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No, Not “America”, but Love – A Review

Here are my thoughts on the final story on the Caine Prize shortlist for 2013: Chinelo Okparanta’s America. Thoughts on earlier stories are here: Bayan Layi, Miracle, Foreign Aid and Whispering Trees.

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As far as the Caine Prize shortlist is concerned, no better gift could have come after last week’s unimpressive encounter with Whispering Trees than a story that is unpredictable, sweet, and delightful – a worthy end to my review of the five shortlisted stories of the Caine Prize 2013. In Chinelo Oparanta’s beautiful story of love and longing is that final elixir. It is a tale of love between two women, eventually separated by the other by the Atlantic Ocean, hence “America”, and a story-long attempt through a stream of recollections to reunite with the distant lover.

The story begins in medias res with the heroine Miss Nnenna Etoniru on the way to Lagos from Port Harcourt for a visa interview. She is hoping to head to America in order to meet Miss Gloria (whose age we didn’t quite figure out), a subject of her affection and love which had defied parental objection and entreaties. Before the trip is over, we hear about her first visit to the visa office which ended in a rejection. We also hear of the story of the relationship itself, how it began, who knew about it and what their reactions were, and what Nnenna was looking forward to in the nearest future. They had met in a school she worked, and where Miss Gloria had visited for a week, and struck up a relationship away from the eyes of their colleagues and the world. All through the story – and to great credit to the writer not falling into a temptation to write a treatise – the word “lesbianism” was never mentioned once. Instead we had the following:

“Mama still reminds me every once in a while that there are penalties in Nigeria for that sort of thing.”

The “sort of thing” taboo-speak the author used here and elsewhere enhances the sense of the abominable in the relationship, leaving us to resolve our feelings about it ourselves. In another scene where her mother walks in on a live sexual scene taking place in Nnenna’s room, the writer describes it again as follows:

“Mama stands where she is for just a moment longer, all the while she is looking at me with a sombre look in her eyes. ‘So, this is why you won’t take a husband?’ she asks.”

It is subtle so that all concerned know what the mother had just witnessed. This dexterous show-not-tell style of writing greatly benefited the story, and deserves a lot of commendation. It also ensured that the story had just those (barely) two sexual encounters in order – I would guess – to keep it special/relevant enough to matter in our minds before it became all too gratuitous. In another scene, she describes something that seemed like a woman on her period:

“There is a woman sitting to my right. Her scent is strong, somewhat like the scent of fish. She wears a headscarf, which she uses to wipe the beads of sweat that form on her face. Mama used to sweat like that. Sometimes she’d call me to bring her a cup of ice. She’d chew on the blocks of ice, one after the other, and then request another cup. It was the real curse of womanhood, she said. Young women thought the flow was the curse, little did they know the rest. The heart palpitations, the dizzy spells, the sweating that came with the cessation of the flow. That was the real curse, she said. Cramps were nothing in comparison”

It turned out eventually that there was a literal fish somewhere in the woman’s bag, and that the woman herself was pregnant. It seemed to be a special narrative strength of the writer to put things like this, or else a personal quirk derived from her own inability or reluctance to be anything but discreet with intimate subjects. I found it enchanting.

In response to the earlier-quoted charge, Nnenna responds:

“It is an interesting thought, but not one I’d ever really considered. Left to myself, I would have said that I’d just not found the right man. But it’s not that I’d ever been particularly interested in dating them anyway.”

This is where my fascination with the plot begins. Many questions arise: was Nnenna a lesbian or merely bisexual? Was she capable of ever loving a man the same way she had loved Gloria? Was Gloria the last woman she would ever love (it certainly sounded like she was the first, or we would have been told)? Is it a love based on mutual respect of mental and professional capabilities and idealism, or one fuelled by lust and desire? Is it both? Will it endure or has it already begun to fail by the time Gloria returned home for the first time after her initial departure? Is this story about an expression of sexual orientation bursting out of a repressed environment or an expression of just a particularly stimulating and enduring passion developed serendipitously for one person only? Not all of these can be answered by the quote above, or by the story itself. At the end, we are left with the endless possibilities that abound in the reunion of two distant friends in a foreign land.

