In
Metaphor, David Punter reads Chinua Achebe s postcolonial novel,
Things Fall Apart (1958) which draws upon Yeats s The Second Coming (1921) for its title, arguing that the centre is responsible for the very social, political and cultural problems now being encountered in Africa, and perhaps globally (117). While in Yeats the centre is synonymous with innocence, Achebe s position as the colonised reconceptualises it to be the root of all plights. The shift in perspective caused by colonial experience endows the postcolonial writer with a weapon to rework. It also alters and indeed subverts the ideologically coded colonial network of images and metaphors to write back to the centre. Theorised as contrapuntal reading by Edward Said, it is a form of reading back from the perspective of the colonised to show how submerged but crucial presence of the empire emerges in canonical texts (Ashcroft and Ahluwalia,
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