By Livia John
After finishing Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for Hadley’s English 2 Honors class—a book I originally found to be dull and boring— I realized it was littered with many moments displaying just how ironically feminine Okonkwo actually is. Here’s a couple of moments from TFA that left me dying from the irony (almost as much as Okonkwo himself, if you get the joke…):
Pssttttt—slight spoilers ahead.
- His exile to Mbanta
The sheer irony that when he fails, he is faced with no choice but to flee to his motherland because “Mother is Supreme,” forcing him to rely entirely on feminine comfort and shelter. For a man who spent his entire life building a masculine reputation based on physical strength, violence, and paternal titles in Umuofia, being stripped of his status and forced into the gentle custody of his mother’s kinsmen is the ultimate joke. He is reduced to a dependent child, completely reliant on the maternal energy he spent decades despising and associating with weakness.
- His relationship with Ezinma
How his favorite, most resilient, and traditionally “masculine” child in spirit is actually his daughter, whom he constantly wishes was a boy. Time and time again, Okonkwo fails to appreciate how resembling Ezinma is of himself; instead, Okonkwo puts all his energy into enforcing rigid masculinity onto his eldest son, Nwoye. The deep irony lies in his total blindness: the legacy he desperately craves to pass down already exists right in front of him, but it is trapped in a female body he refuses to realize. By rejecting Nwoye for being too soft (like Unoka) and overlooking Ezinma’s true potential, he destroys his own legacy out of pure stubbornness.
- The killing of Ikemefuna
He commits a terrible crime against his own family just because he is terrified of looking weak, which ultimately breaks his relationship with Nwoye. Even though the village elder, Ezeudu, explicitly warns him not to bear a hand in the boy’s death because Ikemefuna “calls you father,” Okonkwo’s masculine insecurity drives him to strike the fatal blow himself. The ultimate irony is that in his frantic effort to avoid looking like a coward, he commits the worst act possible: beheading a defenseless boy who trusted him, destroying his own household from the inside out and driving Nwoye straight into the arms of the Christian church.
These three examples demonstrate Okonkwo’s inability to accept femininity as a positive, necessary aspect in his life. This detrimental failure ultimately results in his inevitable downfall and, finally, his death.