I am curious about these because the story is an important intervention in the current debate about same-sex relationships. From all we know, it was a consensual relationship. But from what we hear of the interventions of Mama, it was one caused by the overbearing influence of the foreigner which Nnenna just couldn’t shake.

I found Mama‘s presence very interesting too: a Nigerian woman of the conservative Igbo culture whose strongest reaction to her daughter’s same-sex relationship was to cry a few times, and to pick out baby names in order to pressure the daughter. No church interventions. No village elders brought in. No shouting out loud until the whole town got involved and shamed the daughter. Either she is a weirdly tolerant modern Igbo/Nigerian mother, or she is a contrived flawless character that exists nowhere else but in Ms. Okparanta’s rebellious imagination. Either seemed to work perfectly, but I can accept this only because I am creatively wired to do so. It might be harder for others.

On the other hand, female-to-female sexual love seem to occupy a lower run on the outrage ladder of our society than male-to-male. The writer seemed to have acknowledged that reality in this scene, a nod to the more familiar types of Nigerian families we have come to always expect to meet in these kinds of situations:

‘You know. That thing between you two.’
‘That thing is private, Mama,’ I replied. ‘It’s between us two, as you say. And we work hard to keep it that way.’
‘What do her parents say?’ Mama asked.
‘Nothing.’ It was true. She’d have been a fool to let them know. They were quite unlike Mama and Papa. They went to church four days out of the week. They lived the words of the Bible as literally as they could. Not like Mama and Papa who were that rare sort of Nigerian Christian with a faint, shadowy type of respect for the Bible, the kind of faith that required no works. The kind of faith that amounted to no faith at all. They could barely quote a Bible verse.
‘With a man and a woman, there would not be any need for so much privacy,’

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I enjoyed reading the story because of how it is written, error-free as you would expect from something in Granta, and the dimensions of politics, policy and advocacy that formed a humming background to the whole relationship. The right balance was struck to keep them visible enough, but not too loud as to crowd out the other details in the story. When the story is over, we forget about the oil spill and the other issues bedeviling Nigeria or the US, and are just contented that lovers are finally going to unite.

My grouse with America is with the title, an attempt to be plain and simple that ended up terribly as trite at best, and patronizing at worst. Out of about a million other titles that evoke love, expectations, guilt, distance, longing, and a thousand more other emotions one must feel while being in a taboo relationship fraught with such perils, Chinelo chose “America”, the biggest buzz-kill of all. The theme of “America”, “Americanah”, or traveling or returning has been written about so many times that inviting the audience into that story on that premise holds too much risk. I had the same problem and a disappointment of expectations with Pede Hollist’s “Foreign Aid”. One had to read the with a much reduced of expectations only to discover a gem in the end. That is too cruel, and doesn’t do justice to a work that could otherwise have enticed more curious readership and a better whetted appetite for such interesting stories.

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Reproduced on Nigerianstalk LitMag | Photos from Actuatornic and Queer Cinema.

Fledgling Whispers of a Story – A Review

This week, I discuss my thoughts on Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Whispering Trees, the fourth story on the shortlist of the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing. Many other bloggers are participating in what Aaron Bady spearheaded as a “Blog Carnival”: thoughts and opinions on each of the shortlisted stories. Find the rest of the reviews on twitter via the hashtag #CainePrize.

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Of all the stories I have read since this Caine Prize carnival began, Whispering Trees is one I have read twice fully, from beginning to end. It is a story about Salim, a young man who became disabled, and lost his eyesight, in a car accident and along with it his dignity and prospects, and who eventually finds a different kind of vision staring at “souls” of people, and seeing visions.

I read the story twice not because I particularly enjoyed and understood it all the first time, but because I didn’t fully grasp it and wanted to be sure about the intentions of the author and the character. Many of my thoughts from the first reading were confirmed by a second reading: it is a story about coping with disability, but a little also about faith, and psychic and supernatural outer body experiences, and love. The author doesn’t succeed in developing each of these areas, but we see that it was his intention that we see them. Away from the second reading, I realized that there were no hidden meanings other than the fact of the hero’s disabilities and eventual psychic evolution. It tried very hard to be didactic, but failed at that too. The last line, italicized for effect, read “I realize that happiness lies, not in getting what you want, but in wanting what you have.” I certainly had not come to that conclusion merely by reading the story, and including it as the last line did not drive it in either.

