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The "Evil Forest"1in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is a physical geographic space reserved for threatening and abominable objects and bodies. Although the Evil Forest2is not the only "zone of prohibition"3in the novel, it is the only one completely closed off to any form of collective life. Its two essential features are, as the narrator specifies, its status as "dumping ground" and the fact of its being "alive with sinister forces and powers of darkness."4As a space associated primarily with death and violence, the Evil Forest stands out in the topography of Achebe's novel as a spatial void. Yet, in spite of this singularity, the Evil Forest organizes the texts in interesting ways. For one thing, it is an elusive thread that ties all the main characters in the novel together. The deity who takes the Evil Forest as her primary domain is called The Goddess of the Earth and guarantees the complex of laws having to do with life and death. In the confrontation with the colonial order, the Evil Forest is designated as "the real battlefield."5The objective of this essay is to bring this space into focus by examining it as a complex political and literary paradigm through which the fictional world of the novel derives its form and order.
Scholars of Achebe's work have typically approached the Evil Forest as a cultural curiosity. In Reading Chinua Achebe, Simon Gikandi lumps the Evil Forest with other "zones of prohibition and exclusion" through which the clan6"deals with the unknown and the unseen."7The Evil Forest is thus constituted as a mythic element through which the clan sublimates what it cannot fully assume. Sofia Samatar's attempt to frame the Evil Forest within a "pycho-spiritual"8framework yields interesting analysis. But she treats the Evil Forest as one among other cultural elements that reflects the clan's "moral universe."9Even Harry Olufunwa who begins with the argument that the Evil Forest is linked to spatial order concludes with the notion that it represents a belief system. At first, he defines the Evil Forest as a principle of "chaos"10internal to the clan's "temporal and spatial framework."11But the moment...