By
Isaac Attah Ogezi
Thelma Nwokeji’s debut children’s novel, Red Nest, is a great contribution to children’s literature. Set in Akani village, the novel moves in a hair-raising speed to an unnamed part of a city. It revolves around the life of Ike, a clever and stubborn twelve-year-old who is dissatisfied with his poor parents, their wretched home, the endless farm work, their inability to send him and his elder brother Emeka to school and a catalogue of other grudges. One day his uncle in Alabeke (America) arrives at the village for the Christmas holidays and offers to take either him or Emeka to the white man’s land. The choice is thrown open and the criteria for the selection will be based on a week’s training on reading and writing and the better of the two will be chosen in an aptitude test to go to the white man’s land. But Ike, a dreamer, instead of staying glued to his books, would rather prefer to live in his dreams than realities, “His mind would drift away to thoughts of being in the white man’s land, wearing new and fine clothes and speaking English just like Ekene” (p. 12). As his dreams grow wild, so do realities slip away from him, and he soon discovers much to his chagrin that “Emeka would pass the test ahead of him, and that he would be the one to stay behind and continue with the difficult farm work that had no ending” (p. 13). To forestall this likely fate, Ike resorts to Plan B with deadly consequences which nearly claim his life. His crooked, short-cut plan, Plan B, is to befriend his uncle’s son, while his elder brother labours with the lessons and in the end, he would be his uncle’s son’s choice rather than merit. This backfires and he is kidnapped by two men in a red car and made to undergo a nightmarish experience that makes his hair’s breadth escape a miracle. In the end, he emerges a much matured boy, shorn of the mists of his childish dreams.
From this work, we learn that writing for children as an adult is not an all-comers’ field but a rather specialized form of art by far harder than teaching them. Nwokeji has been able to successfully bring herself down to the level of comprehension of her target children – within the age-range of eight to sixteen – in terms of language and the complexity of plot. The story is fast-paced, gripping and suspenseful enough to keep the children’s interest from the first page to the end, non-stop, with less emphasis on difficult psychology and symbolism. This work will surely encourage the present dying reading culture among our children, given its highly entertaining value.
The didactic lessons for children in this novel are numerous and straightforward – the rewards of stubbornness and impatience when one takes the short-cut routes to success. The major character Ike is quite unlike his elder brother Emeka who is a year older. He despises his parents and mocks their poverty. He hates farm work with a passion, “he wondered why he had to suffer so much in return for very little. He did not know any other child of his age who went to the farm everyday.” (p.6). He dislikes the idea that he is not sent to school because of lack of money: “Their excuse was always that there was no money. There was no money for adequate food, no money for adequate clothes and no money to go to school like some children did. He was tired of their ‘no money’ catchphrase” (p. 19). Apart from his parents whom he holds to disdain and interrupts at will, he carries these ill-manners to people outside. When he loses his way to his uncle’s house in the village, an old man offers to help him only to show him the wrong house. Ike riles at the old man: “This is a rubbish house. Why did you waste my time when you did not know Mr. Obi’s house? Oh, you have deceived me you old man. Go away from me!” (p. 20). Appalled by this rude behaviour from a mere child, the old man tries to appease him further only to be told off by Ike: “Go away from me, you deceitful man” (p.20). On his way home, he runs into a woman who shows him the way to his uncle’s house and “he sprinted away from the woman without even saying a word of gratitude” (p. 24). In a word, the trouble Ike faces is a didactic lesson for recalcitrant children like him to learn from and to make amends. Also, the spate of child-kidnappings and violence against children is well chronicled in this moving work. We see how children are made victims of their parents’ wealth when child-kidnappers come calling. The writer shows the advanced level by which child-kidnappings have reached in the country and seems to be calling the urgent attention of all stakeholders to the present laxity of our security system. The underworld of child-kidnapping, the dreaded Red Nest, headed by the merciless Master who uses blackmail to recruit his lieutenants and terror to silence them, is starkly exposed. We see a complex terror organization, how the Red Nest bristles with little “bridling”, how they go after their victims’ parents to claim their ransoms, with nurses and doctors in their employ, etc.
For a debut children’s novelist, Nwokeji is a maestro of the art of children’s storytelling. She tells a thrilling, unputdownable story in the class of Achebe’s Chike and the River, Ekwensi’s An African Night’s Entertainment, Juju Rock, The Passport of Mallam Iliya, Samakwe and the Highway Robbers and Drummer Boy and Eddie Iroh’s Without a Silver Spoon. Her use of language is deliberately simple for her target audience without being so flat that her readers will not have to consult the dictionary every now and then to increase their vocabulary. The symbolic image in the use of “red” is very significant – “Red Nest” (pp. 50, 52 and 56), “red roof” (p. 24) and “red car” (p. 25). Apart from the beauty of the colour “red”, it also symbolizes danger by which the central character Ike or our children are surrounded with. However, “Red Nest” as a title of a children’s book appears rather complex for them, the same way as the use of “Scarface” and “Hairyface” (pp. 27 – 30) for the characters Kodo and Vynn before their identity was later made known. The inclusion of a glossary at the end of the book would have been helpful to explain some Igbo words used in the text which are not self-explanatory such as “Alabake” (pp. 10, 17 and 19), “umunnaya” (p. 7), “Eziokwu” (p. 7), “Itiboribo” (p. 13) and “opi” (p. 23). The non-Igbo readers will find those words strange which may impede comprehension.
Perhaps, the most glaring snag to an otherwise beautiful story is the writer’s attempt to write a crime thriller in the mould of a James Hadley Chase novel instead of a serious work of art. This makes the work suffer from unbelievability. It is not convincing to the readers that a twelve-year-old boy Ike said to be “very clever” (p. 11), does not know the way to his parents’ home in a village after his abortive plan to visit his uncle. As if this is not enough, when Ike is apparently kidnapped and the opportunity comes for his escape, he tells the village man who sees him in the company of the strange and fearsome twosome that they are looking for Mr. Obi’s house just returned from the USA. Ike surprisingly keeps sealed lips when one of the two men lies that they are his uncles! Most importantly, there are highly improbable scenes like when Tom, a member of the kidnap gang, suddenly takes pity on Ike and decides to help him escape in a classic deus ex machina. The writer takes this improbability further when Ike escapes and a search is mounted for him. Adams, also a member of the kidnap racket, finds him in a van and suddenly “imagined several other possibilities for himself” (p. 113). These possibilities as quickly as they came, morphed into a decision to help the boy escape again, “And he decided that neither the money he could make from Mr. Obi nor the token reward from Master for finding Ike could compensate for his independence”(p. 113). Improbabilities are the stuff by which thrillers are made of and that accounts for the reason why thrillers do not make serious literature. Also, for a book from new home-based publishers, Mazariyya Books, it is beautifully illustrated with the editing almost flawless save for a few typographical and grammatical errors such as: “father’s reincarnate” (p. 12), “only one shoe” (p. 19) instead of “only one pair of shoes”, “under the blazing sun” (p. 19), “First you ask of …” (p. 23), “heading to “(pp. 28, 41, and 98), “a stone throw” (p. 57), “Majority of the children” (pp. 58 and 68), “towardss the hostel” (p. 68) and “kola was asthmatic” (p. 101).
In conclusion, Nwokeji, an architect and a mother, has shown in this work that she understands the psychology of children very well and in her hands language can be made mallaeable for their intake. For a debut children’s novel, Red Nest, is comparable to any work by the grandfather of Nigeria’s children’s literature, the late Cyprian Ekwensi. If Nwokeji can only infuse more verisimilitude into her creative fort, she may yet lift her future stories from the muck of being merely thrillers to the class of serious literature for children and possibly adult readers.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Between Art and Topicality in Yerima's Little Drops ...
By
Isaac Attah Ogezi
Perhaps the most vital and topical issue in Nigeria today apart from the acts of our political leaders is the seemingly endless Niger Delta crisis. This is not surprising because oil is the mainstay of the Nigerian economy. Remove oil from its economy, and the so-called giant of Africa will come tottering to the ground in a great fall which may end the chequered reign of one indivisible and indissoluble entity called Nigeria. In a critical situation such as Nigeria’s, the writers cannot stand aloof without playing an interventionist role. In the words of Chinua Achebe, “an African writer who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant - like that absurd man in the proverb who leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames…” This talks about social commitment in the writer’s art. Interestingly enough, most Nigerian writers are protest writers, adept at handling the big social and political issues of the day. Any wonder that our writers have found the Niger Delta crisis a honey-pot theme to expend their creative energies on, with little or indifferent craft. The crisis has birthed several titles such as Agary’s NLNG Award-winning Yellow-Yellow, Oguchukwu’s Outrage , Adinoyi-Ojo Onukaba’s NLNG-shortlisted Killing Swamp, Yerima’s NLNG Award-winning Hard Ground and NLNG-shortlisted Little Drops …, the list is endless. In fact, because of the preponderance of works on the Niger Delta, even writers very far from the theatre of violence now strain their creative energies to contribute to the Niger Delta literature. A reader need not possess the gift of clairvoyance to predict that Helon Habila’s latest, thematically-overt novel, Oil on Water, is centred on the Niger Delta crisis. One does fervently hope that this sudden romance with this big social and political issue of the Niger Delta is not predicated with an NLNG Prize in the mind. It is not unusual that in a country where writers labour under acute poverty and relative obscurity, a huge monetary prize with its concomitant glitz and blitz like the NLNG Prize will sooner act as a form of censorship on our literature, where writers will now abdicate the high call of the muse and their passions to pander to the whims and caprices of a five-man oligarchy of judges.
The pertinent question that urgently begs for an answer is: how has the writer fared aesthetically in balancing topicality with art in his works on the Niger Delta? Or does he fall foul of what the critic, Charles Larson, calls tending “to cater for the rather transitional reader, more interested in the sensational and the momentary than that which gives an indication of literary pretence at all?” We shall attempt to answer these vexed questions in our examination of Yerima’s Little Drops …
Set in the Niger Delta, Yerima’s Little Drops … is a thesis play on the effect of crises or wars on women and children, the often-neglected victims. The playwright made this very clear from the outset in his Author’s Note, when he stated: “My new play is about people. People who touch my heart and draw me so close towards shedding little drops of tears. In their uniquely fearsome life they shed more … of blood … of Ogogoro … of rain … and of life. And yet sadly, no one talks about them. They are the women. These are the people in my new sad … very dark play.” The play opens at the home of a 70-year-old Memekize, a cleared space by the riverbank, surrounded by a swampy forest. We hear a sound of gunshots from afar, suggestive that all is not well. One after the other, three women on the run from the JTF (Joint Task Force) soldiers and the militants find a temporary refuge at the old woman’s home. We meet Mukume who was raped thrice a day after she had “just got married, four days ago.” (p. 17) but was torn from her husband, Ovievie, because of an internal fight among the militants. Azue, the young queen on the run with the baby prince, after her husband, “the king died like an animal at the shrines.” (p. 23) with the eyes of his headless body still twitching with life. And then Bonuwo, in her mid-forties, who had witnessed forty-one school children between the ages of seven and eight blown to smithereens in the fracas. All these three women find ephemeral shelter in the home of this agile woman of seventy who too has her own gory tale of losing both her husband and two sons in a day during the Nigerian Civil War, “A shell. It tore them to pieces. I never picked one complete. I found a head there … a limb here … a toe … a finger … manacled trunks.” (p. 34). The rhythm of violence in the Niger Delta is well captured in this play. The endless kidnappings of white men and big officials of multinational oil companies, attacks on cargo ships, blowing up of oil refineries and rigs, fight with JTF soldiers and raping of women and little girls, portray the Niger Delta as a place of savagery, debauchery, violence, betrayals, intrigues, etc. In the midst of this holocaust, the innocent victims are the women and children. Like J. P. Clark’s Wives’ Revolt, Yerima champions the cause of the voiceless women in the Niger Delta in this play. He depicts a patriarchal society where the women are always at the receiving end both during peacetime and war periods. Memekize narrates how women are treated as exemplified by the king who was later beheaded by the militants: “He sent his wives packing. Those who started life with him, now smelt of age when his wealth arrived. Their only crime was that they all had female children. By the time the little girl had a son … the prince … the heir-apparent … his madness was complete.” (p. 24). And during war times, Memekize continues: “women and the innocent children will always lose their lives.” (p. 63) and when they do not, they must contend with loneliness like the young queen whose husband and little prince (son) were killed, “They killed my men. Now I am naked … naked for the common world to jeer at “(p. 32). Despite these odds, Yerima celebrates the indefatigable spirit of women in the face of the greatest calamity. Single-handedly, Memekize buried her husband and two sons during the Biafran War, removes two bullets from a militant’s body, Kuru’s, and refuses to run away but stay put in her home: “No. I have all I need here. And besides my home is here … remember?” (p. 65). Like most feminists, Yerima portrays the male, often-offstage characters to be very weak. Ovievie ran away when the rival militants came for him, leaving his new wife at their mercy. The men are only bullies and not strong like the militant Kuru, who “charged in like a lion and fell like a twig” (p. 56), “once most powerful man in the swamp, lying on the mat, helpless” (p.57). Memekize crowns this humiliation of the menfolks when she says: “Hold him. Now, women, this is the time to become real mothers of the clan. See a man groan in raw pain” (p. 55). As if this humiliation is not enough, the women characters round it off with a victory song, forcing Kuru to sing or die, in an apparent display of the dictatorship of women! The women’s position in this war is very clear – they want peace in the Niger Delta. Azue reaffirms this stand by forcing Kuru to swear with the knife that slit her husband’s throat that he will never kill anyone again. Enough is enough to this mad, senseless violence in the Niger Delta, the women seem to be saying to both the JTF soldiers and the militants; sheathe your blood-red swords and allow peace chance. As Yerima put it in the mouth of his character, the inimitable Memekize, “We have not sent anyone to kill and die for us. We want peace. We are tired of burying our beloved ones … Your cause has become a selfish one, and we don’t want you any more … This masquerade has outlived his usefulness” (pp. 52 – 54).
In this socially-committed play, Yerima makes no secret of the topical issues that he addresses. He paints a horrifying picture of the environmental ogre that the Niger Delta has become as a result of oil prospecting and drilling. Before this degradation began, fishing, as Memekize describes, is one of the major means of sustenance of the people of the Niger Delta, “My family were fishermen before the other war took them. And I was the best fish seller in this part of the Creek (sic), but now the water is polluted. Oil kills the fishes before we get there” (pp. 61 -62). This marked the genesis of the Niger Delta crisis, where the present-day scenario is rape, blowing up of oil rigs or refineries, blackmail, intrigues and kidnapping, “I hear they are after a gang of boys who blew up an oil refinery. They have released the kidnapped white men, and are having a party with the young women who live there” (p. 21), laments Azue, the young, widowed queen. These seemingly endless feuds between the oil companies, the government, local chiefs can hardly be described better than directly from the mouth of the militant, Kuru, in the following instructive words:
People must be part of the division of wealth. The oil companies are playing a game of divide and rule with us. They think they are smart. There are some people in government and in high places who believe that the Niger Delta people must be taught a lesson, so each law is against us. Each law is without us. Even our big men are covered with too much tea drinking that they forget the true cause of their people. But they will see. We shall destroy everything … everything …everything. Total break up!” (p. 63).
Perhaps, it was because of the failure of the refined treading on the dialogue path which led to the hanging of Ken Saro Wiwa and the other Ogoni men, culminating in this “they will see” kind of militancy in the Niger Delta. The topicality of this play can be so unsophiscated at times to the point of nausea like when the case of Dokumo Asari is described by Ovievie thus:
Our leader had been arrested by government to advise them on how to solve the Niger Delta region conflict. He had trusted the president, but when he was arrested, we became restless. We became worried. And when we saw his picture in handcuffs we ran mad. Each with a plan of vengeance. Before I realized it, the boys had broken up into a different camps with no leader. We lost total control. I am sorry. The boys who came for me … us … were from one of those rebel camps.” (p. 48)
It is quite appalling how literature can be used as a political tract, bereft of literary finesse and subtlety. Perhaps, Yerima feels that being overtly political will strike home his message, tinged with cynicism when he made his militant character Kuru to lampoon the amnesty programme of the federal government thus: “The amnesty could not sell. There was no consultation with us who were to be granted the amnesty. Just a few men sat in the capital and worked out a one-sided agreement some of our leaders rejected it. “(p. 60). Can Yerima be acquitted of having struck an equitable balance between the topicality of his play and his art as a playwright in this work?