I could be uncharitable and say that Whispering Trees could have borrowed a leaf from the handling of the crises of faith and disability from reading Tope Folarin’s Miracle, or that it could have portrayed the homeliness of young hapless men under a tree deliberately named by reading Elnathan John’s Bayan Layi. Heck, it could have done better with romance under pressure by reading Pede Hollist’s Foreign Aid, but that would be assuming that the author wrote the story with the Caine Prize in mind, only after reading these other stories. It is most certainly not the case, so I will only say that whatever moved the author to write this story could most certainly have been better served by a shorter and smarter handling of the plot. There are many issues that can be raised from this story about of the helplessness of disabled people in Nigeria, particularly those wounded as a result of man-made disasters like car accidents. There are also angles of societal neglect and the non-existence of public facilities to make the life of disabled folks much easier. These however are from my own mining of the story’s schizzy fields. The author doesn’t consciously lead me to them.

The part of the story detailing the problems of disability were affecting, but seemed artificial and forced, helped by the tortured use of some figures of speech. The most uncharitable word for these instances of use is “amateurish”, providing a major obstacle to enjoying the story. Here are a few:

Personifications:

Sometimes it worked beautifully: “I remained there until my anger forced tears out of my damaged eyes”, but most times it didn’t: “Silence answered me.”, “Insomnia would claim me every night”, “My mind climbed up to the gates of heaven once more, seeking admittance”, “She would talk and weep until blessed sleep stole her away”, “I heard the trees screaming in agony as they were cut down”, and “But my mind was not very happy about this.” Nobody should ever write like that.

Similes:

There were some passable lines: “Her tears, like rain, fell on the wild fire of anger raging in my heart and extinguished it.” Others were not: “I discovered a whole new world of numbers and was as excited as Columbus must have been when he stumbled upon America” and “She pranced in front of the house calling for Saratu just like Achilles before the walls of Troy.”

Hyperbole:

In describing a rash and angry response of an otherwise reasonable citizen, the following was written: “Faulata fetched some petrol and poured it on the house. She was about to set it ablaze when they seized her. She struggled fiercely and wept because they would not let her burn down the house. Later, Saratu’s parents came to apologise. Neither Faulata nor I said a word to them. Then the elders came and delivered a long, boring lecture about forgiveness and reconciliation and, to get rid of them, I said it was over. So Saratu kept her distance.” The attempted arson described here could as well be the most hurried description I’ve ever read. I am trying to see how Faulata could have poured petrol on the house. The event to which Faulata was responding by trying to set a fire ablaze didn’t also seem to warrant this kind of response either, so I chalked it down as a failed hyperbole regarding plot.

In another part of the story, a character makes an attempt at quoting Oscar Wilde. The original poem, from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, reads:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

In Ibrahim’s story, there was the following:

Hamza and I talked some more until he rose and said, “I must leave now. Now that you are here, I can leave. But see how beautiful this place is, see how pure and full of life it is. Yet, someday, the living will come and destroy everything.” He started off, “Man destroys that which he claims to love.”

In another instance, the author tries to write in Nigerian Pidgin English, yet gave us the following:

The oga’s voice was raucous. “How much you find for ’im body?”

The first man said, “Four thousand naira, sir.”

The oga grumbled, “These ones se’f, them no carry plenty money. Oya, put ‘im body with the others but hide the money before people come.”

Yes, that was ‘im body, se’f, and other unconvincing attempts at Nigerian Pidgin. In pidgin, there would be no apostrophe in any of those words, and “body” would surely have been written as bodi.

I realize then why I found the story hard to enjoy as fiction, or anything other than the writer’s attempt to be profound and didactic with magical realism: it tried too hard, with little skill, and failed (at least as a worthy representative of this year’s shortlist of the best of African fiction. As some have wondered aloud: “thank goodness we won’t have to read the other ninety non-shortlisted pieces!”).

Now, so that this does not end up as a completely disappointed rant against something that Mr. Ibrahim surely put a lot of effort into writing, let me admit that I found the first sentence quite charming and inviting: “It’s strange how things are on the other side of death.” Had the promise of that initial sentence been followed by equally strong and well sustained passages, and had the story been a lot shorter, or at least the characters better developed, we might have had a different offering.

