huge transformation that began about the time the poem was written. The poem could also refer to such things as the rise of Nazism and Communism. The thing is, however, that the poem was written before these historical changes really became evident in the world. This gives the poem an nearly prophetic tone to it and hilights its significance as a twentieth century piece of literature.

Dadie and Diop

      I very much enjoyed the works by Dadie and Diop that we had to read this week for class. They both featured motifs that can also be found in the folklore of Western culture and others as well as those that are uniquely African. "The Mirror of Dearth" (Dadie) featured a magical mirror (a common feature in European fairy tales such as those recorded by the Grimm brothers) that would cause Kacou Ananze to lose all of his wealth if he looked into it, which has striking parallels to the Forbidden Fruit from the Garden of Eden in the Genesis creation story.        Another interesting feature that appears in both Dadie's and Diop's work is the role of the large reptiles in their stories, a feature that appears to be uniquely African. In "The Hunter and the Boa" (Dadie), a boa (a type of large snake) has the power to grant a poor bush hunter the means of aquiring great wealth and power of his own. The boa also exhibits wisdom by ultimately allowing the hunter to have to make an important decision, become poor again or die. In "Mother Crocodile" (Diop), the title character is a very wise matriarch whose children refuse to listen to at their own great expense.
     The presentation of large reptiles, in this case a great serpent and an aged crocodile, as sources of wisdom and power is, I suggest, a result of African people's experience with such creatures and the knowledge that in order to have attained such great sizes, they would have had to have lived very long lives during which it may be believed that they gained a great deal of experience and wisdom.