Female Characters: Things Fall Apart

Female Characters: Things Fall Apart and the Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

In both novels, Things Fall Apart and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith the protagonists are males, and a great deal of the narrative surrounds the activities and character development of the males (Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart; Jimmie in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith). However, the roles of women in each novel are unique to that culture and will be reviewed and analyzed for this paper. The culture of the Ibo in Nigeria and the culture of the Aboriginal in Australia are as dramatically different from one another as they are far apart in geography from one another. And yet the two cultures share a common theme and that is the heavy hand of colonialism, and its stifling injection of Western cultural values into native cultural values.

Indigenous women in Things Fall Apart are always under the thumb of the men. The male protagonist, Okonkwo orders women around as though they were slaves. They are not slaves but clearly they serve men in the pecking order of the Ibo villages. On page 64 Okonkwo asks his ten-year-old daughter Ezinma to bring him some "cold water." He thought to himself, "She should have been a boy." Ezinma "rushed out of the hut" and hurried back with his water. Next he wanted his bag and Ezinma brings the bag quickly. When he is finished with his meal and his water bowl Ezinma carries it dutifully back to her mother's hut and as she does Okonkwo says to himself again, "She should have been a boy" (p. 64).

On page 66 Okonkwo again mentions that if "Ezinma had been a boy I would have been happier." The reader gets the idea from the start of the book that females are on the lower rung of the social and cultural ladder in Ibo villages. On page 13, for example, Okonkwo's wives, "especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper"; and on pages 29-30, when Okonkwo's youngest wife Ojiugo fails to cook Okonkwo's dinner he is very angry. When Ojiugo returns to Okonkwo's hut "he beat her very heavily." His anger at the fact that one of his wives (yes, polygamy is part of the Ibo culture, but not part of the Aboriginal culture) did not serve him when he expected was so great he ignored the sacred Week of Peace. The goddess of the earth demands that during this week prior to planting crops no villager shall even say an unkind thing to another, let alone engage in violence. Okonkwo though was 'not the man to stop beating somebody half-way through, not even for fear of a goddess" (p. 30).

Also, in Ibo culture the daughter is not the person who makes up her mind about what man she will marry; that decision is up to the father of the bride. And part of the deal is that the father negotiates a "bride-price"; indeed male heads of the family get money or goods from the suitor or his family for arranging the marriage with his daughter. This kind of arrangement does not exist in the Aboriginal culture in Australia.

Donald R. Wehrs, associate professor of English at Auburn University, explains that Okonkwo "beats" his second wife "on a slight pretext" and "impulsively shoots at her when she mocks him." According to Ibo culture, the pride of a man has to be strong as steel, and because of that Okonkwo "cannot acknowledge how much he values his wife, Ekwefi" (Wehrs, 2008). The background into their relationship has it that Ekwefi was a beautiful young woman that Okonkwo wanted to marry but he was "too poor to pay her bride-price" albeit a few years later she deserted her husband and came to him (Wehrs).

The clues about how Ibo women in Nigeria were treated and what their roles in the society were are far more prevalent than clues about the roles of women in Aboriginal Australia from Keneally's book. In the beginning chapters of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith the only references to aboriginal women are presented when Jimmie is having sex with them -- or when they are being described in unflattering contexts. This presents a rather dismal and raw view of aboriginal females. For example, on page 11, Wongee Tom is talking to Jimmie about white women, and he alludes to the white farmer Neville and his wife. Mrs. Neville had suggested that Jimmie ought to marry a white woman and then their baby would be only a quarter Aboriginal, half of what Jimmie was. "Would you like a white woman Wongee?" Jimmie asked. "Don't seem ter make their cow-cockies happy, having white woman for 'is wife. Why else he come after black girls? Must be sum'pin to white women we ain't been told" (p. 11). The implication drawn from Wongee is that aboriginal females are sexier than white women, but Jimmie is sexually attracted to the white woman.

On page 12 Wongee describes an aboriginal woman who "Yawns for men and not with her mouth. She weeps for men and not with her eyes. She drinks men down, she is cave for men," he said, laughing. In Caledonian that Saturday night Jimmie "suddenly" was "pouring himself without joy into one of the women" while laying in the long grass so police wouldn't see them. The next time readers confront an image of an aboriginal females (p. 20) Jimmie "lay down with a scrawny gin called Florence but found that the preliminaries of copulation sent her into a whooping spasm." This aboriginal camp, called Verona, also was a place where white men came and had sex with aboriginal women. "White voices could be heard as burlap door-flaps were flung open" (this has the tone of a whore house). "Shrieking welcomes were sung to the white phallus, powerful demolisher of tribes." The narrator here seems to be suggesting that by inter-breeding with aboriginal woman the white male was turning a culture into half-breeds.

Jimmie showed zero amount of respect for the aboriginal woman: "Wot's yer animal-spirit, the, yer black bitch? I bin killin' a lot of animals lately. What animal's got yer soul, the?" (p. 25). It could be inferred here that Jimmie was afraid of the women in his own culture perhaps because his own half-black conscience was guilty or insecure? "When he does sleep with a black woman it is presented as a kind of cultural rape, of her by him," writes critic Allan James Thomas (Senses of Cinema). Anne Hickling-Hudson writes, "The tragedy of Jimmie is that, abused and humiliated by the white world for trying to grasp its icons, he is unable to relate positively to the black world, which, in spite of its faults, is his only support system" (Hickling-Hudson, 1990).

On page 29 he is having sex with "a full-blood in the same room where [his brother] Mort had her half-breed sister. The symmetry of the situation was not planned" but there was ***ng coming from Mort about "half-way through [Jimmie's] penetration of the girl." Again, readers don't know much about aboriginal females' domestic roles in this book to this point.