The other paragraph that I found absolutely delightful is as follows:

“The rains came and went. The grasses grew lush green and faded into a pale, hungry brown. I could hear the dry, cold harmattan winds blowing through the starved savannah; I could feel it on my desiccated skin. The weather grew unpleasantly chilly. Everything was cold, including my heart. Faulata was gone”

Unfortunately, gems like this were far in-between, and did not tie the story together as a tale of resurrection, redemption, and a soulful realization of an inner strength and power as the author clearly intended the story to be.

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Also published on the NT LitMag

The Travails of Logan – A Review of “Foreign Aid”

Here are my thoughts on the third story on the Caine Prize shortlist: Foreign Aid by Pede Hollist

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I began reading this story with trepidation, and a worry that after reading Elnathan John’s “Bayan Layi” which moved me in a disturbing yet endearing way, and Tope Folarin’s “Miracle”, which made me think a lot about dimensions of faith and unbelief in the socialization process of young Africans, I had lost the innocence of my expectations, and thus perhaps irreparably damaged in my ability to see any new (or delightful) surprises in any of the last three shortlisted stories. After finishing Pede Hollist’s story Foreign Aid, I can now reluctantly admit that the trepidation was unnecessary.

The really long short-story that is Foreign Aid follows the travails of a returnee American, Balogun (who became Logan as part of his necessary painful American socialization experience) all the way from America where he had emigrated with hopes of becoming an economist to his Sierra Leonean homeland where he had come, after a long absence, to visit his parents and right some wrongs. Things didn’t go quite as planned, and thus the story. Nothing explains the length of this work – a little over 10,000 words – except a guess that, like many of the others, it is part of a longer story that continues beyond the limit of a short story. To the its credit, the plot captivates one enough to take the reader from one part to the next one, onto an eventual, climatic (if predictable) end.

Many parts of the story made me smile, a few others made me very upset, and a couple more made me feel sorry for the protagonist, Logan, who reminds me of a number of American emigrés returning home for the first time in years. The accent, the impatience, and the righteous indignation at the state of things in the homeland is carefully depicted in a believable way. Much of the depictions of the warm, cheerful receptions in Freetown, and Logan’s introduction to long-lost relatives reminded me of a book I’d recently re-“read” in audio form – a story of another young man visiting his “hometown” this time for the very first time. It is Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama. The depiction of Kenya’s physical and human landscapes were affecting, and vivid in DFMF, as it was in Mr. Hollist’s work.

Here’s one from Foreign Aid:

Over the next two hours, in the television-less but now mosquito-ﬁlled
room, Father, Mother, and son chatted quietly, beginning with the events
at the ferry terminal and working their way back twenty years, alternating
stories of home and abroad, their conversation punctuated by the occasional
horn from a speeding car and Mother’s palms crushing hapless mosquitoes
that ventured within her reach.
“We’ve arranged a thanksgiving service for you to thank God for
protecting you and making your life a success.”
“I don’t go to church,” Logan said.
“America!” Mother sighed.
“What does that mean?” Father, a lifetime chorister, quizzed.
“God was nowhere when I gat kicked outta my cousin’s house, had no
job, nothing!”
“Were you praying and going to church?” Mother asked.
“All I know is that I gat no one but me,” Logan poked his chest, “to
thank for where I’m today.” He proceeded to tell the story of his twenty-year
sojourn in America. They went to bed that night with smiles and handshakes,
but they were like those offered through the bars of a jail cell between a prisoner and visiting relatives—well-meaning and hopeful but grounded in two
different realities, and neither party fully understood the reality of the other.

The “coming home” factor brought an affecting quality to the story that makes it hard to judge Logan as harshly as one would have if we had just encountered him at a bus park, a train station, or at an airport, screaming impatiently at a bus driver for driving too slow, or for losing his luggage. We know him intimately, we come to believe, and we take as much pity on him as we would if he were us. His reflection at the end of the scene quoted above is common through the story. Like Obama’s in his own autobiography, but unlike him in the circumstances of their return, their relationships with the hosts, the eventual consequences of their return, and the depth of their reflection, there is a sense of keen observation, reflection, and disappointments.

