No Longer at Ease
No
Longer at Ease is a 1960
novel by Nigerian author Chinua
Achebe. It is the story of an Igbo man, Obi Okonkwo, who leaves his village for an education in
Britain and then a job in the Nigerian colonial civil service,
but is conflicted between his African culture and Western lifestyle and ends up
taking a bribe. The novel is the second work in what is sometimes referred to
as the "African trilogy", following Things
Fall Apart and preceding Arrow
of God. Things
Fall Apart concerns the struggle of Obi
Okonkwo's grandfather Okonkwo against the changes brought by the English.
Novel's title
We returned to our places, these
Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
But no longer at ease here,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Plot summary
The
novel begins with the trial of Obi Okonkwo on the charge of accepting a bribe.
It then jumps back in time to a point before his departure for England and
works its way forward to describe how Obi ended up on trial.
The
members of the Umuofia Progressive Union (UPU), a group of Ibo men who have
left their villages to live in major Nigerian cities, have taken up a
collection to send Obi to England to study law, in the hope that he will return
to help his people navigate British colonial society. But once there, Obi
switches his major to English and meets Clara for the first time during a
dance.
Obi
returns to Nigeria after four years of studies and lives in Lagos with his friend Joseph. He takes a job with the Scholarship
Board and is almost immediately offered a bribe by a man who is trying to
obtain a scholarship for his sister. When Obi indignantly rejects the offer, he
is visited by the girl herself, who implies that she will bribe him with sexual
favors for the scholarship, another offer Obi rejects.
At
the same time, Obi is developing a romantic relationship with Clara Okeke, a
Nigerian woman who eventually reveals that she is an osu, an outcast by her descendants, meaning that Obi cannot
marry her under the traditional ways of the Igbo people of Nigeria. He remains
intent on marrying Clara, but even his Christian father opposes it, although
reluctantly due to his desire to progress and eschew the "heathen"
customs of pre-colonial Nigeria. His mother begs him on her deathbed not to
marry Clara until after her death, threatening to kill herself if Obi disobeys.
When Obi informs Clara of these events, Clara breaks the engagement and
intimates that she is pregnant. Obi arranges an abortion, which Clara
reluctantly undergoes, but she suffers complications and refuses to see Obi
afterwards.
All
the while, Obi sinks deeper into financial trouble, in part due to poor
planning on his end, in part due to the need to repay his loan to the UPU and
to pay for his siblings' educations, and in part due to the cost of the illegal
abortion.
After
hearing of his mother's death, Obi sinks into a deep depression and doesn't go
home for the funeral, this is because he thought that the money he would have
used to go and come back would be better served in the funeral and to help out
across the house. When he recovers, he begins to accept bribes in a reluctant
acknowledgement that it is the way of his world.
The
novel closes as Obi takes a bribe and tells himself that it is the last one he
will take, only to discover that the bribe was part of a sting operation. He is
arrested, bringing us up to the events that opened the story.
Themes
Though
set several decades after "Things Fall Apart", "No Longer at
Ease" continues many of the themes from Achebe's first novel. Here, the
clash between European culture and traditional culture has become entrenched
during the long period of colonial rule. Obi struggles to balance the demands
of his family and village for monetary support while simultaneously keeping up
with the materialism of Western culture.
Furthermore,
Achebe depicts a family continuity between Ogbuefi Okonkwo in "Things Fall
Apart" and his grandson Obi Okonkwo in "No Longer at Ease". Both
men are confrontational, speak their minds, and have some self-destructive
tendencies. However, this aggressive streak manifests itself in different ways.
Where his grandfather was a man of action and violence, Obi is a man of words
and thoughts to the exclusion of action.
Reception
"No Longer at Ease" debuted to largely positive
reviews. Mercedes Mackay of the Royal African Society noted that "This
second novel of Chinua Achebe is better than his first, and puts this Nigerian
at the forefront of West African writers." Arthur Lerner of Los Angeles
City College wrote that "The second novel of this young Nigerian author
continues the promise of its predecessor, Things Fall Apart." The novel
was widely praised for its realistic and vivid depictions of life in Lagos in
the early 1960s. However, some reviewers felt that Achebe's attention to detail
in setting was executed at the expense of fully fleshing out his characters.
Ben Mkapa of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute wrote, "Achebe has a broad vision
of the world he is writing about, but unfortunately this broadness is manifest
at the expense of depth of characterisation. Clara, who is so central to Obi's
final disillusionment, is but imperfectly drawn; most of the others are only
nominal. His characters are representational rather than real.
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