Modelled after Ibsenian dramaturgy, the characters’ past is retold as the audience meets them. However, unlike the great Norwegian playwright’s plays, the plot of this play is not sustained farther after the audience is introduced to the characters’ past. For example, in a bid to save her dear life, Mukume runs to Memekize’s home, and tells how she was celebrating honeymoon with her new husband “when all of a sudden, a loud gunshot noise came into the compound” (p.17) and then she was deserted by her husband and was raped by the three men. The young queen appears at Memekize’s home with a gory tale of how her king husband was killed like an animal at the shrines, “his stomach rising and falling as blood gushed out from his headless neck” (p. 23). So are Bonuwo and Kuru. The characters narrate how the crisis affected them before their appearance onstage, and after this the plot progresses no further except for the escape of Mukume, Azue, Bonuwa and Kuru through a canoe to a jetty. Granted that the conflict in this play is the crisis which mostly took place offstage, the play lacks a resolution and thus without a denouement. Nothing significant happens after all the major five characters meet except the retelling of their recent past and the trifles and bickering among one another; no any significant movement save for the characters’ unnerving holding of talks which the playwright used to deliver his sermon on the Niger Delta crisis. Secondly, in order not to appear as a prophet of doom, the play ends with an unrealistic optimism, rather forced. It is an escapist ending usually adopted by writers when the conflict created cannot be resolved. This is what happens to a work where the writer fails to listen to the creative muse within himself, but tends to please the readers and possibly judges of mouth-watering literary prizes who emphasize on social relevance that is not so gloomy like Ayi Kwei Armah”s The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born. Thirdly, for a long-time theatre practitioner like Yerima, one is saddened to find that there is no unique speech pattern for each character. Almost all the characters use the expressions “by the gods” and “Ayiba”, which shows that this is a hastily produced work to meet a certain deadline. The play also suffers from poor editing in consequence, riddled with grammatical and typographical errors such as: “a painting … hunting me always” (p. 6), “all these madness” (p. 15), “winding nights” (p.19), “the palace of the king … raised it to the ground” (p. 28), “been ordained the looser…” (p.35) and “no one could seat on the fence” (p. 48).
Based on the foregoing, there is no gainsaying the fact that in Yerima’s Little Drops …, art becomes the scapegoat, crucified on the altar of topicality. Entertainment as the primary goal of art is jettisoned in favour of the momentary and the sensational. Writing on why entertainment is not an unworthy art, W. H. Auden stated that: “It demands a higher standard of technique and a greater lack of self-regard than the average man is prepared to attempt... there have been and are many writers of excellent sensibility whose work is spoiled by a bogus vision which deprives it of the entertainment value it otherwise would have had …” The same thing can be said of almost all the works on the Niger Delta crisis daily churned out by our writers. Very soon, our literature will be littered with many unreadable political tracts on the Niger Delta under the guise of art and ours shall be the tragic fate of the Ancient Mariner:
Water, water, everywhere
Nor any drop to drink.
Isaac Attah Ogezi
Perhaps the most vital and topical issue in Nigeria today apart from the acts of our political leaders is the seemingly endless Niger Delta crisis. This is not surprising because oil is the mainstay of the Nigerian economy. Remove oil from its economy, and the so-called giant of Africa will come tottering to the ground in a great fall which may end the chequered reign of one indivisible and indissoluble entity called Nigeria. In a critical situation such as Nigeria’s, the writers cannot stand aloof without playing an interventionist role. In the words of Chinua Achebe, “an African writer who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant - like that absurd man in the proverb who leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames…” This talks about social commitment in the writer’s art. Interestingly enough, most Nigerian writers are protest writers, adept at handling the big social and political issues of the day. Any wonder that our writers have found the Niger Delta crisis a honey-pot theme to expend their creative energies on, with little or indifferent craft. The crisis has birthed several titles such as Agary’s NLNG Award-winning Yellow-Yellow, Oguchukwu’s Outrage , Adinoyi-Ojo Onukaba’s NLNG-shortlisted Killing Swamp, Yerima’s NLNG Award-winning Hard Ground and NLNG-shortlisted Little Drops …, the list is endless. In fact, because of the preponderance of works on the Niger Delta, even writers very far from the theatre of violence now strain their creative energies to contribute to the Niger Delta literature. A reader need not possess the gift of clairvoyance to predict that Helon Habila’s latest, thematically-overt novel, Oil on Water, is centred on the Niger Delta crisis. One does fervently hope that this sudden romance with this big social and political issue of the Niger Delta is not predicated with an NLNG Prize in the mind. It is not unusual that in a country where writers labour under acute poverty and relative obscurity, a huge monetary prize with its concomitant glitz and blitz like the NLNG Prize will sooner act as a form of censorship on our literature, where writers will now abdicate the high call of the muse and their passions to pander to the whims and caprices of a five-man oligarchy of judges.
The pertinent question that urgently begs for an answer is: how has the writer fared aesthetically in balancing topicality with art in his works on the Niger Delta? Or does he fall foul of what the critic, Charles Larson, calls tending “to cater for the rather transitional reader, more interested in the sensational and the momentary than that which gives an indication of literary pretence at all?” We shall attempt to answer these vexed questions in our examination of Yerima’s Little Drops …
Set in the Niger Delta, Yerima’s Little Drops … is a thesis play on the effect of crises or wars on women and children, the often-neglected victims. The playwright made this very clear from the outset in his Author’s Note, when he stated: “My new play is about people. People who touch my heart and draw me so close towards shedding little drops of tears. In their uniquely fearsome life they shed more … of blood … of Ogogoro … of rain … and of life. And yet sadly, no one talks about them. They are the women. These are the people in my new sad … very dark play.” The play opens at the home of a 70-year-old Memekize, a cleared space by the riverbank, surrounded by a swampy forest. We hear a sound of gunshots from afar, suggestive that all is not well. One after the other, three women on the run from the JTF (Joint Task Force) soldiers and the militants find a temporary refuge at the old woman’s home. We meet Mukume who was raped thrice a day after she had “just got married, four days ago.” (p. 17) but was torn from her husband, Ovievie, because of an internal fight among the militants. Azue, the young queen on the run with the baby prince, after her husband, “the king died like an animal at the shrines.” (p. 23) with the eyes of his headless body still twitching with life. And then Bonuwo, in her mid-forties, who had witnessed forty-one school children between the ages of seven and eight blown to smithereens in the fracas. All these three women find ephemeral shelter in the home of this agile woman of seventy who too has her own gory tale of losing both her husband and two sons in a day during the Nigerian Civil War, “A shell. It tore them to pieces. I never picked one complete. I found a head there … a limb here … a toe … a finger … manacled trunks.” (p. 34). The rhythm of violence in the Niger Delta is well captured in this play. The endless kidnappings of white men and big officials of multinational oil companies, attacks on cargo ships, blowing up of oil refineries and rigs, fight with JTF soldiers and raping of women and little girls, portray the Niger Delta as a place of savagery, debauchery, violence, betrayals, intrigues, etc. In the midst of this holocaust, the innocent victims are the women and children. Like J. P. Clark’s Wives’ Revolt, Yerima champions the cause of the voiceless women in the Niger Delta in this play. He depicts a patriarchal society where the women are always at the receiving end both during peacetime and war periods. Memekize narrates how women are treated as exemplified by the king who was later beheaded by the militants: “He sent his wives packing. Those who started life with him, now smelt of age when his wealth arrived. Their only crime was that they all had female children. By the time the little girl had a son … the prince … the heir-apparent … his madness was complete.” (p. 24). And during war times, Memekize continues: “women and the innocent children will always lose their lives.” (p. 63) and when they do not, they must contend with loneliness like the young queen whose husband and little prince (son) were killed, “They killed my men. Now I am naked … naked for the common world to jeer at “(p. 32). Despite these odds, Yerima celebrates the indefatigable spirit of women in the face of the greatest calamity. Single-handedly, Memekize buried her husband and two sons during the Biafran War, removes two bullets from a militant’s body, Kuru’s, and refuses to run away but stay put in her home: “No. I have all I need here. And besides my home is here … remember?” (p. 65). Like most feminists, Yerima portrays the male, often-offstage characters to be very weak. Ovievie ran away when the rival militants came for him, leaving his new wife at their mercy. The men are only bullies and not strong like the militant Kuru, who “charged in like a lion and fell like a twig” (p. 56), “once most powerful man in the swamp, lying on the mat, helpless” (p.57). Memekize crowns this humiliation of the menfolks when she says: “Hold him. Now, women, this is the time to become real mothers of the clan. See a man groan in raw pain” (p. 55). As if this humiliation is not enough, the women characters round it off with a victory song, forcing Kuru to sing or die, in an apparent display of the dictatorship of women! The women’s position in this war is very clear – they want peace in the Niger Delta. Azue reaffirms this stand by forcing Kuru to swear with the knife that slit her husband’s throat that he will never kill anyone again. Enough is enough to this mad, senseless violence in the Niger Delta, the women seem to be saying to both the JTF soldiers and the militants; sheathe your blood-red swords and allow peace chance. As Yerima put it in the mouth of his character, the inimitable Memekize, “We have not sent anyone to kill and die for us. We want peace. We are tired of burying our beloved ones … Your cause has become a selfish one, and we don’t want you any more … This masquerade has outlived his usefulness” (pp. 52 – 54).
In this socially-committed play, Yerima makes no secret of the topical issues that he addresses. He paints a horrifying picture of the environmental ogre that the Niger Delta has become as a result of oil prospecting and drilling. Before this degradation began, fishing, as Memekize describes, is one of the major means of sustenance of the people of the Niger Delta, “My family were fishermen before the other war took them. And I was the best fish seller in this part of the Creek (sic), but now the water is polluted. Oil kills the fishes before we get there” (pp. 61 -62). This marked the genesis of the Niger Delta crisis, where the present-day scenario is rape, blowing up of oil rigs or refineries, blackmail, intrigues and kidnapping, “I hear they are after a gang of boys who blew up an oil refinery. They have released the kidnapped white men, and are having a party with the young women who live there” (p. 21), laments Azue, the young, widowed queen. These seemingly endless feuds between the oil companies, the government, local chiefs can hardly be described better than directly from the mouth of the militant, Kuru, in the following instructive words:
People must be part of the division of wealth. The oil companies are playing a game of divide and rule with us. They think they are smart. There are some people in government and in high places who believe that the Niger Delta people must be taught a lesson, so each law is against us. Each law is without us. Even our big men are covered with too much tea drinking that they forget the true cause of their people. But they will see. We shall destroy everything … everything …everything. Total break up!” (p. 63).
Perhaps, it was because of the failure of the refined treading on the dialogue path which led to the hanging of Ken Saro Wiwa and the other Ogoni men, culminating in this “they will see” kind of militancy in the Niger Delta. The topicality of this play can be so unsophiscated at times to the point of nausea like when the case of Dokumo Asari is described by Ovievie thus:
Our leader had been arrested by government to advise them on how to solve the Niger Delta region conflict. He had trusted the president, but when he was arrested, we became restless. We became worried. And when we saw his picture in handcuffs we ran mad. Each with a plan of vengeance. Before I realized it, the boys had broken up into a different camps with no leader. We lost total control. I am sorry. The boys who came for me … us … were from one of those rebel camps.” (p. 48)
It is quite appalling how literature can be used as a political tract, bereft of literary finesse and subtlety. Perhaps, Yerima feels that being overtly political will strike home his message, tinged with cynicism when he made his militant character Kuru to lampoon the amnesty programme of the federal government thus: “The amnesty could not sell. There was no consultation with us who were to be granted the amnesty. Just a few men sat in the capital and worked out a one-sided agreement some of our leaders rejected it. “(p. 60). Can Yerima be acquitted of having struck an equitable balance between the topicality of his play and his art as a playwright in this work?
Modelled after Ibsenian dramaturgy, the characters’ past is retold as the audience meets them. However, unlike the great Norwegian playwright’s plays, the plot of this play is not sustained farther after the audience is introduced to the characters’ past. For example, in a bid to save her dear life, Mukume runs to Memekize’s home, and tells how she was celebrating honeymoon with her new husband “when all of a sudden, a loud gunshot noise came into the compound” (p.17) and then she was deserted by her husband and was raped by the three men. The young queen appears at Memekize’s home with a gory tale of how her king husband was killed like an animal at the shrines, “his stomach rising and falling as blood gushed out from his headless neck” (p. 23). So are Bonuwo and Kuru. The characters narrate how the crisis affected them before their appearance onstage, and after this the plot progresses no further except for the escape of Mukume, Azue, Bonuwa and Kuru through a canoe to a jetty. Granted that the conflict in this play is the crisis which mostly took place offstage, the play lacks a resolution and thus without a denouement. Nothing significant happens after all the major five characters meet except the retelling of their recent past and the trifles and bickering among one another; no any significant movement save for the characters’ unnerving holding of talks which the playwright used to deliver his sermon on the Niger Delta crisis. Secondly, in order not to appear as a prophet of doom, the play ends with an unrealistic optimism, rather forced. It is an escapist ending usually adopted by writers when the conflict created cannot be resolved. This is what happens to a work where the writer fails to listen to the creative muse within himself, but tends to please the readers and possibly judges of mouth-watering literary prizes who emphasize on social relevance that is not so gloomy like Ayi Kwei Armah”s The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born. Thirdly, for a long-time theatre practitioner like Yerima, one is saddened to find that there is no unique speech pattern for each character. Almost all the characters use the expressions “by the gods” and “Ayiba”, which shows that this is a hastily produced work to meet a certain deadline. The play also suffers from poor editing in consequence, riddled with grammatical and typographical errors such as: “a painting … hunting me always” (p. 6), “all these madness” (p. 15), “winding nights” (p.19), “the palace of the king … raised it to the ground” (p. 28), “been ordained the looser…” (p.35) and “no one could seat on the fence” (p. 48).
Based on the foregoing, there is no gainsaying the fact that in Yerima’s Little Drops …, art becomes the scapegoat, crucified on the altar of topicality. Entertainment as the primary goal of art is jettisoned in favour of the momentary and the sensational. Writing on why entertainment is not an unworthy art, W. H. Auden stated that: “It demands a higher standard of technique and a greater lack of self-regard than the average man is prepared to attempt... there have been and are many writers of excellent sensibility whose work is spoiled by a bogus vision which deprives it of the entertainment value it otherwise would have had …” The same thing can be said of almost all the works on the Niger Delta crisis daily churned out by our writers. Very soon, our literature will be littered with many unreadable political tracts on the Niger Delta under the guise of art and ours shall be the tragic fate of the Ancient Mariner:
Water, water, everywhere
Nor any drop to drink.
Re-creating Shakespeare's Othello in Yerima's Otaelo
By Isaac Attah Ogezi
In a moving tribute to his friend, William Shakespeare, in 1623, the English writer, Ben Jonson, in his poem “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author”, prophesied the timeless influence of the former when he penned thus: “He was not of an age, but for all time!’ The universality of Shakespeare’s mind is so great that Dr. Samuel Johnson, writing a century later, said that “We owe Shakespeare everything” because he has taught us through his immortal works how to understand the human nature, the inherent heart of darkness that is man, the good, bad and ugly sides of humanity. Shakespeare’s importance to world literature cannot be over-emphasized. This is evident in the endless translations of his works into several languages of the world and the countless adaptations birthed by his works. One of such latest efforts is Ahmed Yerima’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s arguably most topical and accessible tragedy, Othello, under the title Otaelo.
Yerima’s fascination with Shakespeare dates back several decades ago, as he wrote in the Author’s Notes, “When I first encountered the genius called William Shakespeare through his works, I wondered sometimes with childish envy how God had endowed one man with such a profound creative mind … It was for me and millions of dramatists like me to translate his works into our language, into our cultural reality, into our human, social and religious sensibility” (p. 6). Otaelo is the brain child of this fascination; Yerima’s own version or stage adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello.
Set in the Igbo village of Umuagu, south-eastern Nigeria, Yerima’s Otaelo is based, like Shakespeare’s Othello, on the themes of love, jealousy, deception, prejudice and destruction. It tells the story of Chinyere, the only child of the Igwe, who turns down all eligible suitors only to nurse some intense, “abominable” feelings for an osu, Otaelo. Interestingly, these feelings are reciprocated such that upon the victorious return of the Igwe along with the warlords from the war, the Igwe, like King Herod the tetrarch in the Bible, raises his ofor, places it on Otaelo’s shoulder, and then his chest, kisses the ofor and says: “By the gods, I swear whatever you wish, I shall grant” (p. 16). To the greatest shock of everybody in the palace, Otaelo asks for the hand of the Igwe’s only child Chinyere in marriage. The rest is pandemonium. In a word, this indecent request by an osu almost causes an upheaval in the village of Umuagu, but there is no turning back. The Igwe’s word is law except only if the daredevil osu could reverse his sacrilegious request. Much against the popular will of the people and the gods, the Igwe gives out the hand of his willing daughter in marriage to Otaelo on the gods’ condition that they never set foot on the soil of Umuagu again after their marriage. Going into a trance, Okaramuo warns: “The gods decree, to save the throne let the Osu (Otaelo) and your daughter marry in three days’ time. His god Ala protects him. Both the Osu and his wife must never set foot on the soil of Umuagu again after they are married” (p. 28.). A marriage to an osu wittingly or unwittingly automatically makes the freeborn partner like Chinyere an osu, the same way as running into a shrine of a god for protection. Based on the gods’ stringent condition, the lovers’ fate is sealed and after their marriage, they leave the village of Umuagu. Unfortunately for them, they have reckoned without the betrayals, intrigues, jealousies and destruction of life, thence the harvest of deaths that marks their tragic end in the play.