In many ways then, the story is one of transition, of hope and disappointments, of the price of alienation and intervention, and of the futility of assuming on returning to an old place that things would remain the same or remain within one’s reach to improve. The metaphor of the changing of name from the Yoruba name Balogun (warrior) to the Americanese “Logan” is a sad and constant reminder of this transition and its ramification for immigrants everywhere. It’s more enhanced by a realization that these Yoruba group in Sierra Leone may have originally migrated from Nigeria themselves over a certain period of time. And, importantly, that Sierra Leone was founded as a resettling spot for freed slaves from America who had also – at some point far up in history – come from these parts and others around West Africa.

In one last, moving, scene, Logan speaks to a youth at the airport already contemplating his own migration pattern:

“Do you go to school?”
“Form ﬁve.” Lahai puffed his chest.
“What do you want to do after school?”
“Go to Nigeria and study to become a pilot.”
“Nigeria! Why not America?”
The youth chuckled. “I won’t have the money for America, but maybe
I will have enough for Nigeria.”

The – I assume, authorial – self-reflection, and the notable irony of this opposite migratory pattern eastwards as contrasted with Logan’s own to the West, created – for me – a moment of profound empathy. It is not hard to imagine the youth one day taking on a Nigerian name, and maybe a Nigerian wife of his own in the nearest future.

There was another brief moment of such reflection when we find out that [spoiler alert] the Coral scum who had impregnated the author’s sister was not a foreigner at all, but a native Sierra Leonean himself [/spoiler alert]. It was not a long scene, but readers sensitive to challenges on the continent relating to belonging and nationality might find it significant. Reading the author’s bio as having interests in “the literature of the African imagination—literary expressions in the African continent as well as in the African diaspora” puts all of this exploration of movements into a proper perspective. He could as well be a Chimamanda Adichie, an Uwem Akpan, a Chika Unigwe, or – with some finesse – even a Teju Cole.

The story may have been told before in many different forms, but the development of the characters here, and the attention the writer pays to them and their foibles makes for a refreshing, if entertaining, perspective. I do not know much about Sierra Leone and its political and social situation, so this gave me a little glimpse. I didn’t know how similar to Nigeria it was. This helped. I also like the unapologetic use of the Sierra Leonean Creole throughout. Those who pay attention would easily spot that Tenki ya meant “thank you”, that Sa meant “sir”, that Luk ya meant “look at you”, that Salone meant Sierra Leone, that Yu no yehri wetin a se? asked “Can’t you hear what I said?”, or that Minista bizi meant “the minister is busy.” They may not know that Coral referred to a bastardized form of “Korean” or basically “Asian” (or any brown foreigner, used to refer to Lebanese immigrants in Africa), or the meaning of Borbor, except they are familiar with the pidgins of West Africa. They would not have lost much however, as they story flowed nevertheless.

I have saved my beef with the writing for last – a minor but irritating quirk of the writer to capitalize “white” whenever it referred to a Caucasian woman in the story: “The White ofﬁcer grumbled” (262), “two marriages, one to a White woman, and three child-support payments later” (258), and “to his mother that he would take care of himself and not marry a White woman…” (258). It was unnecessary, ungrammatical, and needlessly distracting. It is also jarring enough, I would assume, to not have escaped the eyes of a diligent journal editor. Overall, it is a brilliant and enjoyable work that improves on re-reading; challenged, perhaps, for this competition, only by its incredible length.

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Also published on the Nigerianstalk LitMag

Losing a Faith You Never Had – A Review of “Miracle”

This week, as part of my five-week blogathon on the five shortlisted stories in the 2013 Caine Prize, I present some thoughts on the second story: Tope Folarin’s Miracle, first published in the Transition Magazine Issue 109, an excerpt from the forthcoming novel The Proximity of Distance. Read it at http://www.caineprize.com/pdf/2013_Folarin.pdf

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The plot of Miracle is a very simple one, a familiar story told however in a deliberately slow fashion that builds expectation from the beginning to a deft crescendo finish at the end: an infidel (also, a realist) gives faith a chance in public at one vulnerable moment, and is disappointed. I have experienced it, however in a different fashion. Most people who grew up in the pentecostal socialization process of southern Nigeria have experienced it in one form or the other. In the beginning, there is doubt, then there is a little benefit of the doubt, which leads to a “leap of faith”, and then a final denouement that sends the accidental believer headfirst into the bosom of disbelief, and reality.

