RE-READING ACHEBE’S ARROW OF GOD: FOUCAULT ON POWER AND EXEGESIS OF A NARRATIVE

Abstract

In his books Discipline and Punish: The Birth of A Prison and The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, Michel Foucault, the French postmodernist philosopher who has been hugely influential in shaping our understandings of power, argues that power should not be seen as an instrument of coercion, as has been traditionally conceived, but an instrument diffused and embodied in discourse. His work marks a radical departure from previous modes of conceiving power with its concentration on a single individual posing as an agent of domination. Rather, Foucault challenges this idea of power, seeing it instead as wielded by a people or group through the discursive process. Employing Foucault’s theory, this paper reads Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God as a manifestation of two perceptions of power: the coercive and discursive represented by Ezeulu and Nwaka respectively. Using some extracts from the novel as data for analysis, the two perceptions of power were explored and highlighted. From the analysis, the paper concludes that reading the novel from these perspectives of power sheds more light on power, and that those in leadership positions should see power as diffuse, discursive and embodied, rather than concentrated in the hands of one person who sees it as an instrument of coercion, self-aggrandizement and control over others.