"Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe

MJKubus (United States of America)
Okonkwo is an Igbo leader who is banished from his community in this novel that explores the tension between white missionaries and tribal culture in Nigeria.

Here are links to all our lists for the novel: Chapters 1–5, Chapters 6–9, Chapters 10–13, Chapters 14–19, Chapters 20–25

Here is a link to our list for Civil Peace by Chinua Achebe.
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. improvident
    not supplying something useful for the future
    In his day he was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow.
    The pronoun "he" refers to Okonkwo's father Unoka, and this description is the opposite of Okonkwo's nature. Okonkwo is the man he is because Unoka was not the man he should've been.
  2. prowess
    a superior skill learned by study and practice
    To crown it all he had taken two titles and had shown incredible prowess in two inter-tribal wars.
  3. discern
    perceive, recognize, or detect
    He had discerned a clear overtone of tragedy in the crier's voice, and even now he could still hear it as it grew dimmer and dimmer in the distance.
    In describing how Okonkwo "discerned a clear overtone of tragedy," Achebe is emphasizing that his character is a human with reason and emotions (which deliberately contrasts with the Africans described in Conrad's Heart of Darkness).
  4. imperious
    having or showing arrogant superiority
    And so when Okonkwo of Umuofia arrived at Mbaino as the proud and imperious emissary of war, he was treated with great honor and respect, and two days later he returned home with a lad of fifteen and a young virgin.
  5. emissary
    someone sent to represent another's interests
    And so when Okonkwo of Umuofia arrived at Mbaino as the proud and imperious emissary of war, he was treated with great honor and respect, and two days later he returned home with a lad of fifteen and a young virgin.
  6. dominate
    be in control
    But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness.
    Note that "dominate" is being used passively in the example sentence. Although Okonkwo likes to actively dominate others, he cannot control his own fear of weakness and failure. His fear of being dominated by failure and weakness drives him to dominate others so that they wouldn't have the strength to notice or point out any of his weaknesses or failures.
  7. capricious
    changeable
    It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw.
  8. incipient
    only partly in existence; imperfectly formed
    Okonkwo's first son, Nwoye, was then twelve years old but was already causing his father great anxiety for his incipient laziness.
  9. contemptible
    deserving of scorn or disrespect
    And indeed he was possessed by the fear of his father's contemptible life and shameful death.
  10. consolation
    the comfort you feel when soothed in times of disappointment
    He had one consolation. The yams he had sown before the drought were his own, the harvest of the previous year. He still had the eight hundred from Nwakibie and the four hundred from his father's friend. So he would make a fresh start.
  11. despair
    a state in which all hope is lost or absent
    It always surprised him when he thought of it later that he did not sink under the load of despair.
  12. industry
    persevering determination to perform a task
    Indeed he respected him for his industry and success.
  13. brusqueness
    an abrupt discourteous manner
    But he was struck, as most people were, by Okonkwo's brusqueness in dealing with less successful men.
  14. repentant
    feeling or expressing remorse for misdeeds
    Inwardly, he was repentant. But he was not the man to go about telling his neighbors that he was in error.
  15. deft
    skillful in physical movements; especially of the hands
    Sometimes he decided that a yam was too big to be sown as one seed and he split it deftly along its length with his sharp knife.
  16. subdue
    put down by force or intimidation
    He trembled with the desire to conquer and subdue.
  17. taut
    subjected to great tension; stretched tight
    The air, which had been stretched taut with excitement, relaxed again.
  18. disembodied
    not having a material form
    The crowd had surrounded and swallowed up the drummers, whose frantic rhythm was no longer a mere disembodied sound but the very heartbeat of the people.
    The scene is very physical, with the drumbeat becoming a part of the people's bodies and with its focus on a wrestling contest. But this scene also emphasizes a collective spirit that enjoys organized displays of strength.
  19. feign
    give a false appearance of
    On receiving such a message through a younger brother or sister, Nwoye would feign annoyance and grumble aloud about women and their troubles.
  20. wily
    marked by skill in deception