In this adaptation, Yerima took his raw material from Shakespeare’s Othello, to address the lingering, decadent and outlandish osu caste system in Igboland which is viewed even worse than racism (mere differences in colour between dark Othello and the lily-white Desdemona). He has used his dramatic licence very effectively in this play to use the Igbo as his fictive people, their culture as his culture, their gods and practice as the backdrop of this tragedy. The choice of the osu caste system is very apt as this is perhaps the most traumatic, dogged practice among the Igbo people which separates man from his fellow man, sets other people apart for the gods, even worse than slaves. This evil practice like racial prejudice has torn friends and lovers apart as in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, where Obi and Clara fall victims of this evil practice. Yerima has been able to recreate the Igbo world-views, atmosphere, the flora and fauna of its people, the idioms and proverbs, etc., in this play. His deliberate use of language and imagery to impose his vision on the older work and to situate it within the Igbo social reality is worthy of commendation. The effective use of jigida, waist-beads, is more emotional and significant to his Igbo, nay, African audiences than the trite, rather highbrow, Western and unsentimental handkerchief in Othello. According to the playwright:
My adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello which I titled Otaelo is based only on Shakespeare’s theme of jealousy and intrigues. The adaptation is based on the Igbo Osu tradition, and the characters’ names change, the situation changes, the sensibilities change but the “jigida” which is the new symbol of love which represents the handkerchief of Shakespeare’s original play still serves as the destructive metaphor in the adaptation. (p. 124, Ahmed Yerima: Basic Techniques in Playwriting, 2003)
Yerima’s thematic pre-occupation in this play, like his elder compatriot, Chinua Achebe in No Longer at Ease, is to draw a critical and urgent attention to the inherent harm in this evil practice among the Igbo. He cannot imagine the traditional sanctioning of ostracization of a certain section of the society for what their ancestors knowingly or unknowingly committed, akin to the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children right up to the last generation. Otaelo’s case, like many cases in Igboland, is particularly touching. His mother killed his father by mistake while he was still in her womb. In a bid to run away from the punishment of death, she “ran to the shrine of Ala for protection. There she became an Osu, and after I was born, she was still used for sacrifice to the gods she ran to for protection” (pp. 34 and 35). Otaelo seems to be speaking the minds of all those ostracized for no fault of their own in the unholy name of a tradition that has long outlived its importance, when he poignantly cries:
Does blood not flow in my veins? Do I not cry, laugh or feel the pangs of pain like anybody? … Let her! Let her share in the chorus of pain which I sing all my life. What did I do wrong? Did I ask to be born by her? In obeying the nature of birth and passing through her passage of life, I offended the earth. That singular act, though no fault of mine makes me today an untouchable” (pp. 34 and 35).
However, the question is: how successful is Yerima’s Otaelo as a tragedy? Otaelo as the central character has all the attributes of a tragic hero – his grass-to-grace success story like Shakespeare’s Othello and Rotimi’s Odewale in The Gods are Not to Blame, his bravery, and, of course, the tragic flaw of vaulting jealousy and the penchant for hasty actions. But do these attributes alone qualify Otaelo as a great tragedy in the class of Shakespeare’s or even the Greek tragedies? Methinks, the answer must be in the negative. For one thing, Yerima’s Otaelo lacks the elevated language of Shakespeare’s Othello enough to make it a full-scale tragedy of great grandeur. No one can satisfactorily discuss tragedies without recourse being had to language at its most sublime, the intensity of emotions which can only and aptly be captured by a dexterous use of sublime language. When Shakespeare’s Othello discovers his folly in killing an innocent Desdemona, he cries lyrically thus:
O cursed, cursed slave! Whip me, ye devils,
From the possession of this heavenly sight!
Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulphur,
Wash me in steep-down gulf of liquid fire!
O Desdemon! Dead Desdemon: dead! O, O!
(p. 130, William Shakespeare: Othello, Wordsworth Classics edition, 2003).
This kind of heightened language is lacking in Yerima’s Otaelo. Placed in a similar circumstance, when Otaelo discovers his folly, he walks slowly to the lifeless body of Chinyere and says: “Oh the gods have pity on my soul. Wait Chinyere, my princess, my wife, don’t go too far” (p 56). Yerima’s language in this play is cliché-ridden in most emotional scenes where sublime poetry should be able to express the emotions of the characters better. Earlier in the play, Otaelo and Chinyere meet after the elders of the land, the Ndiche, have decided on the course of action to take, Otaelo prosaically tells Chinyere in a rather threadbare, melodramatic and childish language that: “I love you, too more than life. For in you I have the freedom of heart. Not because you are a princess, but because, you control the air that I breathe” (p. 36). To compensate for this dearth of enough highly poetic language to express their emotions effectively, the playwright made Chinyere raise her right arm slowly and says: “This is my love I want to express, and I want to keep with you and in you, forever. Here … cut” (p. 36). And amateurishly, Otaelo brings out his right arm, cuts her, and cuts him and they both suck in a blood-oath! (p. 36). Secondly, when pathos is not well evoked in a play to attain the cathartic level of a high tragedy called purgation, such a tragedy cannot be said to be a success. Thence marks the inadequacy of Yerima’s Otaelo as a tragedy and a work of art. Writing on the inadequacy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a work of art, the poet-critic T. S. Eliot in a famous essay in 1919, submitted: “Hamlet, like the sonnets is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art … in the character Hamlet, it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art.” The same can be said of Yerima’s Otaelo. For example, the choice of Chinyere, the Igwe’s only child and daughter by the playwright to break so serious a traditional taboo such as the osu caste system instead of heightening the emotional intensity of the play, rather does the opposite, as it trivializes the magnitude and seriousness of the osu caste system among the Igbo, and exposes how little the playwright knows about the Igbo traditions. Thus, the reaction of the Igwe as the custodian of his people’s culture to such an abomination is most unrealistic. Perhaps if the playwright had used an elder statesman’s daughter in the society rather than the Igwe’s as in Shakespeare’s Othello, it would have added some verisimilitude to the work. Besides, in an egalitarian and highly ultra-democratic society such as the Igbo, the Igwe’s word is not law like Ezeulu in Achebe’s Arrow of God. In consequence, it is manifestly wrong for Chinyere to say that: “Since my father has sworn by his Ofor, his word is law” (p. 25). The Igwe’s ofor as the symbol of authority cannot be used to break a time-hallowed tradition like the osu caste system, enough for the Igwe to say to an osu: “By the gods, I swear, whatever you wish, I shall grant. Speak, my honour is before you” (p. 16). The violation of a sacrilege by the Igwe is not a personal matter but communal in nature. In writing about a culture that is not one’s, it behooves on the writer embarking on such a task to undertake an in-depth research into the traditions of such people, their world-views, belief system, mores, norms and values which it obviously appears Yerima has not done enough in this play.
Be that as it may, Yerima’s Otaelo is a great contribution to the perennial fight against the social anathema among the Igbo called the osu caste system. It is socially committed and may perhaps force some die-hard practitioners to have a rethink despite the failings of the play as a tragedy and a work of art. The problem with adapting the work of a great dramatist like Shakespeare is that the later work will more often than not pale into insignificance when compared to the supreme art of the former like a midget before a giant.
In a moving tribute to his friend, William Shakespeare, in 1623, the English writer, Ben Jonson, in his poem “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author”, prophesied the timeless influence of the former when he penned thus: “He was not of an age, but for all time!’ The universality of Shakespeare’s mind is so great that Dr. Samuel Johnson, writing a century later, said that “We owe Shakespeare everything” because he has taught us through his immortal works how to understand the human nature, the inherent heart of darkness that is man, the good, bad and ugly sides of humanity. Shakespeare’s importance to world literature cannot be over-emphasized. This is evident in the endless translations of his works into several languages of the world and the countless adaptations birthed by his works. One of such latest efforts is Ahmed Yerima’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s arguably most topical and accessible tragedy, Othello, under the title Otaelo.
Yerima’s fascination with Shakespeare dates back several decades ago, as he wrote in the Author’s Notes, “When I first encountered the genius called William Shakespeare through his works, I wondered sometimes with childish envy how God had endowed one man with such a profound creative mind … It was for me and millions of dramatists like me to translate his works into our language, into our cultural reality, into our human, social and religious sensibility” (p. 6). Otaelo is the brain child of this fascination; Yerima’s own version or stage adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello.
Set in the Igbo village of Umuagu, south-eastern Nigeria, Yerima’s Otaelo is based, like Shakespeare’s Othello, on the themes of love, jealousy, deception, prejudice and destruction. It tells the story of Chinyere, the only child of the Igwe, who turns down all eligible suitors only to nurse some intense, “abominable” feelings for an osu, Otaelo. Interestingly, these feelings are reciprocated such that upon the victorious return of the Igwe along with the warlords from the war, the Igwe, like King Herod the tetrarch in the Bible, raises his ofor, places it on Otaelo’s shoulder, and then his chest, kisses the ofor and says: “By the gods, I swear whatever you wish, I shall grant” (p. 16). To the greatest shock of everybody in the palace, Otaelo asks for the hand of the Igwe’s only child Chinyere in marriage. The rest is pandemonium. In a word, this indecent request by an osu almost causes an upheaval in the village of Umuagu, but there is no turning back. The Igwe’s word is law except only if the daredevil osu could reverse his sacrilegious request. Much against the popular will of the people and the gods, the Igwe gives out the hand of his willing daughter in marriage to Otaelo on the gods’ condition that they never set foot on the soil of Umuagu again after their marriage. Going into a trance, Okaramuo warns: “The gods decree, to save the throne let the Osu (Otaelo) and your daughter marry in three days’ time. His god Ala protects him. Both the Osu and his wife must never set foot on the soil of Umuagu again after they are married” (p. 28.). A marriage to an osu wittingly or unwittingly automatically makes the freeborn partner like Chinyere an osu, the same way as running into a shrine of a god for protection. Based on the gods’ stringent condition, the lovers’ fate is sealed and after their marriage, they leave the village of Umuagu. Unfortunately for them, they have reckoned without the betrayals, intrigues, jealousies and destruction of life, thence the harvest of deaths that marks their tragic end in the play.
In this adaptation, Yerima took his raw material from Shakespeare’s Othello, to address the lingering, decadent and outlandish osu caste system in Igboland which is viewed even worse than racism (mere differences in colour between dark Othello and the lily-white Desdemona). He has used his dramatic licence very effectively in this play to use the Igbo as his fictive people, their culture as his culture, their gods and practice as the backdrop of this tragedy. The choice of the osu caste system is very apt as this is perhaps the most traumatic, dogged practice among the Igbo people which separates man from his fellow man, sets other people apart for the gods, even worse than slaves. This evil practice like racial prejudice has torn friends and lovers apart as in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, where Obi and Clara fall victims of this evil practice. Yerima has been able to recreate the Igbo world-views, atmosphere, the flora and fauna of its people, the idioms and proverbs, etc., in this play. His deliberate use of language and imagery to impose his vision on the older work and to situate it within the Igbo social reality is worthy of commendation. The effective use of jigida, waist-beads, is more emotional and significant to his Igbo, nay, African audiences than the trite, rather highbrow, Western and unsentimental handkerchief in Othello. According to the playwright:
My adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello which I titled Otaelo is based only on Shakespeare’s theme of jealousy and intrigues. The adaptation is based on the Igbo Osu tradition, and the characters’ names change, the situation changes, the sensibilities change but the “jigida” which is the new symbol of love which represents the handkerchief of Shakespeare’s original play still serves as the destructive metaphor in the adaptation. (p. 124, Ahmed Yerima: Basic Techniques in Playwriting, 2003)
Yerima’s thematic pre-occupation in this play, like his elder compatriot, Chinua Achebe in No Longer at Ease, is to draw a critical and urgent attention to the inherent harm in this evil practice among the Igbo. He cannot imagine the traditional sanctioning of ostracization of a certain section of the society for what their ancestors knowingly or unknowingly committed, akin to the sins of the fathers being visited upon the children right up to the last generation. Otaelo’s case, like many cases in Igboland, is particularly touching. His mother killed his father by mistake while he was still in her womb. In a bid to run away from the punishment of death, she “ran to the shrine of Ala for protection. There she became an Osu, and after I was born, she was still used for sacrifice to the gods she ran to for protection” (pp. 34 and 35). Otaelo seems to be speaking the minds of all those ostracized for no fault of their own in the unholy name of a tradition that has long outlived its importance, when he poignantly cries:
Does blood not flow in my veins? Do I not cry, laugh or feel the pangs of pain like anybody? … Let her! Let her share in the chorus of pain which I sing all my life. What did I do wrong? Did I ask to be born by her? In obeying the nature of birth and passing through her passage of life, I offended the earth. That singular act, though no fault of mine makes me today an untouchable” (pp. 34 and 35).
However, the question is: how successful is Yerima’s Otaelo as a tragedy? Otaelo as the central character has all the attributes of a tragic hero – his grass-to-grace success story like Shakespeare’s Othello and Rotimi’s Odewale in The Gods are Not to Blame, his bravery, and, of course, the tragic flaw of vaulting jealousy and the penchant for hasty actions. But do these attributes alone qualify Otaelo as a great tragedy in the class of Shakespeare’s or even the Greek tragedies? Methinks, the answer must be in the negative. For one thing, Yerima’s Otaelo lacks the elevated language of Shakespeare’s Othello enough to make it a full-scale tragedy of great grandeur. No one can satisfactorily discuss tragedies without recourse being had to language at its most sublime, the intensity of emotions which can only and aptly be captured by a dexterous use of sublime language. When Shakespeare’s Othello discovers his folly in killing an innocent Desdemona, he cries lyrically thus:
O cursed, cursed slave! Whip me, ye devils,
From the possession of this heavenly sight!
Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulphur,
Wash me in steep-down gulf of liquid fire!
O Desdemon! Dead Desdemon: dead! O, O!
(p. 130, William Shakespeare: Othello, Wordsworth Classics edition, 2003).
This kind of heightened language is lacking in Yerima’s Otaelo. Placed in a similar circumstance, when Otaelo discovers his folly, he walks slowly to the lifeless body of Chinyere and says: “Oh the gods have pity on my soul. Wait Chinyere, my princess, my wife, don’t go too far” (p 56). Yerima’s language in this play is cliché-ridden in most emotional scenes where sublime poetry should be able to express the emotions of the characters better. Earlier in the play, Otaelo and Chinyere meet after the elders of the land, the Ndiche, have decided on the course of action to take, Otaelo prosaically tells Chinyere in a rather threadbare, melodramatic and childish language that: “I love you, too more than life. For in you I have the freedom of heart. Not because you are a princess, but because, you control the air that I breathe” (p. 36). To compensate for this dearth of enough highly poetic language to express their emotions effectively, the playwright made Chinyere raise her right arm slowly and says: “This is my love I want to express, and I want to keep with you and in you, forever. Here … cut” (p. 36). And amateurishly, Otaelo brings out his right arm, cuts her, and cuts him and they both suck in a blood-oath! (p. 36). Secondly, when pathos is not well evoked in a play to attain the cathartic level of a high tragedy called purgation, such a tragedy cannot be said to be a success. Thence marks the inadequacy of Yerima’s Otaelo as a tragedy and a work of art. Writing on the inadequacy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a work of art, the poet-critic T. S. Eliot in a famous essay in 1919, submitted: “Hamlet, like the sonnets is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art … in the character Hamlet, it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art.” The same can be said of Yerima’s Otaelo. For example, the choice of Chinyere, the Igwe’s only child and daughter by the playwright to break so serious a traditional taboo such as the osu caste system instead of heightening the emotional intensity of the play, rather does the opposite, as it trivializes the magnitude and seriousness of the osu caste system among the Igbo, and exposes how little the playwright knows about the Igbo traditions. Thus, the reaction of the Igwe as the custodian of his people’s culture to such an abomination is most unrealistic. Perhaps if the playwright had used an elder statesman’s daughter in the society rather than the Igwe’s as in Shakespeare’s Othello, it would have added some verisimilitude to the work. Besides, in an egalitarian and highly ultra-democratic society such as the Igbo, the Igwe’s word is not law like Ezeulu in Achebe’s Arrow of God. In consequence, it is manifestly wrong for Chinyere to say that: “Since my father has sworn by his Ofor, his word is law” (p. 25). The Igwe’s ofor as the symbol of authority cannot be used to break a time-hallowed tradition like the osu caste system, enough for the Igwe to say to an osu: “By the gods, I swear, whatever you wish, I shall grant. Speak, my honour is before you” (p. 16). The violation of a sacrilege by the Igwe is not a personal matter but communal in nature. In writing about a culture that is not one’s, it behooves on the writer embarking on such a task to undertake an in-depth research into the traditions of such people, their world-views, belief system, mores, norms and values which it obviously appears Yerima has not done enough in this play.
Be that as it may, Yerima’s Otaelo is a great contribution to the perennial fight against the social anathema among the Igbo called the osu caste system. It is socially committed and may perhaps force some die-hard practitioners to have a rethink despite the failings of the play as a tragedy and a work of art. The problem with adapting the work of a great dramatist like Shakespeare is that the later work will more often than not pale into insignificance when compared to the supreme art of the former like a midget before a giant.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
A Nation in Search of Its Soul in Okediran's Tenants of the House
BY
Isaac Attah Ogezi
It has long become a cliché that literature is the heart-beat of every nation. African literature is not an exception, and perhaps because of the historical background of the continent, it has its peculiarities when viewed vis-à-vis its Western counterparts. The same can be said of its writers. Pitted against the colonial misadventure, the African writer used his sacred art to protest the rape of his motherland. Despite the attainment of independence, he is still no longer at ease in the new dispensation, what with the ugly scenario where the lives of the citizenry are not any better than under colonial rule. To him, art for art’s sake is an abdication of the sacred duty he owes his society; a half-digested foreign theory regurgitated by those who see art as pure entertainment and nothing more. No, he must steep himself in the politics of his times not necessarily as a card-carrying politician but as a critic. Chinua Achebe did this so well when he captured graphically the disillusionment and cynicism that marked Nigeria’s First Republic in his A Man of the People. Since then, the Nigerian state is like a rudderless ship at the mercy of military adventurers and careerist politicians. Today, after more than a decade of civil rule, the Promised Land is still a tantalizing, twinkling dot in the distance. Wale Okediran’s latest fiction offering, Tenants of the House, is a strong warning to a nation at the precipice of self-destruction, to boot it awake as it is not yet Uhuru. What have we done with our democracy? He seems to ask.