My first thought on Miracle is that is is well written, well-edited, and well presented on the page – credit to the author, and to the Transition Magazine editors. And although I spent much of initial time reading the story wondering where it is headed, it is one of those stories where patience is rewarded at the end. The initial aimless wandering gradually morphs into a recognizable direction, and the reader is satisfied. Or is he/she? If you are a devout pentecostal church-goer, you would probably force your laptop close as soon as it is all over, and head to church for a confession of sins, or a needed exorcism for the sin of indulgence. Tope Folarin has just eased you into empathizing with a churchgoer whose faith wasn’t strong enough to set him free, who laughed at the pastor’s theatrics even as he wished that they would yield fruitful results, and who in the end relapses into the ways of the flesh to deal with carnal troubles. If you are reading the story on a sheaf of papers, and as soon as you read the last sentence you crumple the sheets and throw them as hard as you can against the nearest object, you might be a Nigerian Christian.

A “Nigerian Christian” is not the same as a Christian who happens to live in Nigeria. No. He/she is one to whom the word of the priest/pastor/prophet is law and holy; one whose first response to an irreverent joke is to either cross himself/herself, give you a dirty look while praying for the salvation of your soul, or to walk away with a loud hiss while reminding you of your place in the hottest part of hell. They are not peculiar to Nigeria either. In the US, they may also go by the name “Social/Religious Conservatives” or “Evangelicals”. I love Miracle because the universality of the short episode that makes up the story is one that many people would recognize, whether they be devoutly pious folks, or resigned agnostics to whom miracles are television advertisements to church services and bountiful offerings. Replace the old pastor in the story with a chief priest in an Ifa shrine, and the hero of the story with one visiting a shrine for the first time in pursuit of some advertised miracle, and you have the same story. A human story of effort, of a “leap of faith”, and disappointment.

It is a familiar story because many people we know, if not ourselves, have experienced it before. It is familiar in fiction too because it has also been told before, sometimes though through foreigners experiencing the evangelical brand of faith for the very first time. In this case, the hero is a Nigerian in a foreign country. The situating of the story far away in the United States when it could have worked just as well in Nigeria is a curious one. I find no justification for it other than the added dramatic effect of the diversity of backgrounds, which makes the agnostic reader’s bewilderment at their followership, and complete acceptance of faith and miracles even more enhanced. Written for “Nigerian Christians”, it is trash literature assaulting the belief of devout Christians. In the hands of more discerning faithfuls however – those not afraid of having their faith questioned and challenged – it is a fascinating parable illustrating the benefit of faith and work, as the bible itself recommends. Muslims, or people of any other faith (or disbelief) who read it should see beyond the caricature of pentecostal church service, to the simple problem of the conflict of expectations, peculiar to many more circumstances than the house of worship. Even the brightest teacher of economics might not always succeed in converting a student most conditioned to writing poetry.

Here is my favourite part of the story:

I begin to believe in miracles. I realize that many miracles have already happened; the old prophet can see me even though he’s blind, and my eyes feel different somehow, huddled beneath their thin lids. I think about the miracle of my family, the fact that we’ve remained together despite the terror of my mother’s abrupt departure, and I even think about the miracle of my presence in America. My father reminds my brother and me almost every day how lucky we are to be living in poverty in America, he claims that all of our cousins in Nigeria would die for the chance, but his words were meaningless before. Compared to what I have already experienced in life, compared to the tribulations that my family has already weathered, the matter of my eyesight seems almost insigniﬁcant.

Right there, in the acceptance and celebration of the little blessings in his life, with or without any further additions in form of a miracle wrought in the presence of an anticipating crowd, is contentment, is nirvana, is a kind of inner peace that the nominal public miracle the crowd so wished onto him may not even have provided. Hence unfortunate, any commentary that dismisses the story solely on the basis of the final, absolutely necessary, embrace and celebration of pragmatism.

There is only one question left to be asked: Is this an important story? My answer is “yes”, without a doubt. It might help explain (or at least describe) why many people throng to churches: chasing miracles. It beautifully illustrates the mindset of the agnostic/realist, and shows today’s churches as less than a homogeneous body of like-minded people. It gives an insight into the level of religious and spiritual development of today’s Nigerian (and Nigerian/African immigrants abroad), and can be pointed to one hundred years from now as a record of one part of that cultural, religious, movement. Every culture went through one. And as far as Nigerian/African religiosity is concerned, this is certainly not one of its most ferocious archetypes, but it’s it’s one of the most relatable. It will also rank as one of my favourites.

