Nov. 12

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend!  It was also a pleasure to meet your families.  If there are any family members who were not able to make Open School Night please let me know and I will set up a phone conversation or send a letter home.

For homework: Below are the quotes we read in class today. Please answer the question written in BOLD.

In Okonkwo’s clan, what traits are men and women given?  Use evidence from the text to support your answer.

1.) Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper […] (2.12)

2.) Even as a little boy he had resented his father’s failure and weakness, and even now he still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate had told him that his father was agbala. That was how Okonkwo first came to know that agbala was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had taken to title. (2.12)

3.) “He belongs to the clan,” he told her [Okonkwo’s eldest wife]. “So look after him.”

“Is he staying long with us?” she asked.

“Do what you are told, woman,” Okonkwo thundered, and stammered. “When did you become one of the ndichie of Umuofia?”

And so Nwoye’s mother took Ikemefuna to her hut and asked no more questions. (2.16-19)

4.) His mother and sisters worked hard enough, but they grew women’s crops, like coco-yams, beans and cassava. Yam, the king of crops, was a man’s crop. (3.28)

5.) Only a week ago a man had contradicted him at a kindred meeting which they held to discuss the next ancestral feast. Without looking at the man Okonkwo had said. “This meeting is for men.” The man who had contradicted him had no titles. That was why he had called him a woman. Okonkwo knew how to kill a man’s spirit. (4.1)

6.) Inwardly Okonkwo knew that the boys were still too young to understand fully the difficult art of preparing seed-yams. But he thought that one could not begin too early. Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one gravest to another was a very great man indeed. Okonkwo wanted his son to be a great farmer and a great man. He would stamp out the disquieting signs of laziness which he thought he already saw in him. (4.32)

7.) [Okonkwo]: “I will not have a son who cannot hold up his head in the gathering of the clan. I would sooner strangle him with my own hands.” (4.33)

8.) As a matter of fact the tree was very much alive. Okonkwo’s second wife had merely cut a few leaves off it to wrap some food, and she said so. Without further argument, Okonkwo gave her a sound beating and left her and her only daughter weeping. Neither of the other wives dared to interfere beyond an occasional and tentative, “It is enough, Okonkwo,” pleaded from a reasonable distance. (5.10)