Okediran’s Tenants of the House is a timely metafictional account of the goings-on in the apex legislative arm of our nation, its perennial cat-and-mouse relationship with the executive and the failure of leadership. It tells the story of Honourable Samuel Bakura, a naïve first-term member of the lower house of the nation’s National Assembly, known as the Federal House of Representatives. His dreams of contributing his quota as a lawyer towards the enactment of laws that will impact on the lives of the citizenry are dogged by the daily happenings in the House, the endless politicking, conspiracies, intrigues, betrayals and scheming. He discovers much to his shock that most of his honourable colleagues have hidden agendas which are anything but honourable. His first baptism of fire into this murky, dog-eat-dog world of politics that he finds himself is when he saw a gun in Honourable Elizabeth Bello’s handbag. What will a gun be doing in a honourable member’s handbag? He is jolted awake by this and several bizarre happenings in his new world of Nigerian politics where ‘to kill is a crime: to kill at the right time is politics’ (p. 3). This amazes our central character greatly as he narrates on pages 3and 4:
What did guns have to do with serving one’s country? Should I have come to the parliament? Now, I thought, it was too late to go back. The road here was hard. To get my nomination confirmed at the constituency level had been a fierce struggle. I had coughed up half my annual income for the nomination but it was not enough.
He learns the bitter truth that the murky waters of Nigerian politics, money answereth to all things including the conscience of a man. A seasoned Nigerian politician, Elizabeth educates him further on page 6 as follows:
Huge loads of fertilizer is what you need. Money, money, money is the fertilizer of politics. Sam, don’t be a small boy. How much do you earn here as a Member of Parliament? Peanuts … peanuts that godfathers and constituents swallow up as quickly as chickens devour maize … You want to make it back? Take the money; make the money, from anywhere, everywhere. Prepare for the rainy day. Politics can be good for you. In this Nigeria, life outside parliament is hard, hard, hard.
In his naivety, and perhaps due to the mesmerizing effect of seeing so much money for the first time in his life, Bakura, the character-narrator, is drafted sheepishly into a clandestine plot to unseat the Speaker of the House. He soon learns that in politics scruples could go to blazes, all that matters is the self, for ‘there are no permanent friends in politics, only permanent interests’ (p.10). Fortunately, his waning idealism is revived when the embattled Speaker pays him a sudden visit at two in the morning to canvass his support with a view to forestalling the impeachment, pricking Bakura’s almost dead conscience with the following words on pages 53 and 54:
I cannot but shudder at the quality of the kind of people you are associating with in that your group… Let me urge you to back out from the group and join me in moving this democracy forward. As I said earlier on, there are several altruistic projects we can carry out within this National Assembly that will both improve the quality of governance in this country and, at the same time, benefit us individually as politicians.
These soul-stirring words strengthen Bakura’s resolve to henceforth listen to his conscience in his future dealings rather than allowing money to be the sole determinant of his actions or inactions. In his words, ‘I was about the best educated. Who of our group knew about Clausewitz? Or Plato? Or Socrates? Education and political gangsterism do not go well together. And instead of my current alignment with political gangsterism, I should use my education and experience as a lawyer in a more positive way: promoting bills and policies which would move the nation forward’ (p. 57). Once he has made this avowal, he is unstoppable. He rises in collaboration with students and workers in the country to help the Speaker nip the impeachment move in the bud. But no sooner is the impeachment saga over than the President comes up with the sinister third-term elongation plan. Perhaps, the climax of Bakura’s shock of how politics can be played without regard to conscience is when he discovers that the President has co-opted the same Speaker he sought to impeach some months ago to spearhead his infamous dream of tenure elongation. One could liken this to erstwhile Vice President Abubakar Atiku’s reconciliation with his boss, former President Olusegun Obasanjo in order to gratify his vaulting ambition for Aso Rock. The reader is equally baffled like Bakura at the prostitute-like change of language such that the now pro-President Speaker could try to persuade the central character with the following words:
Samuel, are you really a politician? Have you forgotten the saying, No permanent friends, only permanent interests? Let me tell you, it is a truism. That is one. The President was against me in the past, now he is for me. Two, the North. The people of the North? They are an amorphous sociological mass, not a political entity. The people. Which people? Our hungry passive constituents? What do they care about politics? The hungry masses will go for anything. At any rate, my own take … what is at stake for us is to give the President our support. Life is a risk. And this is a good risk. If the plan succeeds, all well and good. If it doesn’t, we have nothing to lose. You and I, Sam, all of us would at least have gained some money’ (p. 167).
The above statement is as convincing and selfish as Chief Nanga’s advice to Odili to step down for him and to leave politics to those adept at it. Bakura may appear timid and unprincipled in the early part of the novel, but at this stage such speeches cannot move him to support a plan that ‘may truncate our democracy’ (p. 184). He boldly advises the President to shelf this Lady Macbeth-like ambition as ‘the other examples of tenure prolongation experiments mostly ended badly. My feeling is that here in this great country the idea may not fly … Let us not lose to it all the goodwill we have amassed over the years’ (p. 184). He bravely refuses offers of bribes by the President and his cohorts, dares intimidation and threat to his life, thereby contributing greatly to the killing of that selfish dream.
On the extreme side of the divide is Honourable Elizabeth Bello, who, quite unlike Bakura, appears well-acclimatized to the ‘murky waters of the male-dominated world of politics’ (p. 3). Beautiful, fearless and an irredeemably corrupt single mother, she is not a woman to be pushed around or browbeat. She is ‘direct, combative and hard’ (p. 3). Sizzling Lizzy, as she is fondly called by Bakura, is a maverick in the deadly game of betrayal and could stop at nothing to have her way like when she offers herself to him to enliven his weakening interest in the impeachment plan against the Speaker. She uses what she has to get what she wants. Never truly in love with Bakura until when he informs her of his engagement to a young Fulani girl and suddenly her love for him is ignited (pp. 286 -289). She is among the honourable members fronted by the President to impeach the Speaker, yet she is seen openly mobilizing members to forestall it, ‘playing the role of a decoy … of a mole in the Speaker’s camp’ (p. 15).
Told in simple, unpretentious, lucid language, Okediran employed skillfully the swift, dexterous use of alternate narrative techniques of the first-person narrator and the omniscient narrative in an engrossing, suspenseful, pacy and intellectual and highly informative manner to portray a nation in dire search of its lost soul, using the Federal House of Representatives that he knows so well as the microcosm of the larger society. Despite the all-pervasive air of pessimism and disillusionment that runs through a greater part of the work, Okediran sees a ray of light at the end of the tunnel, when, at the end of the novel, the tables are turned and we see the rather dictatorial President fighting for his life. The love-affair between Honourable Bakura and a village Fulani girl, Batejo, coupled with the foiling of the impeachment of the Speaker by students and workers may appear too idealistic to the reader who is more at home with realism. But is the writer’s duty not the creation of the ideal? In a world of impossibility, enters the writer, a prophet like the US President Barack Obama, bearing the message of ‘Yes, we can.’ The ideal can be made a reality if only we believe and make concerted efforts towards actualizing it.
However, Tenants of the House, like most great works of art, is not without some imperfections. Undoubtedly, the most glaring is the love sub-plot. For the sake of his love for Batejo, Bakura is inflicted with some injuries by his illiterate herdsman rival; he defies all oppositions including his Deaconess mother’s and a reactionary society to convert to Islam, only to fail cowardly and melodramatically at the manhood-testing Sharo festival when flagellated by his rival, much to the chagrin of his would-be wife and her people. ‘Instantly, I let out an ear-shattering scream, tried to flee from the field but collapsed in a heap on the dusty ground crying, wayyo Allah! Wayyo Allah!’ (p. 297). This is a great failing of the novel as the ending of a work of art affects significantly the theme of the writer than anything. What is the message of Okediran to his reader using this character who has withstood all oppositions to his love and conversion to Islam, weathered all the political storms on his way, only to collapse cowardly under mere Sharo flogging? Also, the alternate use of the first-person and the omniscient narratives can be confusing to the reader at times. On pages 37 and 236 in particular, the reader will hardly know where one narrative technique stops for the other to continue as there are no signals such as enough line-spacing nor the use of slight linguistic differences or signposts to distinguish one from the other. Lastly, the transliteration of Hausa words to English like Chimamanda Adichie’s rather over-use of Igbo expressions in her Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, depict both writers’ lack of in-depth knowledge of the culture of the Hausa and the Igbo respectively. In the case of the former, the average educated native-speakers of Hausa will not thank him for this effort, bereft of the ethos, mores, norms and values of the Hausa or Fulani race. The non-Hausa writers in Nigeria who have succeeded so well in the portrayal of the Hausa or Fulani man in his community in their works are Cyprian Ekwensi’s The Burning Grass and Biyi Bandele-Thomas’ Burma Boy.
In conclusion, since the publication of Achebe’s A Man of the People, no novel in Nigeria has captured the political life of Nigerians in a wonderfully satirical manner like Okediran’s Tenants of the House. Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah may well have been shortlisted in 1988 for the Booker Award in England, yet there is no gainsaying the fact that it still toddles as a midget before the towering A Man of the People in the deployment of political satire. Bold, topical and experimental, Okediran’s Tenants of the House places him on the same pedestal as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in terms of the effective use of satire. It is a must read for students of political science, law, and the new lawmaker who wants to know how legislative activities are conducted at the apex legislative house, the delicate nuances of lawmakers’ language and the nitty-gritty of how bills are passed into laws.
Isaac Attah Ogezi
It has long become a cliché that literature is the heart-beat of every nation. African literature is not an exception, and perhaps because of the historical background of the continent, it has its peculiarities when viewed vis-à-vis its Western counterparts. The same can be said of its writers. Pitted against the colonial misadventure, the African writer used his sacred art to protest the rape of his motherland. Despite the attainment of independence, he is still no longer at ease in the new dispensation, what with the ugly scenario where the lives of the citizenry are not any better than under colonial rule. To him, art for art’s sake is an abdication of the sacred duty he owes his society; a half-digested foreign theory regurgitated by those who see art as pure entertainment and nothing more. No, he must steep himself in the politics of his times not necessarily as a card-carrying politician but as a critic. Chinua Achebe did this so well when he captured graphically the disillusionment and cynicism that marked Nigeria’s First Republic in his A Man of the People. Since then, the Nigerian state is like a rudderless ship at the mercy of military adventurers and careerist politicians. Today, after more than a decade of civil rule, the Promised Land is still a tantalizing, twinkling dot in the distance. Wale Okediran’s latest fiction offering, Tenants of the House, is a strong warning to a nation at the precipice of self-destruction, to boot it awake as it is not yet Uhuru. What have we done with our democracy? He seems to ask.
Okediran’s Tenants of the House is a timely metafictional account of the goings-on in the apex legislative arm of our nation, its perennial cat-and-mouse relationship with the executive and the failure of leadership. It tells the story of Honourable Samuel Bakura, a naïve first-term member of the lower house of the nation’s National Assembly, known as the Federal House of Representatives. His dreams of contributing his quota as a lawyer towards the enactment of laws that will impact on the lives of the citizenry are dogged by the daily happenings in the House, the endless politicking, conspiracies, intrigues, betrayals and scheming. He discovers much to his shock that most of his honourable colleagues have hidden agendas which are anything but honourable. His first baptism of fire into this murky, dog-eat-dog world of politics that he finds himself is when he saw a gun in Honourable Elizabeth Bello’s handbag. What will a gun be doing in a honourable member’s handbag? He is jolted awake by this and several bizarre happenings in his new world of Nigerian politics where ‘to kill is a crime: to kill at the right time is politics’ (p. 3). This amazes our central character greatly as he narrates on pages 3and 4:
What did guns have to do with serving one’s country? Should I have come to the parliament? Now, I thought, it was too late to go back. The road here was hard. To get my nomination confirmed at the constituency level had been a fierce struggle. I had coughed up half my annual income for the nomination but it was not enough.
He learns the bitter truth that the murky waters of Nigerian politics, money answereth to all things including the conscience of a man. A seasoned Nigerian politician, Elizabeth educates him further on page 6 as follows:
Huge loads of fertilizer is what you need. Money, money, money is the fertilizer of politics. Sam, don’t be a small boy. How much do you earn here as a Member of Parliament? Peanuts … peanuts that godfathers and constituents swallow up as quickly as chickens devour maize … You want to make it back? Take the money; make the money, from anywhere, everywhere. Prepare for the rainy day. Politics can be good for you. In this Nigeria, life outside parliament is hard, hard, hard.
In his naivety, and perhaps due to the mesmerizing effect of seeing so much money for the first time in his life, Bakura, the character-narrator, is drafted sheepishly into a clandestine plot to unseat the Speaker of the House. He soon learns that in politics scruples could go to blazes, all that matters is the self, for ‘there are no permanent friends in politics, only permanent interests’ (p.10). Fortunately, his waning idealism is revived when the embattled Speaker pays him a sudden visit at two in the morning to canvass his support with a view to forestalling the impeachment, pricking Bakura’s almost dead conscience with the following words on pages 53 and 54:
I cannot but shudder at the quality of the kind of people you are associating with in that your group… Let me urge you to back out from the group and join me in moving this democracy forward. As I said earlier on, there are several altruistic projects we can carry out within this National Assembly that will both improve the quality of governance in this country and, at the same time, benefit us individually as politicians.
These soul-stirring words strengthen Bakura’s resolve to henceforth listen to his conscience in his future dealings rather than allowing money to be the sole determinant of his actions or inactions. In his words, ‘I was about the best educated. Who of our group knew about Clausewitz? Or Plato? Or Socrates? Education and political gangsterism do not go well together. And instead of my current alignment with political gangsterism, I should use my education and experience as a lawyer in a more positive way: promoting bills and policies which would move the nation forward’ (p. 57). Once he has made this avowal, he is unstoppable. He rises in collaboration with students and workers in the country to help the Speaker nip the impeachment move in the bud. But no sooner is the impeachment saga over than the President comes up with the sinister third-term elongation plan. Perhaps, the climax of Bakura’s shock of how politics can be played without regard to conscience is when he discovers that the President has co-opted the same Speaker he sought to impeach some months ago to spearhead his infamous dream of tenure elongation. One could liken this to erstwhile Vice President Abubakar Atiku’s reconciliation with his boss, former President Olusegun Obasanjo in order to gratify his vaulting ambition for Aso Rock. The reader is equally baffled like Bakura at the prostitute-like change of language such that the now pro-President Speaker could try to persuade the central character with the following words:
Samuel, are you really a politician? Have you forgotten the saying, No permanent friends, only permanent interests? Let me tell you, it is a truism. That is one. The President was against me in the past, now he is for me. Two, the North. The people of the North? They are an amorphous sociological mass, not a political entity. The people. Which people? Our hungry passive constituents? What do they care about politics? The hungry masses will go for anything. At any rate, my own take … what is at stake for us is to give the President our support. Life is a risk. And this is a good risk. If the plan succeeds, all well and good. If it doesn’t, we have nothing to lose. You and I, Sam, all of us would at least have gained some money’ (p. 167).
The above statement is as convincing and selfish as Chief Nanga’s advice to Odili to step down for him and to leave politics to those adept at it. Bakura may appear timid and unprincipled in the early part of the novel, but at this stage such speeches cannot move him to support a plan that ‘may truncate our democracy’ (p. 184). He boldly advises the President to shelf this Lady Macbeth-like ambition as ‘the other examples of tenure prolongation experiments mostly ended badly. My feeling is that here in this great country the idea may not fly … Let us not lose to it all the goodwill we have amassed over the years’ (p. 184). He bravely refuses offers of bribes by the President and his cohorts, dares intimidation and threat to his life, thereby contributing greatly to the killing of that selfish dream.
On the extreme side of the divide is Honourable Elizabeth Bello, who, quite unlike Bakura, appears well-acclimatized to the ‘murky waters of the male-dominated world of politics’ (p. 3). Beautiful, fearless and an irredeemably corrupt single mother, she is not a woman to be pushed around or browbeat. She is ‘direct, combative and hard’ (p. 3). Sizzling Lizzy, as she is fondly called by Bakura, is a maverick in the deadly game of betrayal and could stop at nothing to have her way like when she offers herself to him to enliven his weakening interest in the impeachment plan against the Speaker. She uses what she has to get what she wants. Never truly in love with Bakura until when he informs her of his engagement to a young Fulani girl and suddenly her love for him is ignited (pp. 286 -289). She is among the honourable members fronted by the President to impeach the Speaker, yet she is seen openly mobilizing members to forestall it, ‘playing the role of a decoy … of a mole in the Speaker’s camp’ (p. 15).
