The traumatic impacts of colonial project on Igbo society: Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease

Colonialism has been one of the bloodiest projects of the world history, created by the human psyche. It has caused irreparable social and economic destructions. What is worse; it has left many disastrous and permanent wounds on the colonized people‟s psychology as it created a shocking effect and reasoned in psychological trauma This study is committed to analyze the impacts of the colonization plan over Igbo society via the characters of Africa‟s the most prominent figure, Chinua Achebe‟s trilogy-Things Fall Apart, No Longer At Ease and Arrow Of God-hoping to exemplify the psychic problems of all colonized subjects. As a novelist, Achebe aims at regenerating and representing African identity through his characters. With this aim in mind, he uses vivid and nearly real cultural settings in which he screens the victims of the colonial assault with their very agonies and deep psychological predicament. The study consists of four main parts besides introduction section. In the introduction, I tried to state the theoretical principles that are necessary for the analysis of the above novels in terms of the traumatic impacts of the colonial intrusion. In the first part, Things Fall Apart is analyzed in the interest of revealing the symptoms of the trauma experienced by the Nigerian society after their first encounter with the European exploitation. In the second and third parts; respectively Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease are analyzed in the same way. As it will be seen, the same traumatic event can lead to different psychological problems at different times. For instance, the anxiety of the unknown is observed in TFA whereas it is not seen in AOG or NLAE as the second and third generations gradually become adapted to the results of the European exploitation. On the other hand, the chase of power and so corruption can easily be analyzed in AOG and NLAE, while it is not experienced by the first generation victims. In addition to these different ones, similar symptoms which the colonial based trauma has brought about such as grief, depression, superiority/inferiority complex would be analyzed. In the conclusion section, the summation of the paper is presented by general evaluations of the novels in terms of the traumatic effects of the colonization project.