To Inherit Fire

Living fire begets cold, impotent ash. –Things Fall Apart

Earlier in English class we were discussing Part Two of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and we got around to talking about whether or not Okonkwo deserved any of our sympathy when his own son turned against him. Most of the class were against Okonkwo, and I suppose their dislike of him is justified. But despite his hotheaded temperament and condescending attitude towards other people, I think Okonkwo is still entitled to a little bit of pity, or, in my personal opinion, a substantial degree of sympathy.

I could never imagine walking in his shoes. If I had been in Okonkwo’s place, how would I have felt? I don’t know what it’s like to be a parent, but I suppose it has a lot to do with placing your hopes on someone else’s shoulders; expecting them to carry it onwards into the future that you can’t be a part of.

Wouldn’t it be heartbreaking, then, if the very person you trusted with your everything shrugged your cherished dreams off his shoulders and let them hit the ground?

Maybe my friends are right, to some extent. Okonkwo has to take some responsibility in causing Nwoye to run away to the Christians. He should never have pressured Nwoye so much. He should never have assumed that Nwoye wanted the same things as he had as a young man. Maybe despite knowing Nwoye wanted different things, Okonkwo was doing all he could to give Nwoye the best out of the life he knew. Okonkwo is a father, after all, and perhaps—even if we’re not willing to acknowledge it—he, like our parents, knows what it’s like to not want to follow your father’s footsteps; your mother’s footsteps. Perhaps when our parents were like us they had decided never to follow someone else’s decisions, and ended up making choices they never thought they’d agree to; walking down paths they’d hoped to avoid while still dreaming that they would end up somewhere different.

I think we sympathize with Nwoye more easily because most of us know what it’s like to fall under the pressure of someone else’s expectations. We readily back him in his decision to tear away from his father’s ways because some part of us has already known what it’s like to want the same thing. If I had been in his position I would have done the same—I suppose I would have at least contemplated running away.

Let’s imagine it this way; Okonkwo’s modern day equivalent would be a prominent bussinessman with influence left and right in a sprawling metropolis—a highly successful public figure whose life is characterized by outstanding achievements in an Ivy League university and an offer to join a prestigious company upon finishing his second year. It is hard enough to imagine being a daughter to such a man—but to be a son who is expected to continue the legacy? In my head I imagine Atlas with the world on his shoulders, passing it on to a nervous, slippery-fingered, scrawny teen who knows the world will tumble and crash out of his hold.

Then again, isn’t that just what we are expected to do?

In an episode of Heroes, Peter Petrelli comments that “...we’re just cheap knockoffs of our fathers.” For me personally, it feels like a punch to the gut. It hurts more than a little to know that no matter what we do we’ll still be compared to our parents. That we won’t have any trace of things that people thought would still be imprinted in us. That we’ll probably never be good enough to satisfy what people expect. In this sense, I sympathize with Nwoye.

Is it any wonder then that we want to break away from the paths our parents have set out for us? Isn’t it plausible to think that we attempt to build paths other than someone else’s because we’re scared of being less than what they were? I don’t ever want to be known as ash remaining from someone else’s fire.

I don’t want to grow up chasing my father’s shadows and pursuing my mother’s victories and mistakes. I don’t want to destroy what they worked so hard to build. I don’t want to be the one responsible for the look in their faces when they find their life-long struggles are for naught.

Do you still think Okonkwo deserves no sympathy?

A part of me wants to exclaim that I could never forgive Nwoye for tearing down what Okonkwo had given his all to build. I could never forgive Nwoye for taking the dreams Okonkwo had carried with him from childhood to fatherhood—the dreams he had kept alive by pouring out his sweat, blood, and tears for—and allowing them crash and burn. I could never forgive Nwoye for insinuating that Okonkwo’s lifelong struggles held no importance, by walking out on everything his father worked for.

If Okonkwo held true to the hotheaded and violent nature we have associated him with, I would have expected him to take his machete and separate Nwoye’s head from his body. Doesn’t that sound like something he would do?