Told in simple, unpretentious, lucid language, Okediran employed skillfully the swift, dexterous use of alternate narrative techniques of the first-person narrator and the omniscient narrative in an engrossing, suspenseful, pacy and intellectual and highly informative manner to portray a nation in dire search of its lost soul, using the Federal House of Representatives that he knows so well as the microcosm of the larger society. Despite the all-pervasive air of pessimism and disillusionment that runs through a greater part of the work, Okediran sees a ray of light at the end of the tunnel, when, at the end of the novel, the tables are turned and we see the rather dictatorial President fighting for his life. The love-affair between Honourable Bakura and a village Fulani girl, Batejo, coupled with the foiling of the impeachment of the Speaker by students and workers may appear too idealistic to the reader who is more at home with realism. But is the writer’s duty not the creation of the ideal? In a world of impossibility, enters the writer, a prophet like the US President Barack Obama, bearing the message of ‘Yes, we can.’ The ideal can be made a reality if only we believe and make concerted efforts towards actualizing it.
However, Tenants of the House, like most great works of art, is not without some imperfections. Undoubtedly, the most glaring is the love sub-plot. For the sake of his love for Batejo, Bakura is inflicted with some injuries by his illiterate herdsman rival; he defies all oppositions including his Deaconess mother’s and a reactionary society to convert to Islam, only to fail cowardly and melodramatically at the manhood-testing Sharo festival when flagellated by his rival, much to the chagrin of his would-be wife and her people. ‘Instantly, I let out an ear-shattering scream, tried to flee from the field but collapsed in a heap on the dusty ground crying, wayyo Allah! Wayyo Allah!’ (p. 297). This is a great failing of the novel as the ending of a work of art affects significantly the theme of the writer than anything. What is the message of Okediran to his reader using this character who has withstood all oppositions to his love and conversion to Islam, weathered all the political storms on his way, only to collapse cowardly under mere Sharo flogging? Also, the alternate use of the first-person and the omniscient narratives can be confusing to the reader at times. On pages 37 and 236 in particular, the reader will hardly know where one narrative technique stops for the other to continue as there are no signals such as enough line-spacing nor the use of slight linguistic differences or signposts to distinguish one from the other. Lastly, the transliteration of Hausa words to English like Chimamanda Adichie’s rather over-use of Igbo expressions in her Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun, depict both writers’ lack of in-depth knowledge of the culture of the Hausa and the Igbo respectively. In the case of the former, the average educated native-speakers of Hausa will not thank him for this effort, bereft of the ethos, mores, norms and values of the Hausa or Fulani race. The non-Hausa writers in Nigeria who have succeeded so well in the portrayal of the Hausa or Fulani man in his community in their works are Cyprian Ekwensi’s The Burning Grass and Biyi Bandele-Thomas’ Burma Boy.
In conclusion, since the publication of Achebe’s A Man of the People, no novel in Nigeria has captured the political life of Nigerians in a wonderfully satirical manner like Okediran’s Tenants of the House. Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah may well have been shortlisted in 1988 for the Booker Award in England, yet there is no gainsaying the fact that it still toddles as a midget before the towering A Man of the People in the deployment of political satire. Bold, topical and experimental, Okediran’s Tenants of the House places him on the same pedestal as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in terms of the effective use of satire. It is a must read for students of political science, law, and the new lawmaker who wants to know how legislative activities are conducted at the apex legislative house, the delicate nuances of lawmakers’ language and the nitty-gritty of how bills are passed into laws.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Killjoys
By
Isaac Attah Ogezi
Interlocked, their breaths came in gasps.
The loudspeaker voice in the distance as if from another world, extorting loving one’s neighbours as oneself, the portrait of the Savour’s birth in the manger, The Last Supper and other religious paraphernalia in the room draped their act with sacredness, a spiritual rite of purification, a holy act. El Dorado can only be achieved in this perfect state of purity.
Delirious moans rewarded their quest for a pure state of wholeness, the near worship state that man can only experiences the divine.
Presently, they are treading water together, fish-like. Slippery. Each thrust sends sweet-painful sparks through their bodies. They push with all their strength to stay afloat this river at its youthful stage. Push! They urge each other, two souls at the end of their tether, trapped in the void.
Depthless, they strain against the current, this life-death strain that is spiced with pleasure not diametrically opposed to pain as the spiked cilice belt clamped around a zealot’s thigh or the religious self-flagellation as a perpetual reminder of Christ’s agony at Calvary. This pleasure-pain is seemingly endless; paradise and purgatory intricately wedlocked.
And then at last he came! The split-second glimpse of eternity.
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.
Warp! The snake’s head is severed and the rest is nothingness. The silence of the graves.
Came to, the two men of the cloth were surprised at their nakedness, but it was just momentary. Every initiate experiences this transfiguration back to the earthling after this deep spiritual odyssey.
‘Blessed be God,’ they glorified …
There was a dead silence in the zinc-house room as the lady pored over the story on loose foolscap sheets, twisting her lips as if struggling with the effort to read it aloud to herself. Ogaba fidgeted uneasily in the chair three feet away from the ten-spring bed with his back turned on the rubber table. He crossed and uncrossed his legs uneasily like a young writer awaiting the death-knell judgment on his latest offering by the most renowned critic of his day. This time around the critic was a young beautiful lady seated in her nightgown on the bed, hair disheveled, which added, in spite of the dim light in the room, to the strangeness of her bluish eyes. Any time she’d taken so long a time like this to react to a story of his in progress, he foresaw a sharp censorship in the offing.
‘I wrote it this morning while you were away,’ he’d begun, a feeble attempt to thaw the thick, uncomfortable silence in the room. Wordlessly, she ran her fingers, the thumb and the index finger pressed together, through her disheveled hair, two discs of a caterpillar, hunting down imaginary lice.
‘What do you think of the story?’ he asked, relieved at last like a man who’d eventually spat out a phlegm which he’d held captive in his mouth for long out of shame or the courtesy of the company he found himself.
‘If I got your meaning well, the story is about gay priests, right?’
‘You got it!’ he said excitedly like Christ when Peter divulged his Sonship in the Godhead. Or more aptly, as would a professor when a bright student unravelled a difficult point that he’d thought would be a mystery to him. That was what he liked about this young English (B.A.) graduate – simply her brilliance. Except for this secret, this common interest in literature, they were miles apart like Artic and Antarctic Circles in the geography of the earth. Apart from their wide age difference – in fact, to a disinterested onlooker, he could pass for her father – he could not be said to be handsome in any way, no thanks to his compulsive local-gin drinking that had marred his face, rendered it ugly like a baboon’s or the torn patchwork of an amateur tailor. Besides, the few years of frustration, the ex ..., no, he flinched to think of the word that had ruined his life. Since that sad episode in his chequered life, he’d never known himself, a life’s tramp, moving here and there endlessly and purposelessly. In his mid-sojourn through life, he’d come to the irrevocable conclusion that a common interest between a couple, like the umbilical cord that links a child to its mother in the womb, is stronger than mere romantic love which, bereft of this foundation, would always flare up quiveringly and simmer down to cold ashes.
‘Thanks,’ said she and then she smiled her enigmatic smile that often made his member throb with desire.
‘Would you call this a catchy opening?’ he probed on, fishing for compliments.
‘Not really especially to a reader whose grasp of sublime poetry is rusty. That’s not to say that it’s not good. Not at all! On the contrary, I like the subtlety that runs through most of your stories,’ she commended.
It was his turn to say thank you to her. He was always moved by her critique of his writings. She had an aristocratic taste in arts.
‘When you write on dicey subjects, you cannot fail to be subtle otherwise you’re only writing political tracts that will surely gather dust in unknown libraries of the world after a couple of controversies they must have generated. That’s where the hungry hack writers thrive on. They know next to nothing about literature,’ he submitted, as if in a class delivering a lecture. He made to continue but had to stop abruptly when he saw the expression on her face.
‘Yes?’ he asked inquiringly.
‘As I was saying, your subtlety, instead of robbing your writing of some niceties, confers a high level of literary seriousness on it. Take for example, the images of purity in spite of the two priests being engaged in what the society would call an unspeakable act. Wouldn’t it be assumed that you’re pro-gay when you clothed their sinful act with images of purity the same way that Shakespeare used religious images to describe the love between Romeo and Juliet?’ she queried.
He was cut to the deep by her in-depth analysis. What a lady!
‘You’re right. But you know yourself that I’m not gay and can never be pro-gay!’
‘The puritanical world will never think so, mind you’.
‘Then to hell with her!’
‘And the church, don’t forget that, will never forgive you. They’ll think that you’re trying to hit back at them after what they’ve done to you. Your kind of Shylock’s pound of flesh!’
‘Well, they’re entitled to their opinions. That’s not my business. I don’t think I’ll be doing my work as a writer when I’m overtly judgmental. I don’t judge; I don’t take sides. That’s my philosophy as a writer and all great writers’ as well. I only narrate the experiences of the isolated in society, the societal misfits, the outsiders. What’s more, I believe in live and let’s live; a peaceful kind of co-existence, of giving room to different shades of opinions and doctrines. Art will be abdicating its sacred duty when it takes sides or is overtly or covertly judgmental,’ he said emotionally
‘I was only voicing out my fears, hon,’ said she in a consolatory tone.
‘Yes, I know and I do appreciate them so much. But I don’t think I’m going to change that early part of the story in order to please a hypocritical world. No, not on your life!’ he vowed. They lapsed into silence. Funmi knew within herself that she had touched the sore part of his life by making reference to the church which always had way of making him go into convulsive outbursts like this night. The only antidote to this was for her to hold her peace for a while to allow his anger to calm down. Two years ago, when their paths had crisscrossed, she’d met him in the reception office of a newspaper house in Abuja. She’d gone there to see the Fashion Editor of a cream de la cream magazine with respect to some supply agreement they had together which she couldn’t remember now. In the course of the long wait, a conversation was struck between them by his reference to her exquisite beauty which was to conflagrate into a deep physical relationship. They’d exchanged their cell phone numbers, then came the endless free midnight calls before she suggested that he pack his things and move into her one-room zinc-house at Mabuchi instead of putting up with a friend in an over-crowded room of six men at Gwarimpa Estate. Since then, they’d been living together. In the daytime, as early as seventy-thirty in the morning, she’d go out in search of supply contract jobs at construction sites while he scribbled away the daylight at the table as a writer and occasional freelance journalist.
His fight with the church had begun as early as the first few months of his ordination as a Reverend Father before it reached its climax just two and half years ago. To him, it was the endless fight between truth and falsehood, good and evil, between archaic dogmas that had invaded the church for quite a long time and the radical revolutions of the likes of Martin Luther’s war of reformation against the orthodox early churches. When he was ordained, his Hippocratic Oath as a priest was to interpret the Holy Scriptures in a strict constructionist manner without flourishes which hypocrites and charlatans were wont to. This had brought him into frequent head-on collisions with the authorities at his first diocese when he looked at the hardness in the hearts of his flock and lifted the ban on wine. He started the campaign of what was to be called:’ Drink but be ye not intoxicated.’ He used the Scriptures to confound all his detractors who came in droves from within and without to vilify him. Why, didn’t Christ’s first miracle according to the gospel of Apostle John was the turning of water to wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee? Would he have turned water to wine if he didn’t sanction the drinking of it? Didn’t the Book of Proverbs say that thy barn shall be filled with plenty and thy presses shall burst out with new wine? Timothy son, be thou not given to too much wine; drink a little. This syllogism was so strong that even the most simple could not fail to see the streaks of light at the end of the tunnel of ignorance and fanaticism. The problem with wine, however, is that one should not exceed the quantum the brain could contain, for the Holy Writ says: ‘At last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.’ Stunned into silence, the only option left for the hypocritical Council like a drowning man, was to transfer him to a remote village! But like a man eternally married to controversy, it still tailed him there before the last straw.
When he appeared before the disciplinary panel, he was wondering what heresy he must have committed this time around. The letter of invitation didn’t state the reasons for his invitation to face such a high disciplinary panel. His heart constricted so suddenly like a man on the verge of having a heart attack when his eyes strayed to the Chairman’s table where a copy of Washington Post lay conspicuously, with the last few paragraphs of the page where his review had appeared, boldly underlined with a red biro. They ran thus:
Perhaps, the most artistic achievement of Dan Brown’s controversial novel, The Da Vince Code, is not the world-famous blasphemies on the mortality of Jesus Christ with royal lineage with Mary Magdalene nor the unrealistic thrilling story but the theme of physical union between man and woman otherwise known as sex or coitus or intercourse. To him, by communing with woman, man can achieve a climactic instant when his mind goes totally blank and he can see God. On page 335 of Anchor Books Mass-Market edition, Brown put it into the mouth of his character, Langdon, as follows:
‘Historically, intercourse was the act through which male and female experienced God. The ancients believed that the male was spiritually incomplete until he had carnal knowledge of the sacred feminine. Physical union with the female remained the sole means through which man could become spiritually complete and ultimately achieve gnosis – knowledge of the divine. Since the day of Isis, sex rites had been considered man’s bridge from earth to the heaven … intercourse was the revered union of the two halves of the human spirit - male and female – through which the male could find spiritual wholeness and communion with God.’
It is obvious from the word go that Langdon is the alter-ego of Dan Brown himself which he uses to express his views about life. Literature, from countless ages, has been seen as a veritable vehicle through which a writer could sublimate his entire being, the totality of his world-views. Not done with his discourse on sex and man’s spirituality, Brown sees orgasm as prayer when he wrote on the same page that: ‘Physiologically speaking, the male climax was accompanied by a split second entirely devoid of thought. A brief mental vacuum. A moment of clarity during which God could be glimpsed. Meditation gurus achieved similar states of thoughtlessness without sex and often described Nirvana as a never-ending spiritual orgasm.’
On the pain of wounding the pride and sensibilities of a sanctimonious world, herein lies the greatness of Brown’s The Da Vinci Code as a piece of literary excellence, undoubtedly his magnus opus till date! Many uninformed readers have, most unfortunately, been blinded by a gale of vituperative, non-literary criticisms of the book to see the universalism of Brown’s thoughts. This singular achievement in this great work has raised him from being a mere thriller writer and has comfortably placed him on the same pedestal with world’s thinkers, theorists and philosophers like Socrates, Plato, Freud, Satre-Paul and Camus, to mention but a few of the most influential.
How the question-and-answer session began, Ogaba could not remember. His mind was engrossed on how the literary journal got to them all the way from the US. Perhaps somebody who knew him had bought it and sent it to them? This did not fail to amaze him greatly as the only copy he thought he had was quietly tucked away in the drawer of his bedroom at the diocese. And surprisingly, he was not afraid to own up to his review; he’d rather burn at the stake like the early Christian martyrs than to deny his work. If he had wanted to be cowardly clandestine, he’d have published it under a pseudonym or anonymity, but no, he’d rather dare them and die as a hero.
He came suddenly alive by a question pelted at him and he fired back, no holds barred. He was all-ready for a showdown with this bunch of cowards and philistines; hypocrites in position of power, for what right had they to censure him as a writer?
The Chairman angrily thumped the table to silence him from responding to one of the questions from a member of the panel.
‘The last complaint against you, Father Ogaba, which you’re yet to acquit yourself of, was your advocating for the use of condoms in combating the scourge of HIV/AIDS in your diocese instead of preaching total abstinence! Imagine the effrontery of advertising for Gold Circle company on the exalted altar of our Lord Jesus Christ!’
‘I didn’t want to sit down helplessly and watch my diocese being daily depopulated by the pandemic. Let’s not pretend to be holier than the Pharisees and Sadducees in Christ’s days, even the littlest girl child among them cannot vouch for her virginity,’ he fired back.
‘In the first place, did you expect anything different from your flock when you as their shepherd could talk such rot? You need to be born-again!’
‘We know some people here who cannot see the logs in their own eyes yet they can see the specks in their neighbours’ eyes. Physician, heal yourself!’ he retorted, throwing all caution to the winds.
‘Gentlemen, in the name of Christ that we’re gathered …’ began a member visibly worried by the bitter exchanges between the Chairman and Ogaba.
‘Keep out of this, Father Baka! This smart aleck is long overdue to be reduced to his size. What does he think he is by the way?’ barked the Chairman, his Adam’s apple greatly agitated. ‘The cheek of it!’
From where Ogaba sat facing the panel, he couldn’t help but give a ghost of a smile. The Council knew what it was up to. When they were looking for whom to nail him, they had to go back to his great enemy in the past, during his seminary days, and made him the Chairman of the panel that’d crucify him. They sure did their homework very well. Father Chia had never forgiven him for topping their class while he trailed behind him throughout their days at the seminary. If their enmity had stopped at that, it would have been milder but what about the other thing? Dare he tell of a lady he snatched away from him when they used to escape from the seminary to look for girls whom they’d quench the lust of the flesh on?
Eventually, when the other panel members succeeded in quelling Father Chia’s tsunami-anger, they shifted their attack to Ogaba’s offensive review of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, the subject of their inquisition. They were unanimous in their condemnation. How would he do that to the church, nay, the entire Christendom? How could he praise such a despicable work that sought to question the divinity of Jesus Christ ‘as a piece of literary excellence’? A priest of all people! Was he paid by the enemies of the church to do so or was it worldly fame that would perish with the soul in the Last Days?
