When things fall apart
Dec 5th, 2006 by Tian
I just read the news on banned books in Malaysia. My jaws drop, what? Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is banned by the government. I wonder how crazy our censorship can be? In the banned list includes works of Milan Kundera and Khalil Gibran. And 1001 Arabian Nights too? We can’t tell the stories of Sindbad, Aladdin or Ali Baba to children anymore!?
Things Fall Apart was my English textbook for HSC (in Australia). I believe it was in the syllabus of STPM too. I am amazed, how illiterate and how ignorant our authorities have become. But I am not sad, it is evident now: things are falling apart, the center cannot hold. Isn’t that a clear sign?
I could partially memorize the verses of William Butler Yeats which inspired the title of Achebe’s book. The poem titled “The Second Coming†was describing the End, or ‘Kiamat’. I find this as an appropriate allegory for the end of a regime:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer. Is the PM the falconer? And his followers are deaf to his command? No verse describes the current political reality better: The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. When the ‘center’ cannot hold, as we are witnessing today, sentiments of extremist and violent racialism have been unleashed. Umno Assembly showed plenty of them. Our politics have lost its center.
The poem reads on. Yeats even predicted the confrontation of ‘global’/‘universal’/world spirit and the Maha Fir’aun:
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand;
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries
of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The revelation: the second coming is near. Perhaps it is the coming of a universal spirit of democracy and humanism. Things of the old regime are falling apart. Shouldn’t we wipe our tears and rejoice?
P/S
Read more on Sharon Bakar and Silverfish