No Longer at Ease: Similes 3 key examples

This passage investigates the contrast between ornate language and simple language. It is fitting that the one literary device in this passage occurs in the paragraph describing ornate language; and yet the simile involved, which compares such language to “dry meat” that “filled the mouth,” doesn’t actually celebrate such ornateness. The meat is “dry,” not flavorful, and it fills “the mouth,” not the stomach. This points to the way ornate language is sometimes hollow—a conviction supported by the Union’s admiration but not understanding.

Obi’s English is not the only one that is simple and, at first, “unimpressive”: so is Achebe’s, in this passage and throughout. And yet the content is subtle and rich in ways that ornate English is often not. Because Achebe’s style matches Obi’s, this passage can be read as an argument for simple and direct language.

This contrast is also important in a world where language is closely associated with power. In colonized Nigeria, English, of any type, is a form of power and even violence; but this passage gestures to the fact that this power can be mobilized in multiple ways. One is to lean into the aesthetic of the language to captivate those who have been less exposed to it, and thereby wield power manipulatively. But the other, which Achebe supports, is to use simple, clear language to illuminate the contrasts and injustices of colonial society.  

This is a highly complex simile that entwines traditional Ibo culture with colonialism and English rule. On the surface, the simile indicates that “throwing a white man” is taboo: one does not throw a white man just as one does not unmask an ancestral spirit—out of fear of retribution. By bringing English rule into contact with the Ibo notion of an ancestral spirit, Achebe renders the gravity of the school principal’s offense legible to traditional Ibo people. 

But the word “unmasking” can be read in two ways: as either provoking violence or stripping power. To Obi, this second understanding has happened to traditional Ibo culture itself: he feels less intimidated by folktales or customs (like respecting the status of osu) than he did as a child. To Obi, unmasking an ancestral spirit is both something he understands as taboo and also something his education has performed. To understand something is to unmask it. In this way, to throw a white man is to rob him of his power or mystique. Perhaps Achebe is really advocating for (and even performing) an unmasking of the white man that is not physical but intellectual.

This passage incorporates an unusual simile: rather than comparing two distinct things as alike, Achebe describes them as “not like” each other. This is particularly important because it reverses a simile that was used a few pages ago: though in that instance readers were told that “a palm tree bearing fruit at the end of its leaf is like the death of a mother,” here the sentiment is reversed. This matches the way Obi was once an idealist but, over the course of the novel, has come into contact with the hard realities of the modern world. He can no longer afford his idealism, literally and figuratively.

The reversal of this simile also resonates with the theme of literature and idealism. Obi studied English, and his degree bolstered the idealism that then deteriorates over the course of this novel. By inverting a literary device to describe Obi’s loss of idealism, Achebe gestures to the idealism embedded in the novel as a form: the question of whether literature can change anything in the real world. This passage indicates that for Obi to lose his idealism is also a loss of faith in literature. But, of course, Achebe uses intricate literary techniques to convey the complexity of this thematic tangle; in the same line, he both rejects and ratifies the power of literature.