Can Okonkwo Speak?: Re-Reading Okonkwo’s Suicide as a Silent Speech through Body

Abstract

Many postcolonial critics have grappled with the question over the subaltern's voice/representation: who can have voice or who can speak (for others)? As an effort to translate theoretical assertions into practice, this essay examines Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in order to reread Okonkwo's murder and suicide as a highly subversive yet silent speech of the subaltern, reconsidering Spivak's famous (or infamous) manifesto that “the subaltern cannot speak.”Seemingly, Okonkwo who plays a role as the keeper of native culture and order embodies the surrender of aboriginal culture to the colonial violence through his demise. However, Okonkwo's murder and suicide is full of political meanings both to Umuofia and to colonizers. His murder of the colonial figure would threaten the colonial order itself; at the same time, it would trigger Umuofia's collective resistance against colonizers. At the same time, Okonkwo's dead body becomes a reminder to hark back to pre-colonial days when they used to be one as “clansmen” against strangers. More importantly, since Okonkwo's body should be taken down from the tree and buried not by the Umuofia people but by others, his murder and suicide can be passed on to others. After all, Okonkwo's dead body becomes a signifier referring to what brought him to commit such an abominable behavior. In this way, both to his own people and to colonizers, Okonkwo's body becomes a silent but provocative text of anti-colonial violence, which should be deciphered and brooded over.