17 pages • 34 minutes read
Beware Soul Brother
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Symbols & Motifs
The Dance
The dance, at its core, represents life. The dance is culture, history, customs, and identity. Achebe establishes this at the beginning of the poem when he says his people “measure out / [their] joys and agonies / too, our long, long passion week / in paces of the dance” (Lines 2-5). Throughout the poem, he argues that these men must not give up their dance—they must not give up their lives, thus sacrificing the music and the rhythm that they are responsible for continuing.
Later in the poem, he warns them to take care against ending the dance with a “lame foot in the air” (Line 35). To do this, he argues, would lead to a loss of inheritance, meaning they would give up the dance in the face of those who wish to end the music. This is not an option for Achebe because the dance is not something only one person does; it is the connection between everyone within the culture, so it is a collective activity that all must perform to stay alive and to keep the culture from vanishing.
The Soul
Achebe connects the dance of life to the soul. It is important for him to identify his people as soulful because the description establishes them as connected to the earth, the past, the gods, the dead, and everything in the world. Whereas those who seek to destroy them cannot dance, the soul brothers have the rhythm of culture and history to give them life and energy. By describing his people as soul brothers, Achebe imbues them with vigor. He declares them human. He makes them people worth following and makes the culture something worth saving because it has spirit, life, and goodness.
The concept of the soul is also deeply spiritual. For Christians, the soul connects humans to God and gives them purpose and significance in the universe. For many non-Christian belief systems, too, the soul distinguishes people from animals. For Achebe’s poem, the soul serves the function of giving autonomy, purpose, and humanity to his people. This offers validation for his own people and works as advocacy against those who might seek to oppress them.
Those Who Lie in Wait
In contrast to the soul brothers who dance and are lively and connected to the natural world, Achebe describes the oppressors as lifeless, materialistic, and lacking rhythm. They are tone deaf, which has a few meanings. On the one hand, this means they cannot fathom the beauty of the music, or the culture and lives, of those they oppress. On the other hand, these are people who do not have a connection with the world and who, instead of dancing to the rhythm of the world, will exploit it for their own gain. These are people with ugly intent who seek only to dominate.
Achebe’s strongest criticism of these people is when he says they are “passionate only for the deep entrails / of our soil” (Lines 17-18), and he warns his people not to leave their land to the “long ravenous tooth / and talon of their hunger” (Lines 20-21). These are animalistic people. They are greedy and uncivilized. They exploit and take without regard for nature, tradition, or the rhythm of life.
Here, Achebe is flipping the traditional power dynamic of colonizer and colonized. For centuries, the powerful colonizers used animalistic descriptions for colonized people, justifying their atrocities with the rationale that these people were less than human. Here, Achebe flips this by showing the true animalistic and inhuman actions of the oppressors in comparison to the energetic, lively, soulful existence of the oppressed.
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By Chinua Achebe
