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 s...