Having known how the story ends, I may not read it again, except as part of the longer novel from which the story was culled. However, that initial process, and the little perks of re-reading parts of it, carry a certain premium that I now wish on all my pious friends.

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Also reproduced on the Nigerianstalk LitMag

The Children of “Bayan Layi”

As part of my five-week blogathon on the five shortlisted stories in the 2013 Caine Prize, I present some thoughts on the first story: Elnathan John’s Bayan Layi, first published at http://www.percontra.net/issues/25/fiction/bayan-layi/.

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Bayin Layi is a story of street children, located this time, unlike those in Olufemi Terry’s Caine Prize-winning Stickfighting Days, in a real and defined city. The violence they experience is situated in recognizable political landmarks and scenarios, but like in Terry’s work, the scourge they in turn infest on themselves and the society is portrayed in isolation from the children’s personal stories. Who are they? Why are they here? Who are their parents? We are to assume that we know, because they are almajiris, merely hapless homeless urchins forced to survive. And survive they did, these children, aggregated from different defective backgrounds from around town, finding themselves without anyone else but each other, decide to live by rules they made up, egged on by a selfish and enabling society. Their presence in these larger crises in turn destroys society, and the cycle continues.

I approach the story from the familiar. A similarly sounding small town in Plateau State, called Barkin Ladi, was close to the little town of Riyom where I spent a year in 2005 as a “Youth Corper”. And through the rough year, living hundreds of kilometres away from home, one constant worry was a threat of sudden violence by aggrieved youths pursuing a social, political, or religious cause. By the time the NYSC was over, there were at least five nationally-reported cases of violence around Plateau, sometimes very close to where we were, where many people lost their lives. Compared to what is going on in the Plateau today, and Northern Nigeria in general, those were the more peaceful times in the state.

The similarity with Terry’s work are many: the kids fought a lot, they used hard drugs, they killed when necessary to survive in the harsh and brutal life they lived, kids fighting to survive on their own without any redeeming lifeline from the world of adults. Thematically, the author should prepare for these comparisons although the placing of the kids in an abstract reality in Terry’s work insulates it almost successfully from the problem of verisimilitude. At least it affords us more opportunity, than Elnathan’s work does, to suspend disbelief. He should also expect unflattering comparisons to style.

Here’s an excerpt from Stickfighting Days:

I’d dreamed of a killing blow, the single cut that cleanly ends life, but I’ve done that already, with Tauzin earlier. It was sweet. But now’s not the time for precision. I swing and thrust, mindlessly raining blows, and Markham is with me, shares my aim for we club at the judge’s head with no thought for accuracy. Even when he no longer moves, Markham and I swing for some minutes. Then I stop.

while the following is from Bayan Layi:

I hate that he was hiding like a rat, fat as he is. I strike behind his neck as he stumbles by me. He crashes to the ground. He groans. I strike again. The machete is sharp. Sharper than I expected, light. I wonder where they got them from…

The man isn’t shaking much. Banda picks up the gallon and pours some fuel on the body. He looks at me to strike the match. I stare at the body. Banda seizes the matchbox from me and lights it. The man squirms only a little as the fire begins to eat his clothes and flesh. He is dead already.

The sentences in both work are short and reasonable, with apt and vivid depictions of violence. In Elnathan John’s story at least, we come to expect that anything could happen.

In one short and frightening scene, the boys could not repress an ethnic blood lust that led eventually to a lynching when a boy suspected to be Igbo gave his name as Idowu, a Yoruba name. Sophisticated enough to know which name sounded Igbo, or which sounded Yoruba, they still gave the poor victim a beating which led to his death later in the day, away from the triumphant mob. “He had the nose of an Igbo boy,” we heard the mob say, and one’s blood boiled. As is the case with an actor getting into character to play an extremely dark role in a movie enough to elicit hate from an audience so believing of the portrayal, the writer succeeds in getting us into the children’s heads, and want to get out as soon as we can.

