“Things fall apart when the center cannot longer hold” is a line from Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” written in 1919. It inspired Chinua Achebe for the title of his novel Things Fall Apart, first published in 1959. Surprisingly, we can also link this line to the atmosphere in the other novel that will be quoted in this essay, The Interpreter published in 2003 and written by Suki Kim. These two novels deal with stories and characters that are extremely different – one follows the Igbo tribe and how the Igbos react to the arrival of the British and their claim of superiority and the other occurs more than a century later, in the heart of the Korean immigrant community in New York City – and yet it is possible to connect them together. Both
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Reading these two novels can have a profound impact on the readers, as it helps them open their mind to the unknown and different Cultural Others. Both Achebe and Kim increase their readers’ awareness that different peoples have different ways of being human and none should be privileged over the others, through representing different modes of mourning and grieving, different ways to express love that are at the same time culture-specific and universal.
This essay is about creating a shift in the readers’ awareness and acceptance of Cultural Others. However, this shift cannot happen if the readers read the books with closed minds. The following Chinese proverb is a good illustration “The frog at the bottom of the well only see one part of the sky”. Indeed, if a person has walls around them, and sees only what is similar to them, how can they accept something different? This is called ethnocentrism, which Ken Barger defines as “making false assumptions about others' ways based on our own limited experience”. In the same paper, he also says that “the key word [of his definition of ethnocentrism] is assumptions, because we are not even aware that we are being ethnocentric... we don't understand that we don't understand.” Indeed, it is a complicated process to get rid of the stereotypes that
Reading these two novels can have a profound impact on the readers, as it helps them open their mind to the unknown and different Cultural Others. Both Achebe and Kim increase their readers’ awareness that different peoples have different ways of being human and none should be privileged over the others, through representing different modes of mourning and grieving, different ways to express love that are at the same time culture-specific and universal.
This essay is about creating a shift in the readers’ awareness and acceptance of Cultural Others. However, this shift cannot happen if the readers read the books with closed minds. The following Chinese proverb is a good illustration “The frog at the bottom of the well only see one part of the sky”. Indeed, if a person has walls around them, and sees only what is similar to them, how can they accept something different? This is called ethnocentrism, which Ken Barger defines as “making false assumptions about others' ways based on our own limited experience”. In the same paper, he also says that “the key word [of his definition of ethnocentrism] is assumptions, because we are not even aware that we are being ethnocentric... we don't understand that we don't understand.” Indeed, it is a complicated process to get rid of the stereotypes that