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Chapter 12
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in No Longer at Ease, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Corruption
Western Influence and Alienation
Language, Literature, and Communication
Prejudice and Discrimination
Summary
Analysis
Obi is granted two weeks’ leave from work in order to visit his parents. Clara helps him pack, but she’s clearly upset. She finally declares that she and Obi can’t get married after all. Obi acts stoic and accepts her choice, but eventually he breaks and accuses her of ditching him because of his present financial straits.
Obi’s invocation of his financial difficulties as the only possible explanation for Clara’s reluctance to marry shows his commitment to the Western emphasis on material wealth over traditional values. That Clara could genuinely fear the ancient prohibition doesn’t occur to him because he is too alienated from their traditional culture to fully appreciate Clara’s perspective.
Themes
Obi leaves for his parents’ home early the next morning, worrying about money the entire way there. When he arrives, he reflects on his parents’ respective rooms: through Christianity, his father developed an absolute reverence for the written word (something his people did not traditionally have the technology to make permanent), so he obsessively keeps every scrap of writing he’s ever come across, cluttering his room. Obi’s mother, meanwhile, fills her room with odds and ends of domestic wares. When Obi goes in to see his ailing mother, she acts as though she’s on the mend, but Obi is distraught to see her weakened condition.
Obi’s father’s fixation on the written word clearly influence Obi’s own development as a reader and a lover of literature. His mother, in contrast, seems more tied to the life and community around her—a connection that Obi and his father both lack due to their preference for modern, Western ideas.
Themes
That afternoon, a funeral procession passes by the house, and some female singers realize Obi has returned home and stop to serenade him. Isaac instinctively wants to drive away these women, whom he considers superstitious revelers, but Obi convinces him to let them stay. They sing a song about kin being more important than money.
Obi observes these singers as an alienated spectator rather than an active participant in a shared culture. The message of their song resonates with his present suffering: he has prioritized money (and the Western culture that taught him to value it) over his ties to his kin, and he feels lost and alone as a result.
Themes