In the end, the panel members conferred briefly among themselves and told him he was free to go. He’d hear from them as soon as possible. Little did Ogaba bargain that the outcome could be this harsh. The Council had adopted wholesale the recommendations of the panel and he was relieved of his work without any ceremony nor entitlements, what with the disgrace of being defrocked after more than twenty-five years in the service of the Lord’s vineyard! Left in the cold, without gratuity, nothing!
In more sober moments, when reason was able to dethrone self-pity, Ogaba was not surprised at the outcome of the inquisition. From time immemorial, there is no love lost between art and fundamentalism of whatever clime be it in religion or governance. As the mirror of the society, art is eternally pitted against extremism of any kind. Any wonder that political and religious leaders hate the artist with unruly passion? The poet is excommunicated from Plato’s Republic, a Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, slain in 2004 for a 24-minute film Submission, that mildly criticized the treatment of Muslim women, with fatwa being declared on Salman Rushdie’s head for purportedly blaspheming Prophet Mohammed in his novel, The Satanic Verses. Was death not spread across the globe for a handful of Danish cartoons that linked the Prophet of Islam with violence? Deaths to innocent souls far, far away from the scene of the crime, unleashed by some placard-carrying zealots? What about the countless, most gruesome wars fought in the Christendom during the Protestant Movement in the 16th and 17th centuries only reminiscent of the treatment of the Jews in Germany under Adolf Hitler? Martyrs were burnt alive at stakes for heresies. Can one possibly write the history of the church without wanton bloodshed? Tired of all these, the world’s supreme dramatist, William Shakespeare, cried out his helplessness in one of his sonnets:
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
And Art made tongue-tied by Authority …
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone …
It is a fight to the finish! A war without end. Art must never allow itself to be robbed of its power to shock. To be docile and obsequious is for the snake to be without its venomous fangs. Art that is polite is aesthetically bereft, impotent and toothless; cold ashes in grandmothers’ hearths …
‘You’ve succeeded in describing the sexual act in the opening paragraphs which I believe it’s like a foreshadow. What exactly is the plot all about?’ asked Funmi rather curiously.
‘Yes, that’s where the flashback comes in,’ began Ogaba. ‘The two priests had met earlier in the day during an All-Ministers’ Conference and fell in love immediately. In fact, the conference was still in progress when they’d decided to take a break and before they knew it, ended up in each other’s arm. It was love at first sight like the one between a man and a woman. I want you to note this: that the two priests in the story are not celibates and thus cannot be Reverend Fathers before the Catholic Church will feel that I’m out to take my revenge on them. My temperament is beyond such petty sentiments. The story is going to be a psychological study of why some are genetically constituted to be gay and cannot enjoy the normal sexual act with the opposite sexes like the same sex. To them, they believe that its pleasure is deeper and lasts longer than heterosexual sex.’
‘In other words, are you saying that these two priest in your story were doing it with women and yet not being satisfied?’ asked Funmi more alarmed by the psychological thrust of Ogaba’s statement.
‘Definitely. It’s to do with their genetic impulses and nothing more. I’m still researching on that,’ he answered.
‘Would they be caught?’ asked she anxiously.
‘Sure. As the creator, I’ll allow them to be caught as only that will bring out my message more clearly and pointedly.’
‘Caught and dismissed, perhaps?’
‘No, not at all. I dare not try that amateurish nonsense,’ he said determinedly.
‘Why not?’
‘Because that’ll completely mar my message, my theme. I want a situation where the church will show them some more understanding and tolerance. Besides, the question of allowing gay priests to be ordained is still raging in the church today like a wild harmattan fire.’
‘Yes, I know. But the church will never forgive you for this, I bet you. They’ll call it your cowardly onslaught at them, especially the Catholic Church!’
‘Well, they’re entitled to their opinions, as I said earlier. I dream of a world where the society will stop pigeon-holing its writers,’ he said passionately. ‘What’s more, I fear the gays more than the church. They’ve long become a mafia headed by Bishop Jackson Spoon. Their fear is the beginning of wisdom in the modern-day world,’ he added jocularly. Funmi giggled girlishly, stifling the urge to burst into a boisterous laughter. They lapsed into a momentary silence.
‘Come to bed,’ she invited amorously and huskily, breaking the silence. He sat, without moving a muscle, undecided. Wordlessly, she pulled the nightgown over her head as if to prove a point, threw it on the wooden clothes-rack, and stood unashamedly naked in the light, her orb prominently outlined against her silk pant, with her brassiereless breasts dancing quiveringly on her chest. Something rustled in the thicket of his shorts, throbbing with life.
‘I hope your writing on gays has not affected your psyche that you now have a phobia for women?’ she taunted teasingly. ‘Oh c’mon, sugar,’ she invited again rather huskily, with a mischievous smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
Aflame, he got tremblingly to his feet with his shorts bulging, and made for her. She moved backwards towards the bed, then lying on it gently and trance-like, their eyes locked in inexpressible desire. Instinctively, her left hand reached for the rope-switch, plunging the entire room into total darkness.
Isaac Attah Ogezi
Interlocked, their breaths came in gasps.
The loudspeaker voice in the distance as if from another world, extorting loving one’s neighbours as oneself, the portrait of the Savour’s birth in the manger, The Last Supper and other religious paraphernalia in the room draped their act with sacredness, a spiritual rite of purification, a holy act. El Dorado can only be achieved in this perfect state of purity.
Delirious moans rewarded their quest for a pure state of wholeness, the near worship state that man can only experiences the divine.
Presently, they are treading water together, fish-like. Slippery. Each thrust sends sweet-painful sparks through their bodies. They push with all their strength to stay afloat this river at its youthful stage. Push! They urge each other, two souls at the end of their tether, trapped in the void.
Depthless, they strain against the current, this life-death strain that is spiced with pleasure not diametrically opposed to pain as the spiked cilice belt clamped around a zealot’s thigh or the religious self-flagellation as a perpetual reminder of Christ’s agony at Calvary. This pleasure-pain is seemingly endless; paradise and purgatory intricately wedlocked.
And then at last he came! The split-second glimpse of eternity.
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.
Warp! The snake’s head is severed and the rest is nothingness. The silence of the graves.
Came to, the two men of the cloth were surprised at their nakedness, but it was just momentary. Every initiate experiences this transfiguration back to the earthling after this deep spiritual odyssey.
‘Blessed be God,’ they glorified …
There was a dead silence in the zinc-house room as the lady pored over the story on loose foolscap sheets, twisting her lips as if struggling with the effort to read it aloud to herself. Ogaba fidgeted uneasily in the chair three feet away from the ten-spring bed with his back turned on the rubber table. He crossed and uncrossed his legs uneasily like a young writer awaiting the death-knell judgment on his latest offering by the most renowned critic of his day. This time around the critic was a young beautiful lady seated in her nightgown on the bed, hair disheveled, which added, in spite of the dim light in the room, to the strangeness of her bluish eyes. Any time she’d taken so long a time like this to react to a story of his in progress, he foresaw a sharp censorship in the offing.
‘I wrote it this morning while you were away,’ he’d begun, a feeble attempt to thaw the thick, uncomfortable silence in the room. Wordlessly, she ran her fingers, the thumb and the index finger pressed together, through her disheveled hair, two discs of a caterpillar, hunting down imaginary lice.
‘What do you think of the story?’ he asked, relieved at last like a man who’d eventually spat out a phlegm which he’d held captive in his mouth for long out of shame or the courtesy of the company he found himself.
‘If I got your meaning well, the story is about gay priests, right?’
‘You got it!’ he said excitedly like Christ when Peter divulged his Sonship in the Godhead. Or more aptly, as would a professor when a bright student unravelled a difficult point that he’d thought would be a mystery to him. That was what he liked about this young English (B.A.) graduate – simply her brilliance. Except for this secret, this common interest in literature, they were miles apart like Artic and Antarctic Circles in the geography of the earth. Apart from their wide age difference – in fact, to a disinterested onlooker, he could pass for her father – he could not be said to be handsome in any way, no thanks to his compulsive local-gin drinking that had marred his face, rendered it ugly like a baboon’s or the torn patchwork of an amateur tailor. Besides, the few years of frustration, the ex ..., no, he flinched to think of the word that had ruined his life. Since that sad episode in his chequered life, he’d never known himself, a life’s tramp, moving here and there endlessly and purposelessly. In his mid-sojourn through life, he’d come to the irrevocable conclusion that a common interest between a couple, like the umbilical cord that links a child to its mother in the womb, is stronger than mere romantic love which, bereft of this foundation, would always flare up quiveringly and simmer down to cold ashes.
‘Thanks,’ said she and then she smiled her enigmatic smile that often made his member throb with desire.
‘Would you call this a catchy opening?’ he probed on, fishing for compliments.
‘Not really especially to a reader whose grasp of sublime poetry is rusty. That’s not to say that it’s not good. Not at all! On the contrary, I like the subtlety that runs through most of your stories,’ she commended.
It was his turn to say thank you to her. He was always moved by her critique of his writings. She had an aristocratic taste in arts.
‘When you write on dicey subjects, you cannot fail to be subtle otherwise you’re only writing political tracts that will surely gather dust in unknown libraries of the world after a couple of controversies they must have generated. That’s where the hungry hack writers thrive on. They know next to nothing about literature,’ he submitted, as if in a class delivering a lecture. He made to continue but had to stop abruptly when he saw the expression on her face.
‘Yes?’ he asked inquiringly.
‘As I was saying, your subtlety, instead of robbing your writing of some niceties, confers a high level of literary seriousness on it. Take for example, the images of purity in spite of the two priests being engaged in what the society would call an unspeakable act. Wouldn’t it be assumed that you’re pro-gay when you clothed their sinful act with images of purity the same way that Shakespeare used religious images to describe the love between Romeo and Juliet?’ she queried.
He was cut to the deep by her in-depth analysis. What a lady!
‘You’re right. But you know yourself that I’m not gay and can never be pro-gay!’
‘The puritanical world will never think so, mind you’.
‘Then to hell with her!’
‘And the church, don’t forget that, will never forgive you. They’ll think that you’re trying to hit back at them after what they’ve done to you. Your kind of Shylock’s pound of flesh!’
‘Well, they’re entitled to their opinions. That’s not my business. I don’t think I’ll be doing my work as a writer when I’m overtly judgmental. I don’t judge; I don’t take sides. That’s my philosophy as a writer and all great writers’ as well. I only narrate the experiences of the isolated in society, the societal misfits, the outsiders. What’s more, I believe in live and let’s live; a peaceful kind of co-existence, of giving room to different shades of opinions and doctrines. Art will be abdicating its sacred duty when it takes sides or is overtly or covertly judgmental,’ he said emotionally
‘I was only voicing out my fears, hon,’ said she in a consolatory tone.
‘Yes, I know and I do appreciate them so much. But I don’t think I’m going to change that early part of the story in order to please a hypocritical world. No, not on your life!’ he vowed. They lapsed into silence. Funmi knew within herself that she had touched the sore part of his life by making reference to the church which always had way of making him go into convulsive outbursts like this night. The only antidote to this was for her to hold her peace for a while to allow his anger to calm down. Two years ago, when their paths had crisscrossed, she’d met him in the reception office of a newspaper house in Abuja. She’d gone there to see the Fashion Editor of a cream de la cream magazine with respect to some supply agreement they had together which she couldn’t remember now. In the course of the long wait, a conversation was struck between them by his reference to her exquisite beauty which was to conflagrate into a deep physical relationship. They’d exchanged their cell phone numbers, then came the endless free midnight calls before she suggested that he pack his things and move into her one-room zinc-house at Mabuchi instead of putting up with a friend in an over-crowded room of six men at Gwarimpa Estate. Since then, they’d been living together. In the daytime, as early as seventy-thirty in the morning, she’d go out in search of supply contract jobs at construction sites while he scribbled away the daylight at the table as a writer and occasional freelance journalist.
His fight with the church had begun as early as the first few months of his ordination as a Reverend Father before it reached its climax just two and half years ago. To him, it was the endless fight between truth and falsehood, good and evil, between archaic dogmas that had invaded the church for quite a long time and the radical revolutions of the likes of Martin Luther’s war of reformation against the orthodox early churches. When he was ordained, his Hippocratic Oath as a priest was to interpret the Holy Scriptures in a strict constructionist manner without flourishes which hypocrites and charlatans were wont to. This had brought him into frequent head-on collisions with the authorities at his first diocese when he looked at the hardness in the hearts of his flock and lifted the ban on wine. He started the campaign of what was to be called:’ Drink but be ye not intoxicated.’ He used the Scriptures to confound all his detractors who came in droves from within and without to vilify him. Why, didn’t Christ’s first miracle according to the gospel of Apostle John was the turning of water to wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee? Would he have turned water to wine if he didn’t sanction the drinking of it? Didn’t the Book of Proverbs say that thy barn shall be filled with plenty and thy presses shall burst out with new wine? Timothy son, be thou not given to too much wine; drink a little. This syllogism was so strong that even the most simple could not fail to see the streaks of light at the end of the tunnel of ignorance and fanaticism. The problem with wine, however, is that one should not exceed the quantum the brain could contain, for the Holy Writ says: ‘At last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.’ Stunned into silence, the only option left for the hypocritical Council like a drowning man, was to transfer him to a remote village! But like a man eternally married to controversy, it still tailed him there before the last straw.
When he appeared before the disciplinary panel, he was wondering what heresy he must have committed this time around. The letter of invitation didn’t state the reasons for his invitation to face such a high disciplinary panel. His heart constricted so suddenly like a man on the verge of having a heart attack when his eyes strayed to the Chairman’s table where a copy of Washington Post lay conspicuously, with the last few paragraphs of the page where his review had appeared, boldly underlined with a red biro. They ran thus:
Perhaps, the most artistic achievement of Dan Brown’s controversial novel, The Da Vince Code, is not the world-famous blasphemies on the mortality of Jesus Christ with royal lineage with Mary Magdalene nor the unrealistic thrilling story but the theme of physical union between man and woman otherwise known as sex or coitus or intercourse. To him, by communing with woman, man can achieve a climactic instant when his mind goes totally blank and he can see God. On page 335 of Anchor Books Mass-Market edition, Brown put it into the mouth of his character, Langdon, as follows:
‘Historically, intercourse was the act through which male and female experienced God. The ancients believed that the male was spiritually incomplete until he had carnal knowledge of the sacred feminine. Physical union with the female remained the sole means through which man could become spiritually complete and ultimately achieve gnosis – knowledge of the divine. Since the day of Isis, sex rites had been considered man’s bridge from earth to the heaven … intercourse was the revered union of the two halves of the human spirit - male and female – through which the male could find spiritual wholeness and communion with God.’
It is obvious from the word go that Langdon is the alter-ego of Dan Brown himself which he uses to express his views about life. Literature, from countless ages, has been seen as a veritable vehicle through which a writer could sublimate his entire being, the totality of his world-views. Not done with his discourse on sex and man’s spirituality, Brown sees orgasm as prayer when he wrote on the same page that: ‘Physiologically speaking, the male climax was accompanied by a split second entirely devoid of thought. A brief mental vacuum. A moment of clarity during which God could be glimpsed. Meditation gurus achieved similar states of thoughtlessness without sex and often described Nirvana as a never-ending spiritual orgasm.’
On the pain of wounding the pride and sensibilities of a sanctimonious world, herein lies the greatness of Brown’s The Da Vinci Code as a piece of literary excellence, undoubtedly his magnus opus till date! Many uninformed readers have, most unfortunately, been blinded by a gale of vituperative, non-literary criticisms of the book to see the universalism of Brown’s thoughts. This singular achievement in this great work has raised him from being a mere thriller writer and has comfortably placed him on the same pedestal with world’s thinkers, theorists and philosophers like Socrates, Plato, Freud, Satre-Paul and Camus, to mention but a few of the most influential.
How the question-and-answer session began, Ogaba could not remember. His mind was engrossed on how the literary journal got to them all the way from the US. Perhaps somebody who knew him had bought it and sent it to them? This did not fail to amaze him greatly as the only copy he thought he had was quietly tucked away in the drawer of his bedroom at the diocese. And surprisingly, he was not afraid to own up to his review; he’d rather burn at the stake like the early Christian martyrs than to deny his work. If he had wanted to be cowardly clandestine, he’d have published it under a pseudonym or anonymity, but no, he’d rather dare them and die as a hero.
He came suddenly alive by a question pelted at him and he fired back, no holds barred. He was all-ready for a showdown with this bunch of cowards and philistines; hypocrites in position of power, for what right had they to censure him as a writer?
The Chairman angrily thumped the table to silence him from responding to one of the questions from a member of the panel.
‘The last complaint against you, Father Ogaba, which you’re yet to acquit yourself of, was your advocating for the use of condoms in combating the scourge of HIV/AIDS in your diocese instead of preaching total abstinence! Imagine the effrontery of advertising for Gold Circle company on the exalted altar of our Lord Jesus Christ!’
‘I didn’t want to sit down helplessly and watch my diocese being daily depopulated by the pandemic. Let’s not pretend to be holier than the Pharisees and Sadducees in Christ’s days, even the littlest girl child among them cannot vouch for her virginity,’ he fired back.
‘In the first place, did you expect anything different from your flock when you as their shepherd could talk such rot? You need to be born-again!’
‘We know some people here who cannot see the logs in their own eyes yet they can see the specks in their neighbours’ eyes. Physician, heal yourself!’ he retorted, throwing all caution to the winds.
