As the Text Speaks: The Repressed Returns in Achebe’s No Longer at Ease

Chinua Achebe's novel, No Longer at Ease, which is a sequel to his Things Fall Apart, has aptly upheld the anxieties related to the formation of the-then new generation of Western-educated Nigerian elites through the depiction of the cardinal protagonist, Obi Okonkwo, the grandson of Okonkwo of Things Fall Apart.In fact, the projection of the character of Obi and the various circumstances that victimize him, makes evident as to how the author has tactfully sublimated his anxieties into his narrative, problematizing the text in order to project his painful entrapment between his indigenous roots which are about to "fall apart" under the colonial hegemony imposed by the prevailing European administration on the one hand, and the terribly manipulating and domineering colonial institutions on the other.To this newly formed generation, the subjectposition becomes a blurry, hyphenated space because these young Nigerians on one hand in spite of their Western education are not recognized or accepted by the white-skinned Europeans, on the other hand are alienated by their indigenous people too as they look up at them with reverence and expectation that as they are Western-educated employed in "European posts", they must put forth an exemplary posh lifestyle.Thus, these new Nigerian elites on one hand have to repress their ethnic roots due to the ideologies imposed on them by their European education, on the other hand have to suffer rejection from the colonizers.No Longer at Ease becomes a semi-autobiographical novel, and my Paper aims to project how Achebe has used the 'Conscious' of the text to bring forth his anxieties (he is being: like Obi, a Western-educated Nigerian elite with parents who had converted themselves to Christianity) that he has to otherwise repress into the realm of the 'Unconscious'.