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Obi’s Car
The written word represents Obi’s alienation from the folk traditions of his home state as a result of his assimilation to Western culture. The written word plays a determining role in Obi’s life: inspired by the model of biblical study, his strict Christian father Isaac stuffs their house with written works (a rarity in the village), encompassing everything from scripture to newspaper scraps. This reverence for the written word and emphasis on reading steers Obi down a scholarly path that eventually brings him to university studies in England. While abroad, he studies English literature and becomes broadly familiar with the canon. Yet while he seems to have a real admiration for these works, his academic devotion to the literature of a nation that has colonized his own inevitably alienates him from his cultural roots and leaves him with a narrow vision of what professional success and personal fulfillment should look like for a young colonial subject like Obi himself. Under colonial rule, with its inextricable ties to White supremacy, assimilating to Western culture is the only way for Obi to achieve upward mobility and success in British Nigeria. Obi and his father’s areas of interest differ: Obi gravitates toward modern British literature, while Isaac devotes himself to the teachings of Christianity. Nevertheless, they both find that although writing is a source of intellectual and spiritual fulfillment, it has alienated them from the living oral traditions and folk culture that are their people’s lifeblood.
The Written Word Quotes in No Longer at Ease
The No Longer at Ease quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Written Word. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 5
Quotes
‘Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly for ever. Conventional tragedy is too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions. A real tragedy takes place in a corner, in an untidy spot, to quote W. H. Auden. The rest of the world is unaware of it. Like that man in A Handful of Dust who reads Dickens to Mr Todd. There is no release for him. When the story ends he is still reading. There is no purging of the emotions for us because we are not there.’
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Four years in England had filled Obi with a longing to be back in Umuofia. This feeling was sometimes so strong that he found himself feeling ashamed of studying English for his degree. He spoke Ibo whenever he had the least opportunity of doing so. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than to find another Ibo-speaking student in a London bus. But when he had to speak in English with a Nigerian student from another tribe he lowered his voice. It was humiliating to have to speak to one's countryman in a foreign language, especially in the presence of the proud owners of that language. They would naturally assume that one had no language of one's own. He wished they were here to-day to see. Let them come to Umuofia now and listen to the talk of men who made a great art of conversation. Let them come and see men and women and children who knew how to live, whose joy of life had not yet been killed by those who claimed to teach other nations how to live.
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Chapter 11
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With a flash of insight Obi remembered his Conrad which he had read for his degree. 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded.' That was Mr Kurtz before the heart of darkness got him. Afterwards he had written: 'Exterminate all the brutes.' It was not a close analogy, of course. Kurtz had succumbed to the darkness, Green to the incipient dawn. But their beginning and their end were alike. 'I must write a novel on the tragedy of the Greens of this century,' he thought, pleased with his analysis.
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Chapter 13
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‘[…] But sometimes our elders spoke about uli that never faded, although no one had ever seen it. We see it today in the writing of the white man. If you go to the native court and look at the books which clerks wrote twenty years ago or more, they are still as they wrote them. They do not say one thing today and another tomorrow, or one thing this year and another next year. Okoye in the book today cannot become Okonkwo tomorrow. In the Bible Pilate said: "What is written is written." It is uli that never fades.'
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The Written Word Symbol Timeline in No Longer at Ease
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Written Word appears in No Longer at Ease. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...could aid his tribe in land disputes when he returned. Obi, however, switched to studying English literature upon his arrival in England.
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Chapter 2
...the movies, which he hates and she loves. Clara, meanwhile, has no interest in the poetry he admires.
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Chapter 5
...Public Service Commission. He hits it off with the Chairman, with whom he discusses modern English literature . Obi claims that real tragedy is never as simply concluded as it is in...
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Chapter 6
...that his mother would have preferred to regale her children with folk tales rather than Bible readings , but she dutifully submitted to Isaac’s demands and raised them according to his strictures.
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Chapter 10
...terms. When Obi returns home later that night, he takes down A. E. Housman’s collected poems and finds a poem called “Nigeria” that he had written in the manner of Housman...
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Chapter 13
...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...
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Chapter 16
...until tomorrow, as she’s being monitored for complications. He goes home and pulls out Housman’s poems again, this time crumpling the poem called “Nigeria” that he had written and left in...
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Chapter 17
...While going over finances in his head, a messenger arrives to return to Obi a letter he wrote to Clara, in which begged her to keep their relationship alive. The letter...
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