Brown vs. Smith

Mr. Brown is patient, where Mr. Smith has no patience at all.  Mr. Brown is overall friendlier than Mr. Smith.  However, Mr. Brown is minipulating them for a long term take over.

          The Ibo culture welcomed the white newcomers when they arrived in the villages.  When the white men began convincing the villagers to convert to Christianity, Okonkwo challenged the Ibo decision to have let the missionaries into the village in the first place and blamed the Ibo culture for the outcome.  Personally, I do believe that the Ibo citizens played a major role in the problems that arose within the community, for they knew that the white men had killed an entire village of people in the past.  Yet they had welcomed the white men into the village, causing a decent portion of their village to convert making the village weaker as a whole. 

TFA: Converting

          Converting to a foreign religion is a difficult choice for anyone, especially when your entire culture is against it.  Members of the Ibo culture who converted to Christianity were resented by their own villages.  The Ibo culture had their own religious beliefs that were put down when the white missionaries arrived, and they didn't want to go against them.  It would be extraordinarily difficult to suddenly change religion when you have believed in one particular thing for all of your life.  In addition, imagine that your entire family is Ibo and you convert to Christianity.  Your family would be divided, right?  They would be emotionally divided because, while you are still family, converting against your own culture would drastically change your social status.  Plus, for every Ibo individual who converts, the village loses a follower.  Imagine it like a giant game of Jenga.  For every person that converts, it is like removing a Jenga block, meaning that the village will evantually crumble.  With the Christians taking over, the Ibo become weaker, meaning they have more potential for destruction 

Journal 8

          Okonkwo is a tragic hero.  His life was ruined when he accidentally killed a young boy when his gun exploded during a funeral ceremony.  He was exiled from Umuofia and forbidden to return for seven years.  He found refuge in his home village where he stays for a few years.  All tragic heroes have flaws, and one of the most common is Hubris.  Okonkwo had a huge ego, leading him to believe he could get away with things that others couldn't. 

TFA 7: Okonkwo's Shell Broken

          Okonkwo was exiled from Umuofia after a funeral ceremony that went horribly wrong.  During the ceremony, the villagers of Umuofia gave their version of what we would know to be a 21-gun solute.  This was done periodically throughout the ceremony without incident.  Yet during the last solute, Oknonkwo's weapon exploded, sending shrapnel flying in all directions.  A piece of metal from his rifle struck the son of the dead man in the heart, killing him.  This, in Umuofia, is known as a female crime.  A female crime is one commited in-advertantly.  Okonkwo was banished from Umuofia for seven years.  This punishment seems unjust, for the young boy's death was the result of a freak accident that Okonwo had no control over. 

TFA 5: The Story of the Tortoise

          The story of the Tortoise was merely a child's story.  The story told of a tortoise that wished to fly with the birds, but they never let him for he was not liked by the birds.  When he changed his ways, each bird gave him a feather from which he made two wings.  The tortoise flew with them to a feast, yet he cheated them to get most of the food.  The birds were enraged by this and each took a feather back so that the tortoise no longer had two wings and was trapped in the clouds where the feast had taken place.  The tortoise had asked the parrot to go and tell the tortoise's wife to lay everything soft in the house out in the lawn so that he could safely jump from the clouds.  However, the parrot told the wife to lay every hard object in the house into the lawn.  The tortoise saw the wife working from his pirch on the cloud, but was too far away to see what she was moving.  Thinking he was jumping onto a pile of soft items, he let himself fall from the sky.  He landed on the hard objects and shattered his shell.  The local medicine man managed to gather the pieces and put the shell together again.  This is why the tortoise does not have a smoothe shell.  The story explains why a tortoise looks the way it does.  This story also seems to forshaddow a later portion of the book.

TFA 4: Death Spirits

          Umuofia is a very spiritual village.  Its inhabitants believe strongly in the gods and evil spirits.  In fact, they believe that children who die in childbirth or in the mother's womb are evil spirits.  Their beliefs are sparked by the uninformed knowlage about children.  They didn't fully know anything about medical situations such as childbirth, so they came up with a story to explain the child's death.  It is also the denial of the women that there is something wrong with their body, therefor they blame a greater power.

Chapter 7: Ikemefuna's death

          Was Okonkwo justified in killing Ikemefuna?  Personally, I don't believe that he is.  The book even states that Ikemefuna was Okonkwo's favorite son, yet the man still struck down the young boy for fear of being thought weak.  What Okonkwo did was that he acted out of spontanious instinct to maintain a certain reputation of emotional and physical strength.  In doing so, he brutally murdered the boy who trusted him as a son would a father.

TFA: How women are portrayed

          Umuofia is a village based on patriarchy.  The women other than the preistess never had higher authority over any man.  Okonkwo has an especially short fuse when it comes to women doing what they shouldn't.  On page 38, he noticed that a few leaves were missing from a banana tree in his yard and called out saying "who killed this banana tree?" (38).  Okonkwo then proceeded to beat his second wife, the woman who had cut the few leaves off to wrap food.  When he went to go hunting he heard the same wife murmer something and shot at her. 
          Women in this book are shown as being powerless against their husbands which is probable because of the face that the book was written by a man.  They are also seen as "housemaids" and are expected to cook and do everything.  The way women are treated in the story is different from the way we do, such as physical abuse and having multiple wives.

          Okonkwo lives within a family based on patriarchy.  He has moments where he is violently abusive and never openly shows compassion towards family members.  His actions are much different than those of the rest of the village, and many of the village's inhabitants resent Okonkwo for his lifestyle.  Nowadays, not many people would have been able to get away with being so abusive towards families.