    Nwoye knew that it was right to be masculine and to be violent, but somehow he still preferred the stories that his mother used to tell, and which she no doubt still told to her younger children—stories of the tortoise and his wily ways, and of the bird eneke-nti-oba who challenged the whole world to a wrestling contest and was finally thrown by the cat.
  21. harbinger
    something indicating the approach of something or someone
    They were the harbingers sent to survey the land.
    The pronoun "they" refers to a small swarm of locusts that arrives before the mass of locusts descends like a black cloud that covers half the sky. In the Bible, the descent of locusts was seen as a plague; here, they're seen as a rare opportunity for tasty treats. Later, when a couple of missionaries come as harbingers of British colonists, the villagers' reactions to them are a mix of both views.
  22. audacity
    fearless daring
    Of his three wives Ekwefi was the only one who would have the audacity to bang on his door.
  23. implore
    beg or request earnestly and urgently
    One of them was a pathetic cry, Onwumbiko—"Death, I implore you."
  24. elude
    escape, either physically or mentally
    In that way she will elude her wicked tormentor and break its evil cycle of birth and death."
  25. malevolence
    wishing evil to others
    Her husband's wife took this for malevolence, as husbands' wives were wont to.
  26. listless
    marked by low spirits; showing no enthusiasm
    At first Ekwefi accepted her, as she had accepted others—with listless resignation.
  27. specious
    plausible but false
    And although she believed that the iyi-uwa which had been dug up was genuine, she could not ignore the fact that some really evil children sometimes misled people into digging up a specious one.
  28. manifest
    clearly revealed to the mind or the senses or judgment
    "No," said Ezinma, whose feeling of importance was manifest in her sprightly walk.
  29. guttural
    relating to or articulated in the throat
    Then came the voices of the egwugwu, guttural and awesome.
  30. pandemonium
    a state of extreme confusion and disorder
    The house was now a pandemonium of quavering voices: Am oyim de de de de! filled the air as the spirits of the ancestors, just emerged from the earth, greeted themselves in their esoteric language.
    "Pandemonium" seems like an odd state for judges to be in right before they appear to hear cases. But the egwugwu are not actually confused or disorderly. They are deliberately making their voices sound that way in order to scare the villagers into believing that they are the ancestral spirits of the clan.
  31. esoteric
    understandable only by an enlightened inner circle
    The house was now a pandemonium of quavering voices: Am oyim de de de de! filled the air as the spirits of the ancestors, just emerged from the earth, greeted themselves in their esoteric language.
  32. approbation
    official acceptance or agreement
    There was a loud murmur of approbation from the crowd.
  33. voluble
    marked by a ready flow of speech
    Tortoise was very happy and voluble as he flew among the birds, and he was soon chosen as the man to speak for the party because he was a great orator.
    Tortoise's volubility is connected to his cunning. While volubility is valued by the Ibos because it can bring people closer together, cunning is not because it destroys trust for individual gain. This is emphasized in the ending of the folk story, where Tortoise is justly punished for his deception and greed.
  34. tremulous
    quivering as from weakness or fear
    Now and again an ancestral spirit or egwugwu appeared from the underworld, speaking in a tremulous, unearthly voice and completely covered in raffia.
  35. calamity
    an event resulting in great loss and misfortune
    When the will of the goddess had been done, he sat down in his obi and mourned his friend's calamity.
  36. grievous
    causing or marked by grief or anguish
    Why should a man suffer so grievously for an offense he had committed inadvertently?
  37. irreparable
    impossible to rectify or amend
    But some of these losses were not irreparable.
  38. amends
    something done or paid to make up for a wrong
    As the years of exile passed one by one it seemed to him that his chi might now be making amends for the past disaster.
  39. indignity
    an affront to one's self-esteem
    They were grieved by the indignity and mourned for their neglected farms.
  40. dispensation
    the act of giving out in portions
    There were many men and women in Umuofia who did not feel as strongly as Okonkwo about the new dispensation.
    While the chosen definition for "dispensation" can refer to Mr. Brown's giving of towels and singlets to encourage the villagers to attend his school, the definition intended here is "a specific system by which something is administered," which in the example sentence is "the white man's government."
Created on Sun Nov 03 17:30:43 EST 2019 (updated Sun Nov 03 17:35:46 EST 2019)

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