Getting to know the Igbo
INTRODUCTION
 Chinua Achebe |
Chinua Achebe, the author of Things Fall Apart , explained in an interview that “Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do -- it can make us identify with situations and people far away. If it does that, it's a miracle. I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.” (“An African Voice”) |
 Tell us a story... |
Today, your group's job will be to create a piece of literature that will help an American child connect with the culture of the Igbo people (especially the culture that existed before they were colonized). This will be a challenge – you'll need to understand the Igbo culture and you'll have to find a way to explain it so that a fourth grader can understand it. And by doing this, hopefully you'll begin to understand the culture better and be able to connect with the characters and the situations present in the novel we will be reading. NEXT STEP: Task |