But people like me who have no idea what it’s like to be a father or a mother will never understand what it is that makes them love their children so much. I may never understand why Okonkwo still allowed Nwoye to pursue his own choices; why Okonkwo would allow Nwoye to build a new life and support dreams of his own when Okonkwo’s hopes had been sullied and broken beyond repair by his son’s betrayal.

I may never understand how Okonkwo can retain love for a traitor. But at least I can imagine him thinking about Nwoye and sighing at the fire. Perhaps at that moment some semblance of weakness crossed his features. Perhaps at that moment we would be able to see the face of a broken old man, mourning the death of his wasted, uncontinued dreams; still harboring an amazing, undying love for the boy who blew out the fire and left behind only ash.

A Digital Apocalypse

Note: This is not to be graded. This post is so horrid that I am considering deleting it. If you grade it you will cause extreme strain to my highly vulnerable ego.

In an eccentric movie being shown in TOK, I realized that humans have an innate need to make everything complex that even when they try to make things simpler, they unconsciously complicate it in the process.

Its human nature, after all.

Technology is paramount to our development. It serves as a backbone to the functions of our world. Conglomerates such as Intel, IBM, and the Japanese giants shape who we are today. True, the extent to which we are capable of innovating is admirable, and what we've come up with over these past years are in fact joys that I delight in – for heaven’s sake, I’m writing in the offspring of human innovation right now.

But past a certain extent, our indulgence on these good things might as well be our self-imprisonment. Because after all, as we find ourselves further and further taking advantage of the technologies we have at our expense, we are involuntarily making ourselves reliant on these things. In fact, technology has become so crucial to our lives that a relatively skilled hacker could take down an entire country from the comfort of his personal computer. In our pursuit of making life easier, we have instead chained ourselves unto this digital web of binary codes and iThings that our world has been morphed into a gigantic maze of circuitry.

What can I say? We are naturally self-damaging.

Cellular messaging, online messenger clients, and social sites such as friendster and facebook have been deemed great inventions that bridge communication gaps. Miraculous isn’t it, how people on separate ends of the world can be connected by a simple click of a button? Clicking and typing have now become comparable to making friends. Lovely.

Yes sure, communication on a superficial level has become as easy as getting a drink or taking a piss. But in reality, have we become more social creatures through the aid of these so-called social “tools?” Are we so much more social than our parents, or our grandparents – old folks who have no remote clue of what the world-wide-web is? Or have some of us instead become overly dependent on this system that without it, we are rendered socially dysfunctional?

Because nowadays, in our pursuit of taking advantage what is there for us, there’s a long, gradual, unnecessary process involved in socializing. First, meeting randomly through friendster or facebook. Next, when things become more comfortable, chatting. After that comes SMSing. This is then followed by calling. Only then can people become comfortable enough to meet in person.

Long gone are the days when socializing is the way it’s supposed to be – frank, straightforward, simple. In fact, for some, it’s impossible to go back to the way it was. They are so adapted to having a digital social life – an artificial social life – to the extent that face-to-face communication becomes a nervous chore that is impossible to do without that dreadful awkwardness and an unforgiving urge to urinate. It truly is ironic how something that was designed to help people socialize have instead caused social retardation to some unfortunate ones. Marvelous, isn't it?

In the domestic household, communication has become so easy that the use of a phone or a pager is parallelized to staying in touch. Members of a family feel free to come home late and not meet their siblings or parents as long as they’ve made contact during that day. Familial union is slowly becoming nonexistent as parent-children interaction is based on radio frequencies.

In this digital era, our digitalization is inescapable. As we reinvent, we reform our world into a prison of encryption plague-ridden by the fear of malicious codes. As we restructure society, we make human interaction artificial. As we try to connect, we instead disconnect. As we play into this symphony of irony, our intentions backfire, our control is lost, and our self-sufficiency becomes just a mere shadow of our "primitive" past.