Marriage Is A Private Affair Analysis

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We were asked to read the story “Marriage Is a Private Affair” written by Chinua Achebe. The story was about a young man from Ibo, Nnaemeka, who was from the Igbo/Ibo tribe and who was now living in the city of Lagos. Nmaemeka who went home to talk to his father about a girl named Nene whom he was deeply in love with. Okeke, his father, refuses to accept Nene as his son’s wife in the future. In fact, Okeke has chosen a wife for Nmaemeka who was Ugoye Nweke. Ugoye was a girl who Okeke believes to be a perfect wife for Nmaemeka. But, Nmaemeka was too in love with Nene that he refused to his father’s will. Nmaemeka shows determination to marry the woman that he loves. Because of this, he returns to Nene and the city. Equally stubborn, Okeke refuses…show more content…
It was full of information about the culture of the Ibo tribe. I was biased to Nene because she has a point about the love that they are fighting for. They deserve the right to choose their partner. They should not be dictated to whom they should marry. But after I have read the whole story and doing a few more readings, I realized that Okeke just wants to continue their tradition because maybe he feels that they will soon be extinct if he let that modern culture kind of mind spread through their tribe. In the conversation of Nene and Nnamaeka in the first part of the story, Nnamaeka said “Yes. They are most unhappy if the engagement is not arranged by them. In our case its worse—you are not even an Ibo”, that is why Nene was silent for a moment and then he began to realize that it is possible that a person’s tribe could arrange whom he should marry. It illustrate what kind of society Nene had lived. In her society, they have the right and the freedom to choose on what they want to do in their life. They believe that parents should abandon them after they reached the right age to decide on their own. I can see how Achebe was trying to tell us what the kind of culture that the Ibo’s are living. He was illustrating how Ibo’s preserve their culture even though they are being colonized by the other country. Also, he was illustrating what happened to the city like how it became more

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