No Longer At Ease Identity Quotes

Obi's listlessness did not show any signs of decreasing even when the judge began to sum up. It was only when he said: "I cannot comprehend how a young man of your education and brilliant promise could have done this" that a sudden and marked change occurred. Treacherous tears came into Obi's eyes….All that stuff about education and promise and betrayal had not taken him unawares….

In fact, some weeks ago when the trial first began, Mr. Green, his boss, who was one of the Crown witnesses, had also said something about a young man of great promise. And Obi had remained completely unmoved….But now when the supreme moment came he was betrayed by treacherous tears. (1.9-10)

Joseph was not very happy when Obi told him the story of the interview. His opinion was that a man in need of a job could not afford to be angry.

"Nonsense!" said Obi. "That's what I call colonial mentality."

"Call it what you like," said Joseph in Igbo. "You know more book than I, but I am older and wiser. And I can tell you that a man does not challenge his chi to a wrestling match. (5. 16-18)

"We have our faults, but we are not empty men who become white when they see white, and black when they see black."

Obi's heart glowed with pride with in him.

"He is the grandson of Ogbuefi Okonkwo who faced the white man single-handed and died in the fight. Stand up!"

Obi stood up obediently.

"Remark him," said Odogwu. "He is Ogbuefi Okonkwo come back. He is Okonkwo kpom-kwem, exact, perfect." (5.100-104)

She [Hannah] was a very devout woman, but Obi used to wonder whether, left to herself, she would not have preferred telling her children the folk stories that her mother had told her. In fact, she used to tell her eldest daughters stories. But that was before Obi was born. She stopped because her husband forbade her to do so.

"We are not heathens," he had said. "Stores like that are not for the people of the Church."

And Hannah had stopped telling her children folk stories. She was loyal to her husband and to her new faith. Her mother had joined the Church with her children after her husband's death. Hannah had already grown up when they ceased to be "people of nothing" and joined the "people of the Church." Such was the confidence of the early Christians that they called the others "the people of nothing" or sometimes, when they felt more charitable, "the people of the world."

Isaac Okonkwo was not merely a Christian; he was a catechist. In their first years of married life he made Hannah see the grave responsibility she carried as a catechist's wife. (6.21-24)

"I can't marry you," she said suddenly…

"I don't understand you, Clara." And he really didn't. Was this woman's game to bind him more firmly? But Clara was not like that; she had no coyness in her….

"Why can't you marry me?" He succeeded in sounding unruffled. For answer she threw herself at him and began to weep violently on his shoulder.

"What the matter, Clara? Tell me." He was no longer unruffled. There was a hint of tears in his voice.

"I am an osu," she wept. Silence. She stopped weeping and quietly disengaged herself form him. Still he said nothing.

"So you see we cannot get married," she said, quite firmly, almost gaily—a terrible kind of gaiety. Only the tears showed she had wept.

"Nonsense!" said Obi. He shouted it almost, as if by shouting it now he could wipe away those seconds of silence, when everything had seemed to stop, waiting in vain for him to speak. (7.58-64)

"I was thinking how such a good and beautiful girl could remain unmarried until now." (7.66)

"Look at me," said Joseph…"You know book, but this is no matter for book. Do you know what an osu is? But how can you know?" In that short question he said in effect that Obi's mission-house upbringing and European education had made him a stranger in his country—the most painful thing one could say to Obi.

I know more about it than yourself," he said, "and I'm going to marry the girl. I wasn't actually seeking your approval." (7.70-71)

Mother's room was the most distinctive in the whole house, except perhaps for Father's….Mr. Okonkwo believed utterly and completely in the things of the white man. And the symbol of the white man's power was the written word, or better still, the printed word…. The result of Okonkwo's mystic regard for the written word was that his room was full of old books and papers—from Blackie's Arithmetic, which he used in 1908, to Obi's Durell, from obsolete cockroach-eaten translations of the Bible into the Onitsha dialect to yellowed Scripture Union Cards of 1920 and earlier. Okonkwo never destroyed a piece of paper. He had two boxes full of them. The rest were preserved on top of his enormous cupboard, on tables, on boxes and on one corner of the floor. (13.24; 27)

"I was no more than a boy when I left my father's house and went with the missionaries. He placed a curse on me. I as not there but my brothers told me it was true. When a man curses his own child it is a terrible thing. And I was his first son."

Obi had never heard about the curse….

"When they brought me word that he had hanged himself I told them that those who live by the sword must perish by the sword. Mr. Braddeley, the white man who was our teacher, said it was not the right thing to say and told me to go home for the burial. I refused to go. Mr. Braddeley thought I spoke about the white man's messenger whom my father killed. He did not know I spoke about Ikemefuna, with whom I grew up in my mother's hut until the day came when my father killed him with his own hands." He paused to collect his thoughts, turned in his chair, and faced the bed on which Obi lay. "I tell you all this so that you may know what it was in those days to become a Christian. I left my father's house, and he placed a curse on me. I went through fire to become a Christian. Because I suffered I understand Christianity—more than you will ever do." (14.58-60)

Everybody wondered why. The learned judge, as we have seen, could not comprehend how an educated young man and so on and so forth. The British Council man, even the men of Umuofia, did not know. And we must presume that, in spite of his certitude, Mr. Green did not know either. (19.29)