‘Gentlemen, in the name of Christ that we’re gathered …’ began a member visibly worried by the bitter exchanges between the Chairman and Ogaba.
‘Keep out of this, Father Baka! This smart aleck is long overdue to be reduced to his size. What does he think he is by the way?’ barked the Chairman, his Adam’s apple greatly agitated. ‘The cheek of it!’
From where Ogaba sat facing the panel, he couldn’t help but give a ghost of a smile. The Council knew what it was up to. When they were looking for whom to nail him, they had to go back to his great enemy in the past, during his seminary days, and made him the Chairman of the panel that’d crucify him. They sure did their homework very well. Father Chia had never forgiven him for topping their class while he trailed behind him throughout their days at the seminary. If their enmity had stopped at that, it would have been milder but what about the other thing? Dare he tell of a lady he snatched away from him when they used to escape from the seminary to look for girls whom they’d quench the lust of the flesh on?
Eventually, when the other panel members succeeded in quelling Father Chia’s tsunami-anger, they shifted their attack to Ogaba’s offensive review of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, the subject of their inquisition. They were unanimous in their condemnation. How would he do that to the church, nay, the entire Christendom? How could he praise such a despicable work that sought to question the divinity of Jesus Christ ‘as a piece of literary excellence’? A priest of all people! Was he paid by the enemies of the church to do so or was it worldly fame that would perish with the soul in the Last Days?
In the end, the panel members conferred briefly among themselves and told him he was free to go. He’d hear from them as soon as possible. Little did Ogaba bargain that the outcome could be this harsh. The Council had adopted wholesale the recommendations of the panel and he was relieved of his work without any ceremony nor entitlements, what with the disgrace of being defrocked after more than twenty-five years in the service of the Lord’s vineyard! Left in the cold, without gratuity, nothing!
In more sober moments, when reason was able to dethrone self-pity, Ogaba was not surprised at the outcome of the inquisition. From time immemorial, there is no love lost between art and fundamentalism of whatever clime be it in religion or governance. As the mirror of the society, art is eternally pitted against extremism of any kind. Any wonder that political and religious leaders hate the artist with unruly passion? The poet is excommunicated from Plato’s Republic, a Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, slain in 2004 for a 24-minute film Submission, that mildly criticized the treatment of Muslim women, with fatwa being declared on Salman Rushdie’s head for purportedly blaspheming Prophet Mohammed in his novel, The Satanic Verses. Was death not spread across the globe for a handful of Danish cartoons that linked the Prophet of Islam with violence? Deaths to innocent souls far, far away from the scene of the crime, unleashed by some placard-carrying zealots? What about the countless, most gruesome wars fought in the Christendom during the Protestant Movement in the 16th and 17th centuries only reminiscent of the treatment of the Jews in Germany under Adolf Hitler? Martyrs were burnt alive at stakes for heresies. Can one possibly write the history of the church without wanton bloodshed? Tired of all these, the world’s supreme dramatist, William Shakespeare, cried out his helplessness in one of his sonnets:
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
And Art made tongue-tied by Authority …
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone …
It is a fight to the finish! A war without end. Art must never allow itself to be robbed of its power to shock. To be docile and obsequious is for the snake to be without its venomous fangs. Art that is polite is aesthetically bereft, impotent and toothless; cold ashes in grandmothers’ hearths …
‘You’ve succeeded in describing the sexual act in the opening paragraphs which I believe it’s like a foreshadow. What exactly is the plot all about?’ asked Funmi rather curiously.
‘Yes, that’s where the flashback comes in,’ began Ogaba. ‘The two priests had met earlier in the day during an All-Ministers’ Conference and fell in love immediately. In fact, the conference was still in progress when they’d decided to take a break and before they knew it, ended up in each other’s arm. It was love at first sight like the one between a man and a woman. I want you to note this: that the two priests in the story are not celibates and thus cannot be Reverend Fathers before the Catholic Church will feel that I’m out to take my revenge on them. My temperament is beyond such petty sentiments. The story is going to be a psychological study of why some are genetically constituted to be gay and cannot enjoy the normal sexual act with the opposite sexes like the same sex. To them, they believe that its pleasure is deeper and lasts longer than heterosexual sex.’
‘In other words, are you saying that these two priest in your story were doing it with women and yet not being satisfied?’ asked Funmi more alarmed by the psychological thrust of Ogaba’s statement.
‘Definitely. It’s to do with their genetic impulses and nothing more. I’m still researching on that,’ he answered.
‘Would they be caught?’ asked she anxiously.
‘Sure. As the creator, I’ll allow them to be caught as only that will bring out my message more clearly and pointedly.’
‘Caught and dismissed, perhaps?’
‘No, not at all. I dare not try that amateurish nonsense,’ he said determinedly.
‘Why not?’
‘Because that’ll completely mar my message, my theme. I want a situation where the church will show them some more understanding and tolerance. Besides, the question of allowing gay priests to be ordained is still raging in the church today like a wild harmattan fire.’
‘Yes, I know. But the church will never forgive you for this, I bet you. They’ll call it your cowardly onslaught at them, especially the Catholic Church!’
‘Well, they’re entitled to their opinions, as I said earlier. I dream of a world where the society will stop pigeon-holing its writers,’ he said passionately. ‘What’s more, I fear the gays more than the church. They’ve long become a mafia headed by Bishop Jackson Spoon. Their fear is the beginning of wisdom in the modern-day world,’ he added jocularly. Funmi giggled girlishly, stifling the urge to burst into a boisterous laughter. They lapsed into a momentary silence.
‘Come to bed,’ she invited amorously and huskily, breaking the silence. He sat, without moving a muscle, undecided. Wordlessly, she pulled the nightgown over her head as if to prove a point, threw it on the wooden clothes-rack, and stood unashamedly naked in the light, her orb prominently outlined against her silk pant, with her brassiereless breasts dancing quiveringly on her chest. Something rustled in the thicket of his shorts, throbbing with life.
‘I hope your writing on gays has not affected your psyche that you now have a phobia for women?’ she taunted teasingly. ‘Oh c’mon, sugar,’ she invited again rather huskily, with a mischievous smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
Aflame, he got tremblingly to his feet with his shorts bulging, and made for her. She moved backwards towards the bed, then lying on it gently and trance-like, their eyes locked in inexpressible desire. Instinctively, her left hand reached for the rope-switch, plunging the entire room into total darkness.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Announcing my play: Waiting for Savon (2009)
Writers,
May I have the great honour to announce the release of my play: Waiting for Savon from Hybun Publications International. Many hands went into bringing this work to perfection. Great friends like E. E. Sule who not only contributed a blurb (as below)but suggested a better ending, I am grateful. Uche Peter Umez who read the draft of the play and also contributed a great blurb (as below), Ojinmah Umelo, for the third blurb. Poet-novelist Maiwada, for the cover concept. All Hybun men such as my dear brother Diego, for the beautiful innovations and typesetting, Sylvester Ukut for the eye-catching cover design. Most importantly, my publishers, Hybun, for the patience in bearing a playwright's endless demands to bring out a perfect work. This play is good enough to bear the Hybun logo. To all these great guys, please send your addresses for copies. Also, Henry of National Life, Ben Ubiri and Umaisha are to send me their postal addresses for copies.
BLURBS:
“Waiting for Savon is one long rollercoaster of hilarity. Brilliantly crafted, as stinging as it is a forewarning in its thrust. Timely, telling, a farce that pokes fun at our rich diversity and our asinine refusal ‘to be true to ourselves.’ Ogezi has striven to remind us of our misadventure( s) as a nation, albeit subtly mocking our self-induced impotency to chart an all-embracing equitable path. The whole play argues that redemption is within and amongst us and not outside our reach. Until we rise above ethnic chauvinism nationhood would remain as elusive as the wait for a saviour.”
- Uche Peter Umez, author of Dark Through the Delta (2004)
“This is a fantastic demonstration of imaginative power … It is enthralling.”
- Umelo Ojinmah, author of The Pact (2006)
“The dramaturgy is impressive. Language and research are commendable.”
- E. E. Sule, author of What the Sea Told Me (2009)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Isaac Attah Ogezi is a legal practitioner, poet, playwright, short story writer and literary essayist. He is published in Drumvoices Revue, USA (2006), Prosopisia, Vol. 1, No.1, India (2008),www.fictiono ntheweb.com, www.authorme. com and several other national and international anthologies, online journals and dailies. His adaptation of Soyinka’s The Interpreters under the title: The Misfits won a 3rd prize position at the 2006 ANA International Colloquium to mark the 20th Anniversary of Soyinka’s Nobel Prize. Also, his adaptation of Achebe’s Arrow of God under the title: Ezeulu came first at the 2008 ANA International Colloquium to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. A fellow of UNPFA/Nollywood Scriptwriting and British Council Radiophonics programmes, he currently practises law at Keffi, Nasarawa State.
Cover Photograph by:
New Dimension Studio, Keffi
Cover Concept by Ahmed Maiwada
Cover Design by Sylvester Ukut.
FROM THE PLAYWRIGHT:
“… the play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”
– William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)
No country baffles the international community to a state of inertia like the contraption called Nigeria. As the most populous black nation in the world, she is endowed with both natural and human resources yet toddles behind other nations of the world like the man-child in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are not yet Born. She is in the forefront of Third World countries caught in the quagmire of cyclic movement reminiscent of the revolution of the earth around its orbit. There seem to be no marked changes or growth in the polity or the economy except the usual bumper harvest of corruption, ethnic militias, political assassinations, plane crashes and several indices of underdevelopment. Indeed, the current happenings in our body-politic is like the replay of the events that took place during the First Republic, as superbly captured in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People. The question now is: what is the role of the writer in this season of
anomie? Is he a self-seeking entertainer aloof to the socio-political climate of his time? Can he still regurgitate half-digested theories such as art for art’s sake in the face of an impending doom that threatens his very existence? Or is his art so sacred and pure that he must remain an apolitical animal until the end of his life?
During the pre-colonial African society, the role of the griots, which the modern-day writer occupies, was akin to that of a prophet, a priest, a seer and a marabout. The society looked up to him for direction. If there is a consensus that literature is the soul of every nation, then what is the role of a writer if not a man of action, the voice of the voiceless? Achebe and Ngugi are two classic examples of why the writers must not shy away from the politics of his times. A few months after the publication of his A Man of the People in 1966, the military struck. The ending of the novel was so prophetic that some politicians suspected that Achebe must have had a hand in the coup that overthrew the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa government. In an interview in 1970, Achebe had this to say as regards the role of the contemporary writer:
“Right now my interest is in politics or rather my interest in the novel is
politics. A Man of the People wasn’t a flash in the pan. This is the begin-
ning of a phase for me in which I intend to take a hard look at what we
in Africa are making of independence – but using Nigeria which I know
best … It is clear to me that an African creative writer who tries to avoid
the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up
being completely irrelevant – like that absurd man in the proverb who
leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames … What
is the place of the writer in this movement? I suggest that his place is
right in the thick of it – if possible, at the head of it”.
When asked further if he considered himself a protest writer, Achebe retorted thus: “Well, according to my own opinion of protest, I am a protest writer. Restraint – well, that’s my style, you see”. After A Man of the People, Achebe followed it up with an equally politically charged, Booker Award-shortlisted Anthills of the Savannah in 1986. Similarly, before the environmentalist- cum-writer, Ken Saro Wiwa was hanged by the military junta in 1995, he delivered what could well pass for the raison de’tre of his mission as a writer. He said:
“Literature in a critical situation such as Nigeria’s cannot be divorced from politics. Indeed, literature must serve society by steeping itself in politics, by intervention, and writers must not merely write to amuse or to take a bemused, critical look at society. They must play an interventionist role … The writer must be l’homme engage: the intellectual man of action”.
It must be conceded from the outset that literature cannot shoot a gun nor depose a corrupt, totalitarian government, yet there is no gainsaying the fact that it is the most potent weapon above all other forms of art. When Sharia was introduced in some parts of the North in 1999, there were a lot of vitriolic attacks from the press all to no avail. The press cannot take the place of literature as it obviously lacks the necessary wherewithal of capturing human experience that is inherent in the latter. In his book, The Revolution of Hope (New York: Harper Row, 1969), Erich Fromm posited and rightly too that:
“Poetry, music and other forms of art are by far the best-suited media for
describing human experience because they are precise and avoid the
abstraction and vagueness of worn-out coins which are taken for
adequate representations of human experience”.
This is what I sought to do in this play. The way things are going on in our beloved country is really absurd, to say the least, and the best way to capture this absurdity is to have recourse to the theatre of the absurd as popularized by the great Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett. This is the theatre of our misbegotten era where, according to a fellow writer, Ali Omachi, “the moon walks on its head”. In a season of anomie like this, it is the writer’s sacred duty to sound a note of warning. Whether I have succeeded in this mission, it is best left for history to judge.
- Isaac Attah Ogezi
Keffi, September, 2009.
May I have the great honour to announce the release of my play: Waiting for Savon from Hybun Publications International. Many hands went into bringing this work to perfection. Great friends like E. E. Sule who not only contributed a blurb (as below)but suggested a better ending, I am grateful. Uche Peter Umez who read the draft of the play and also contributed a great blurb (as below), Ojinmah Umelo, for the third blurb. Poet-novelist Maiwada, for the cover concept. All Hybun men such as my dear brother Diego, for the beautiful innovations and typesetting, Sylvester Ukut for the eye-catching cover design. Most importantly, my publishers, Hybun, for the patience in bearing a playwright's endless demands to bring out a perfect work. This play is good enough to bear the Hybun logo. To all these great guys, please send your addresses for copies. Also, Henry of National Life, Ben Ubiri and Umaisha are to send me their postal addresses for copies.
BLURBS:
“Waiting for Savon is one long rollercoaster of hilarity. Brilliantly crafted, as stinging as it is a forewarning in its thrust. Timely, telling, a farce that pokes fun at our rich diversity and our asinine refusal ‘to be true to ourselves.’ Ogezi has striven to remind us of our misadventure( s) as a nation, albeit subtly mocking our self-induced impotency to chart an all-embracing equitable path. The whole play argues that redemption is within and amongst us and not outside our reach. Until we rise above ethnic chauvinism nationhood would remain as elusive as the wait for a saviour.”
- Uche Peter Umez, author of Dark Through the Delta (2004)
“This is a fantastic demonstration of imaginative power … It is enthralling.”
- Umelo Ojinmah, author of The Pact (2006)
“The dramaturgy is impressive. Language and research are commendable.”
- E. E. Sule, author of What the Sea Told Me (2009)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Isaac Attah Ogezi is a legal practitioner, poet, playwright, short story writer and literary essayist. He is published in Drumvoices Revue, USA (2006), Prosopisia, Vol. 1, No.1, India (2008),www.fictiono ntheweb.com, www.authorme. com and several other national and international anthologies, online journals and dailies. His adaptation of Soyinka’s The Interpreters under the title: The Misfits won a 3rd prize position at the 2006 ANA International Colloquium to mark the 20th Anniversary of Soyinka’s Nobel Prize. Also, his adaptation of Achebe’s Arrow of God under the title: Ezeulu came first at the 2008 ANA International Colloquium to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. A fellow of UNPFA/Nollywood Scriptwriting and British Council Radiophonics programmes, he currently practises law at Keffi, Nasarawa State.
Cover Photograph by:
New Dimension Studio, Keffi
Cover Concept by Ahmed Maiwada
Cover Design by Sylvester Ukut.
FROM THE PLAYWRIGHT:
“… the play’s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”
– William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)
No country baffles the international community to a state of inertia like the contraption called Nigeria. As the most populous black nation in the world, she is endowed with both natural and human resources yet toddles behind other nations of the world like the man-child in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are not yet Born. She is in the forefront of Third World countries caught in the quagmire of cyclic movement reminiscent of the revolution of the earth around its orbit. There seem to be no marked changes or growth in the polity or the economy except the usual bumper harvest of corruption, ethnic militias, political assassinations, plane crashes and several indices of underdevelopment. Indeed, the current happenings in our body-politic is like the replay of the events that took place during the First Republic, as superbly captured in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People. The question now is: what is the role of the writer in this season of
anomie? Is he a self-seeking entertainer aloof to the socio-political climate of his time? Can he still regurgitate half-digested theories such as art for art’s sake in the face of an impending doom that threatens his very existence? Or is his art so sacred and pure that he must remain an apolitical animal until the end of his life?
During the pre-colonial African society, the role of the griots, which the modern-day writer occupies, was akin to that of a prophet, a priest, a seer and a marabout. The society looked up to him for direction. If there is a consensus that literature is the soul of every nation, then what is the role of a writer if not a man of action, the voice of the voiceless? Achebe and Ngugi are two classic examples of why the writers must not shy away from the politics of his times. A few months after the publication of his A Man of the People in 1966, the military struck. The ending of the novel was so prophetic that some politicians suspected that Achebe must have had a hand in the coup that overthrew the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa government. In an interview in 1970, Achebe had this to say as regards the role of the contemporary writer:
“Right now my interest is in politics or rather my interest in the novel is
politics. A Man of the People wasn’t a flash in the pan. This is the begin-
ning of a phase for me in which I intend to take a hard look at what we
in Africa are making of independence – but using Nigeria which I know
best … It is clear to me that an African creative writer who tries to avoid
the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up
being completely irrelevant – like that absurd man in the proverb who
leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames … What
is the place of the writer in this movement? I suggest that his place is
right in the thick of it – if possible, at the head of it”.
