ktravula – a travelogue!

A Review of Tendai Huchu’s “The Intervention”

“The Intervention”, a short story by Tendai Huchu, which can be read here, was recently shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African writing. Here’s my take on the work.

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“Intervention” could be read in many different ways: as a tale of distant compatriots grown impotent by time and distance; the futility of armchair activism or the inevitability of same in the face of real challenges; or as a common allegory on the state of the continent in tumult.

It could, however, be read simply as a story of love, lust, disappointment, and one man’s care-free interrogation of it all. That man was Simba in this case, a poet, along with his friends, Z and Tamu (and their girlfriends).

The texture of Huchu’s story goes from casual to mundane to judgmental observations of people made by the principal character, Simba, who lives in the United Kingdom, far away from the scene of electoral action in Zimbabwe, his hometown. The story climaxes at the end of a national election in Zimbabwe where the president who has ruled since the country’s independence in 1981 was “elected” into office for another term. Then it descends gently into the chaos of domestic dispute between lovers and friends: a not so subtle subplot that had followed the story from the start.

So, is this an allegory on the state of our impotence and confusion on the continent? I’m more inclined to that conclusion. Or, in trying to find other ways to appreciate a story so ordinary yet representative of a slice of some immigrant life from a failed African country, I might be forced to dismiss it as a neophyte attempt at storytelling (at worst) or an effort carefully riddled with levity, for particular effect (at best). The characters are naïve if not simple, and prosaic if not uninspired. An example:

“…I never cast a single stone in this entire charade. I was consumed with overwhelming fury, seeing what Tamu was doing to this little princess. How could he sit there, chatting nonsense about his privacy, as she trailed the list of names from his phone.”

Apart from the fact that the last sentence is missing a question mark, the expression itself is not that striking, especially in a work of fiction aspiring to Africa’s largest literary prize.

In an earlier scene, Simba says: “I gave him my wtf face”, written exactly as quoted, with small letters for “wtf” which one assumes does not mean “Welcome to Facebook”.

Maybe the pedestrian storyline of a bunch of immigrants in England watching and pontificating about their home elections does call for equally carefree characters speaking in insipid turns of phrase. Or maybe the primary character is an extension of a writerly experimentation that didn’t quite achieve its goals. Either way, one is left with a feeling of deep dissatisfaction when it all ends. This is 2014. A failed African state and the disappointment of its emigrated elites isn’t such a tantalizing storyline except something new is added in the form of great and captivating writing.

“The kids didn’t speak Shone, so we were introduced in English, and check this out; I was “Uncle Simba”… The kid just looked at me blankly like I was talking effing Zulu.”

Effing, really? Who is this character? A twenty-two year-old Zimbabwean visiting England for the first time and intent on convincing us of his acquisition of street and teen lingo?

So, maybe the writer didn’t care much for inspiring our imagination or challenging our capacity for linguistic fireworks. Or maybe he couldn’t. We may not know until we read his other offerings.

Or maybe the story is a deliberate simplistic portrayal of simplistic existence. Zimbabwe goes on in its charade of a government. AIDs continues to ravage the continent. Sudan is now two countries. Egypt has changed its government more than twice in three years. Boko Haram has turned the fragile Nigerian state into a colander of dust and dead bodies. Kenya is fighting Al-Qaeda on its streets. Somalia is a violent ghost of whatever was there before, and Libya after Gaddaffi hasn’t lived up to Western (and African) hopes of its survival. Yet here we are in a quotidian cycle of daily vanities: dating, cheating, smoking, etc, and goofing around in our new realities, too impotent to act in any meaningful way. On this level, I understand and appreciate the effort and direction of the work. Otherwise, I should also probably go for a smoke (and hopefully not “cry like a pussy.”)

In any case, if it is the writer’s first, it shouldn’t necessarily be his worst. Next, please.

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First published on Brittle Paper.

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

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 2013 Caine Prize Shortlist

Out of this year’s five shortlisted stories for the annual Caine Prize for Writing, four of the stories are from Nigeria. This is unprecedented in the history of the organization. According to the announcement on the Caine Prize website,

“The five contrasting titles interrogate aspects of things that we might feel we know of Africa – violence, religion, corruption, family, community – but these are subjects that are deconstructed and beautifully remade. These are challenging, arresting, provocative stories of a continent and its descendants captured at a time of burgeoning change.”

The shortlisted stories are:

Elnathan John (Nigeria) ‘Bayan Layi’ from Per Contra, Issue 25 (USA, 2012)
Tope Folarin (Nigeria) ‘Miracle’ from Transition, Issue 109 (Bloomington, 2012)
Pede Hollist (Sierra Leone) ‘Foreign Aid’ from Journal of Progressive Human Services, Vol. 23.3 (Philadelphia, 2012)
Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (Nigeria) ‘The Whispering Trees’ from The Whispering Trees, published by Parrésia Publishers (Lagos, 2012)
Chinelo Okparanta (Nigeria) ‘America’ from Granta, Issue 118 (London, 2012)

Like many literary-minded bloggers did last year, I intend to participating in this year’s pre-award review of the five short stories for the reading and critical public. Keep a date on this blog for a review of each of the stories, one for each week that passes between now and the announcement of the winner.

A review of Elnathan John’s Bayan Layi will be up here and on the Nigerianstalk LitMag in coming days.

ktravula – a travelogue!

A Review of Tendai Huchu’s “The Intervention”

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

Fledgling Whispers of a Story – A Review

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

The 2013 Caine Prize Shortlist

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