Amateur Fiction and “Things Fall Apart”

The BYU English Symposium was an awesome experience. First I attended a lecture on Chinoa Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” that included several essays reflecting different messages and viewpoints. The most interesting of these was an essay by Sara Doyle entitled “Nothing but a Tortoise: Animals as Symbols”. I found this essay to one fascinating because Doyle went against what so many of the critics have said about the tortoise in “Things Fall Apart”. Acccording to her, most critics hold with the opinion that the tortoise is a representation of Okonkwo, the novel’s conflicted, occasionally violent protagonist. This has to do with many of the similarities between the tortoise and Okonkwo, such as being generally scornful and cunning. However, Doyle gives a different statement, saying that the tortoise doesn’t necessarily Okonkwo, rather better represents the white man who comes to the village to live there, and eventually build a church. This comparison is made because in the story the tortoise is a creature that decides to live among the birds, with the final goal of reigning over them. He convinces the birds to give him feathers until he has enough to make his own wings; but he is still a turtle and the birds still don’t accept him, until he finally conquers them all to his will. In a similar manner, the white man comes to the village, deciding he’d like to live among them. He finally asks them for land, and they give him some, in the cursed forest. In this way, he becomes like them, but he is still an outcast, until eventually the white men DO take over the village, along with the rest of Africa. This was a great fresh take on Achebe’s story.

The other event I attended was the Creative Writing Undergraduate Fiction winners. This was also a treat, on the whole the most entertaining event I attended. All three authors wrote very different stories, with very different styles. My favorite was the story from the winner, Jessica Holcomb, who wrote a story around a fascinating idea: what if an emperor had to face the very harbinger of death upon his passing in order to enter in to paradise, but needed one of his wives to face it with him? This is exactly what happens in this story, which occurs in a counsel of wives of the emperor immediately after his passing. The wives are made to draw straws from a cup, and the one who gets the marked straw will die with the emperor, to be his guide as he faces death itself. The story was ripe with tension, over all a fantastic experience.