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Browsing the archives for the Opinion category.

How Do We Fix This Broken Educational System?

Nigerian writer Ikhide Ikheloa gave a couple of provocative (and really thought-provoking) recommendations on the ASUU-FG mess and what could help fix the broken educational system in Nigeria…

Regardless of where you are, there are certain things that must happen, to maintain an appropriate standard of education. With the current ASUU wahala, all sides appear unwilling or unable to learn anything new and refreshing. No one is willing to accept responsibility, and in my view, ASUU is the worst culprit. Let me simply observe that these dysfunctions did not start yesterday, they were already manifesting themselves robustly in my time at the University of Benin, Benin City, in the late seventies. It is hugely hypocritical for anyone now to suddenly wake up, look around and smell decay. And by the way, ASUU, Ikhide has been telling you to clean up something as simple as your website since 2009, yet not a typo has been touched. What gives Ikhide or anyone the confidence that anything will change when you get some more money? The culture of abuse and mediocrity is pervasive. There needs to be a Needs Assessment done in that area. Seriously.

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 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.

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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

A Week in Ignorance

It surprised one of my co-workers when, during lunch sometime during the week, I’d mentioned that one of my grouses with the Goodluck Jonathan presidency was his condonement of corruption, citing the example of his appointment of a convicted certificate forger onto the board of a university. The government has since vigorously defended it as proper and not out of the ordinary. Propriety, and setting a good example with exemplary public servants can go to hell.

“This really happened?” My co-worker asked, unbelieving of something that would otherwise sound like something copied out of a satire written by Wole Soyinka. It got the attention of a few more staff members at the table some of whom also had never even heard of Salisu Buhari or his present designation in the corridors of power.

“Yes, he did.” I replied, and the conversation went on and on about a few other ills that paints the administration as one of the most permissive of corruption in the history of the nation’s democratic experiments. “He also pardoned Alamayesiegha, among others.”

Why the conversation surprised me a lot was because I had assumed that everyone, like me, was interested in what was going on in government, and thus fully aware of the misgovernance taking place in our name. I am wrong, obviously. Nobody really cares. As long as the routine of our daily lives are not affected in any way by the corrupt dealings of the “top bosses”, we are fine. This is not a typically Nigerian problem, but as I am here, it is one that I have given a lot of thought. A few weeks ago in Ikogosi Ekiti, during the session on what young people can do to get proper representation in power to be able to effect the changes they want, the chairman of the governors’ forum, Rotimi Amaechi, had suggested to the faces of those present that no change would come as long as people sat pretty and gave the leaders a free hand to do whatever they wanted. How else could it be any different now, I thought, when we don’t even know, or care, about what is going on in the first place? A number of young people have twitter and Facebook accounts. But how many are relevant enough to effect change? When next an “Occupy” protest comes on and locks down the streets, preventing people from going to work in order to demand for one change or the other, the very first people to complain that the protests have gone on long enough are going to be these ones who (though are very hardworking and well-meaning citizens) have no idea what the heck anyone of us should be worried about. After all, salaries get paid on time, and the road to and from Lekki are good enough in the morning on the way to work, and during evenings on the way back home.

This is the problem, and I can think of millions more who are merely content to go on with their lives without a worry in the world about anything else.

I don’t have a solution.

It just makes for a rather curious study in citizen revolt and participatory democracy.

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