In another scene, a man escaping from a fire is referred to as dan daudu or “effeminate/homosexual” just before he was struck down and set on fire. We know from reading this that it is no exaggeration, that bigotry lives healthy and strong in many parts of the country, even on Facebook, that we fought a 30 month civil war over a series of crises that involved acts of genocide stemming from ethnic affiliation, and that in the hands of those to whom a sacred duty to purge the world has reputedly been granted from on high, this is a moment of cathartic orgasm. But the story is not one of that kind of balance, or political retribution, or justice. It is one of participant observation and reportage in a horrible scene. Anyone seeking redemption, or an artistic righting of that emotional assault somewhere in the story, would not likely find it.

According to Leila Aboulela, one of this year’s judges of the Caine Prize, in a piece discussing her process of choosing the stories, “nearly every submitted story reflected the economic, political and social difficulties of life in Africa.” In the case of this particular story, we glean the factors that enable child soldiers, child election riggers, child urchins, child thieves, and even children terrorists and suicide bombers: neglect, hunger, and immaturity. Does this reflect the “economic, political and social difficulties of life in Africa”? Yes, in many cases. Is that the whole story? No. But Leila continues: “The writers did not shy away from sensitive issues or gruelling realities.”

But serious subject matters do not guarantee a good story. There are other qualities that are more important – creative imagination, skills, the ability to invoke delight, plough depth, stir drama and chart connections, a sense of place, history and culture, characters who intrigue, an individual vision.

I will leave to the judges the decision on how this story meets the other criteria, or at least reserve my overall comparative judgment until I’ve read the other four shortlisted stories. As a creative treatise on the cause and effect of election violence, stolen childhood, and life on the streets however, it is an affecting story, but not a fresh intervention. The universality of the story and its premise makes it at once easy to relate to and understand, and to abuse.

Those interested in resurrecting old debates about the audience of our stories will have a field day with Bayin Layi. Addressed to a Nigerian audience, the line between good and justifiable evil not being clearly delineated might turn the text in the hands of a less-discerning audience into a justification for evil. The hero of Bayan Layi is no hero at all, but a victim. We feel sorry for him in the end because the authors made us do it, but we are not sure that he – the character – is thus totally purged or cleansed from the conditions that created him (or his kind) in the first place. At the end of the story, he is fleeing, but there is no indication that it is a permanent one. How long until he returns in company of others to wreak violence? We don’t know. There is no redeeming factor. In the hands of a foreigner, the story plays into the caricature of the African experience as a cycle of meaningless violence, and the escape is romantic, redemptive, and cathartic. Not to me. Yet I suspect that it is the foreign audience for which the story is written. After all, many of the Hausa phrases in there are translated immediately afterwards.

Don’t get me wrong, the story is well-written. It is an important piece in the understanding the mosaic of violence now in the age of Al-Qaeda and Boko Haram. It barely tells us anything new though (and by us, I don’t mean aliens just arriving in the world and meeting Nigeria – or Northern Nigeria – for the very first time). It does however create an affective interest in a flawed character, and makes us care for him as if he were one of us – which he is. This, for me, might be the story’s greatest strength. Across from the government secondary school where I taught English language as a Youth Corper was the country home of a popular Berom politician who once hosted us young graduates in his home to talk about politics, policy, and developmental issues. Sometime in 2012, after he had been a member of the Nigerian Senate, he was dead, killed in a sporadic (or, who knows, planned) attack on his convoy somewhere in the city of Jos, by warring tribes of suspected Fulani fighters. This depiction of the reality and root of violence (as inevitable results of neglect), though familiar, designates Elnathan’s work as a cautiously important one.

****

A glossary of the Hausa words in the story: Lambu means “garden”. Kuka means “cry” or a “Baobab tree”. Bayin Layi means “toilet” or “the next street” depending on context, while Gobedanisa is a proverb which means, literally, “tomorrow is far” or “tomorrow maybe late”. Acishuru (mistakenly written phonetically at least once in the story as Ashishiru) is a type of dwarf bean seeds, Ladadi is the name of a female born on Sunday, while Tanimu is a name given to a male born on Monday. Dantala, our character’s name, means “born on a Tuesday”. Sabon Layi is a “new street”. Dan daudu means “effeminate” or as usually used as a form of extreme insult, “homosexual.”

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Also reproduced on the Nigerianstalk LitMag

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