O mundo natural e a conversão religiosa em Arrow of God, de Chinua Achebe

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the relationship between the natural world and the theme of religious conversion in Chinua Achebe’s novel Arrow of God. The novel portrays the conflictual relationship between an Igbo religious leader and agents of the British government and the Christian church during the colonial period in Nigeria. As a result of Christian missionary movements during the 19th and 20th centuries, the process of religious conversion was intensified in the African colonial environment, resulting in the fomenting of conflicts and, often, the violent acculturation of colonised countries. This occurred because the missionary movements of the Christian religion were governed by a doctrine of cultural immanence, that is, they sought social and political dominance in the colonised region. Thus, we present a bibliographical research in three complementary sections, considering the animist thinking about a religious consciousness of the material world; the cultural importance of planting and harvesting yam in traditional Igbo societies; and the relationship between the sacred python and the earth goddess of the Igbo pantheon. During the development of the discussions, we established dialogues with authors from different areas of knowledge. We favoured the work of the poet and professor Harry Garuba (2003, 2012), who wrote about the overlapping between animism and literature; the anthropological study of Joseph Thérèse Agbasiere (2000) about the life and culture of Igbo women; and the reflections of Frantz Fanon (1952, 2002) on the colonial project in Africa. Given the fact that religious conversion was presented as a polyvalent process that implies a change in the subjectivity of the converted individual, we consider the intersection between religion and politics in the literary text, investigating the role of Christian faith in the ideological apparatus of British imperialism. We conclude that, in the context of British colonisation, Christianity was not only opposed to the traditional Igbo religion, but also to specific forms of coexistence with the natural world.