When asked further if he considered himself a protest writer, Achebe retorted thus: “Well, according to my own opinion of protest, I am a protest writer. Restraint – well, that’s my style, you see”. After A Man of the People, Achebe followed it up with an equally politically charged, Booker Award-shortlisted Anthills of the Savannah in 1986. Similarly, before the environmentalist- cum-writer, Ken Saro Wiwa was hanged by the military junta in 1995, he delivered what could well pass for the raison de’tre of his mission as a writer. He said:
“Literature in a critical situation such as Nigeria’s cannot be divorced from politics. Indeed, literature must serve society by steeping itself in politics, by intervention, and writers must not merely write to amuse or to take a bemused, critical look at society. They must play an interventionist role … The writer must be l’homme engage: the intellectual man of action”.
It must be conceded from the outset that literature cannot shoot a gun nor depose a corrupt, totalitarian government, yet there is no gainsaying the fact that it is the most potent weapon above all other forms of art. When Sharia was introduced in some parts of the North in 1999, there were a lot of vitriolic attacks from the press all to no avail. The press cannot take the place of literature as it obviously lacks the necessary wherewithal of capturing human experience that is inherent in the latter. In his book, The Revolution of Hope (New York: Harper Row, 1969), Erich Fromm posited and rightly too that:
“Poetry, music and other forms of art are by far the best-suited media for
describing human experience because they are precise and avoid the
abstraction and vagueness of worn-out coins which are taken for
adequate representations of human experience”.
This is what I sought to do in this play. The way things are going on in our beloved country is really absurd, to say the least, and the best way to capture this absurdity is to have recourse to the theatre of the absurd as popularized by the great Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett. This is the theatre of our misbegotten era where, according to a fellow writer, Ali Omachi, “the moon walks on its head”. In a season of anomie like this, it is the writer’s sacred duty to sound a note of warning. Whether I have succeeded in this mission, it is best left for history to judge.
- Isaac Attah Ogezi
Keffi, September, 2009.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Between Fantasy and Reality in Maiwada's Musdoki
Between Fantasy and Reality in Maiwada’s Musdoki
In serious literature, the genre that bears the closest affinity to popular literature such as thrillers, mysteries and romances can be said to be works classed under magical realism. Despite its great attraction to writers and readers alike, the demands placed on this kind of writing are so onerous such that only a few adherents can fulfill. It is these demands that have raised magical realism far above popular literature especially the added requirement of verisimilitude. It is not enough to depict the world of magic, it must be very realistic, with the characters well-infused with flesh-and-blood quality, the setting even when surreal must, through the power of imagination, made so real and life-like that the readers can be able to associate with. What about the issues or themes? They must be serious and timeless, and not merely centred on fast bucks (money), women, crime, espionage and counter-espionage. It is the absence of these ingredients that robs popular literature of being regarded as serious literature. In spite of the world-wide fame of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, owing to the controversies it has generated in religious circles, it can still not be classed as serious literature because of poor characterization and the unrealistic portrayal of events in the name of thrilling the readers. John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief, Fredrick Forsythe’s The Day of the Jackal, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish, and Mario Puzo’s The Godfather are classic examples of thrillers that find convenient categorization as popular literature.
The evolution of the concept of magical realism can be traced to the short fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. This tradition was to be continued in the short fiction of Frantz Kafka (Metamorphosis) and D. H. Lawrence before attaining its maturity in the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie. No mention of magical realism today is complete without Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera and J. K. Rowlings’ Harry Potter series. On the African soil, Amos Tutuola blazed the trail with The Palm-wine Drinkard, followed by D. O. Fagunwa’s A Forest of Thousand Daemons (translated into English by Wole Soyinka), Okri’s The Famished Road and Song of Enchantment and Ngugi’s The Wizard of the Crow. The new generation of Nigerian writers has also found this magical realism mould of fiction alluring, albeit with a handful of successful adherents such as Maik Nwosu’s Return to Algadez and Nnedi Okorofor-Mbachu’s Zarah, the Windseeker, and most recently, the lawyer-poet, Ahmed Maiwad, with his first fiction offering, Musdoki.
Set in the early 1990s, more specifically during the military regime of General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida, Musdoki is a story of a young, shy, frail, bespectacled law graduate from the Northern city of Zaria, Nigeria, who goes to Lagos for his Barrister-at Law programme at the Nigerian Law School, then only centralized in the latter city. Before he finds his feet in the hustle-and-bustle city, he is fortunately accommodated for four days by his ex-coursemate’s mother, Mrs. George, in their family house at one of the highbrow areas of the city, the famous Victoria Island. This is where he is fated to meet Christy, later changed by her to Christine, one of the beautiful daughters of Mrs. George, whose influence in the life of the central character, Musdoki, in later years is to take the most dramatic turns. Her rather dreamy view of the future reminds the young lawyer of a young girl in his past known as Rita. She taunts him with cowardice as he refuses to live in the paradisiacal world she presents to him. From the outset, it is obvious that her love is not innocent but with strings attached especially when she seals it with blood-oath without his knowledge or consent on page 40:
She eased the knife and the blood-stained, half-peeled potato from my hands and set them on the floor. When she rose to attend to me her left thumb was equally bleeding, which she joined to my bleeding thumb. Then she stooped and licked the blood on my arm, moaning with pleasure and chuckling at the same time. ‘Suck mine’, she urged …
This seemingly innocent initiation into the occult world is to haunt the narrator-character with nightmarish existence. His resistance is not viewed lightly by her, after all, in the words of Shakespeare, ‘heaven knows no fury like a woman’s scorned’. In consequence, his life is dogged by one plague or the other until, when all attempts appear to have failed, she comes to the open to kill him by auto-accident. Her skills in the supernatural world are so powerful that she can morph from one creature into another, from Christine to Rita, to an old Hausa woman and to other hair-raising shapes!
One unique feature of the African writer, which he appears not to have weaned himself from, long after the colonial misadventure in Africa, is the theme of protest. Apart from the central theme of love, Musdoki can well be regarded as a reprisal novel to Adichie’s sectional novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, as seen from the eyes of a northern Nigerian zealot-narrator. All the sins of Southern Nigerians against Northerners in this ill-fated union are well-chronicled. The disdainful attitude of the Southerners not to ever attribute intelligence to Northerners, ‘intelligence was not associated with my people!’ (p. 37), ‘Some others said I was only daft like my kith and kin’ (p. 88), how Northerners were hounded out of Lagos and other South-western states of Nigeria during the annulment of June 12 Presidential Elections by the IBB dictatorship (pp. 88 -126), how their Yoruba wives and children refused to flee along with their Hausa husbands reminiscent of white women when the going is unpalatable, how Northern delegates were stoned in Lagos and Ilorin for the sin ‘that the North was not yet ready for full independence from Britain at that time’ (p. 100). Maiwada’s sense of history is very high and he uses it to advantage to describe how Nigeria is endlessly plagued with disunity right from the days of the independence heroes. He seems to be saying that as long as we give room to these divisive tendencies, the dream of one Nigeria is a mirage on our road to the Promised Land. His arguments are more balanced than Adichie’s with great sympathies for the marginalized Northern Hausa Christians. As he put it in the mouth of his character, Musdoki, on page 126:
The unqualified patriotism for the North among the crowd was infectious. I was infected. I was electrified to find myself with the same content of Northern patriotism I had long before I left home for the Law School; long before the religious killings slit the throat of my delusion on a cohesive North.
In the end, Musdoki resolved never to run away from the boiling West, for he would rather ‘gladly suffer the stranger’s dagger than the grass blade of my own kith and kin’ (p. 128 -129). He poignantly narrates his heart-rending experiences when he flees the bloodthirsty Yoruba youth thirsty for Northern blood and runs into his people. Happily, he calls at them in Hausa, ‘Wait … please don’t run away, for Allah’s sake. I’m one of you.’ (p.92) and he is given a lift by a family in a flight from Lagos in a salon car. After donating his two bottles of water as a sacrifice which ‘must have convinced everybody of my authenticity as a Northerner’ (p. 93) for the car stalled for want of water, he is given a lift. But on getting to Jebba, a Northern town, the family discovers much to their chagrin that he is not a Northern Muslim like them when he is invited to join them at the mosque but he does not budge (p. 126). Upon return, they refuse him entrance, wrench the door from his grip and leave without him, the profligate, the infidel! His cry is perhaps the cry for the entire North as on page 127:
I stood there for a long while after the car had disappeared from my sight, northward toward Mokwa town. If I cried, the tears were not for me; they were for the North that must be one to win the rumoured war, regardless of its people’s diverse personal choices.
The writer does not spare these divisive elements within the so-called monolithic North who use religion to discriminate against their Northern Christian brothers who, like the bat, stranger to the sky and earth, are both rejected by the Southerners and their Northerner brothers with nowhere to cling to in the name of religion. Perhaps, through the immediacy of the first-person narrative technique, one cannot fail to associate Musdoki as the alter-ego of the writer himself. They both share several similar attributes in common – lawyer, poet (pp. 56, 67 and 195), Northern Hausa Christian, son of a teacher mother but spoilt like the lastborn (pp 36 and 42) and a pharmacist father (p. 37).
Musdoki can also be described as a picturesque this-is-Lagos novel, for perhaps, no any novel in Nigeria has ever described Lagos from the eyes of a stranger like this work. To the narrator, the city was like a god caught naked. The roads are terrible (p.46), the weather treacherous (p. 47), ‘the air is foul; the houses are old and dirty … People were out on the porches and the balconies brushing their mouths. I said don’t they have sinks in their toilets? Children were hauling water from one compound to the other. That was hard life.” (p. 46). The narrator went on on page 54 to describe the milling bodies engaged in usual wait for buses and taxis under drizzling skies, the ‘cut-throat struggle’ for them when they come along, and even the ferry in the lagoon and Apapa not exempted, ‘crawling with bodies and sunk into the lagoon water up to her deck; and I perched on the edge, watching the liquid killer growl by.’ Perhaps, the best description of Lagos in this novel is given on pages 42 and 43, thus:
Lagos was a whirlpool, for a first time like me coming out of a bucolic city in the conservative north. The buses would not wait for the passengers to board or disembark properly before moving as if they were running on conveyor belts. Sometimes they seemed to vanish from the roads, especially when it poured, or during rush hours. On those occasions, miracles alone could get me either to school or back home at the expected hours. When it was not pouring hard and long, it was scotching and stifling; a condition made worse for me by the Law School dress code of suit-and-tie. The high volume of traffic often blocked every inch of the broad highways. And there were crowds everywhere; on the streets, at the bus stops, inside the buses, on the roads, at school, at the pepper soup joints and even at home. My cousin and I shared a cramped bedroom in a three-bedroom apartment flat rented by his married and older friend who worked in a different merchant bank on the island, and who had a retinue of dependants that lived there or camped at will. There was always more than one person to a bedroom. Still the parlour never ceased serving as bedroom every night.
Maiwada may have left the city of Lagos for more than a decade now to settle in Abuja, but he is still a Lagosian at heart, for Lagos is like an enigmatic lover noted for its recalcitrance and yet difficult to break completely loose from her. Even writers in Lagos will go green with envy with the powerful description of the waterways in Lagos on pages 68 and 69 as follows:
We flew eastward against the tides, toward the Apapa Port. To our right, Ikoyi West and East blurred past, and to our left Victoria Island did the same; each area with its strings of dazzling traffic, dominated by yellow of the taxis and buses traditional to Lagos. The Falomo Bridge flipped above us as if it was a curved piece of stick. So did the Onikan Bridge, from where we swerved southward toward the sea. Lagos Island and Apapa Port were to our right, as was the lagoon separating the two places that lay flat like a crinkled aluminum sheet. To our left were the posteriors of Bonny Camp military barrack, the Federal Palace Hotel, navy staff story buildings, the national and Lagos State television stations all on Ahmadu Bellow Way in Victoria.
A beautiful description from a writer very familiar with Lagos, wouldn’t one say? Maiwada has done to Lagos with his Musdoki what his elder literary countryman, J. P. Clark did to Ibadan in poetry several years ago when he penned as follows:
Ibadan,
Running splash of rust
and gold – flung and scattered
among seven hills like broken
china in the sun.
Perhaps apart from Helon Habila, no any other Northern Nigerian writer uses language with the consciousness of entertaining his readers like Maiwada. To him, literary language is sterile and dead without poetry, be it in prose-fiction or drama. As a poet, Maiwada’s language is so fresh and sublime that the world of his characters is so pictorially realistic in a grand style of magical realism. The fusion of reality and fantasy is impossible without language as on pages 81 and 82 where the narrator described a horrifying scene reminiscent of Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard and Okri’s The Famished Road:
… the hawk’s hanging tail began to turn gradually, receding from the top edge of the television screen in jerky motions as the hawk turned to face me directly. Its eyes shot two pinstripe shafts of dazzling green light into my eyes. I screened the blaze from my eyes with an open palm. Then I heard a sudden, urgent flutter of wings. The hawk’s claws and beak had torn into my bare face and shoulders before I knew it; it wings that felt like heated iron plates had slapped my newly shaved head and my face. I jerked backward until I crashed out from the sofa with my back to the floor. My eyeglasses dropped to my mouth, which made it hard for me to see very clearly.
A nature poet, Maiwada’s description of nature in this novel is comparable to the masters of the Romantic Age of English Poetry such as John Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ and William Wordsworth’s ‘The World is Too much with Us’. On page 76, ‘the rising sun tinted the eastern sky in slapdash strokes of grey and amber’, and on page 107, we have:
The grey clouds draped on the sun’s doorway admitted a sprinkle of tan and amber. It was enough to attach silhouettes to our voices; to transform the vegetation on the outside to a stable olive blur; enough to reveal the patches of liquid silver that littered the grey road from the previous rainfall. Oh, the glow and the glory! It was like emerging through the birth canal of a coal pit into the open world. Beakful serenades by the treetop choirs and orchestra cheered our rebirth …
He continued on page 125 with powerful nature imagery when he wrote ‘Now and then a frayed ribbon of skylarks would drift across the blue clear sky and then evaporate’. On every page, Maiwada serves his reader with fresh images drawn from his wide experiences such as ‘only to see the toilet seat brimming with a black python as thick as a sumo wrestler’s thigh. Its wide hood stood erect in readiness either to spit or spring, and then swallow. Its big eyes were translucent bulbs of blood.’ (p. 57). In fact, it is this keen imagination that the writer infused in his character, Musdoki, that lends this work with magical realism.
However, as great as this novel is, there is a snag with the ending which rings like a typical Nigerian film, what with the usual last-minute repentance and reconciliation of Musdoki and Rita alias Christine. This has dampened his attempt to ‘vividly blur the border between dream and reality’, what would have been an otherwise great tragedy, thus robbing the work of a convincing ending. Again, there are many gaps in the work. Is Rita really Christine? If yes, what happens to her shape, Rita’s? It would have been better if the Rita story is removed from the entire work to pave way for the more interesting Christine story to run, unimpeded, to the end alone instead of this escapist happy ending. It appears that the gargantuan conflict provoked in the story is beyond a satisfactory resolution by the writer. This would have taken care of some of the improbabilities in the work which have weakened the verisimilitude of the plot. The end result is the last, unsatisfying gasp of the reader that hangs tremulously in the teeth like a false laughter. Also, the character of the hero, Musdoki, does not seem to be fully developed. He started as a weak, innocent and indecisive character and ends as a very carefree character when he rises on page 205 to defend a girl who has been seeking to destroy his life. This cannot be said to be Christ-like as even Christians are enjoined to be as gentle as a lamb but as wise as a serpent! Similarly, there is a little lack of consistency in the plot. For example, the old-woman ‘organ-thief’ is said to have restored Musdoki’s stolen organ (private parts) and disappeared into thin air in public view on pages 175 and 176 but on pages 180 and 181, Iyabo, Musdoki’s office secretary, worried when told that the old woman had disappeared because Musdoki’s organ had not been returned, only for her fear to be allayed by Musdoki himself that when he woke up from sleep and rushed to ‘the bathroom for shower so that I could rush down to your [Iyabo’s] place, I saw that my yahoo [organ] has been restored!’ (p. 181). There are also a few typographical and grammatical errors such as ‘a series of slow, ominous nod’ (p. 79),’Iyabo sprung to her feet’ (p. 161), ‘Some more people had also ran’ (p. 178), ‘resulting to’ (p.168) yet ‘resulting in a wild stampede’ on page 176, ‘the Nigerian Police Force ‘(p. 198) yet ‘The Nigeria Police Force’ used twice on page 199!
Undoubtedly, with Musdoki, Maiwadda has taken magical realism to greater heights and has carved a niche for himself which cannot be reckoned without in any meaningful discussion of the modern African Novel. This multi-dimensional novel goes beyond merely chronicling the timeless theme of love but can also be taken as a timely warning to a nation on the precipice of self-destruction. One cannot help but agree with the writer that the problem with us as a nation is not only the failure of leadership but in ourselves, our pathological refusal to be truly united as a people despite our diversity. As a first novel, Maiwada’s Musdoki is not a tentative footstep in an unfamiliar terrain akin to the chicken in the adage, hopping on one leg. Maiwada as a first-time novelist, came fully made with thirty-two teeth of a full-grown adult.
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