The Enigmatic Nature of the Short Story: A Review of The Taste of the Tale is in the Telling by Allwell Abalogu Onukaogu et al (eds.)

By Isaac Attah Ogezi The modern short story is perhaps the most abused genre in literature today after poetry. It is not the miniature novel that many intending novelists violate on their journey to novel-writing. Though it evolved from the oral tradition of didactic moonlight tales, folklores and anecdotes in pre-television days, the modern short story is far more complex and has successfully untangled itself from such reductionist mooring save for its timeless brevity. Just like a symbolic snapshot that tells more than meets the eye, the short story has assumed such cryptic idiosyncrasy that bears a closer affinity to poetry than the novel. Little wonder that sometimes in an entire collection or anthology of stories, one can hardly find a single well-crafted story that has passed the test of the modern short story. It is not uncommon to hear a great work of a first-time novelist or poet or playwright being labelled as a ‘flash in the pan’ because of their innocence of how the virginal knot is broken, but not so for the short story when innocence wears the toga of a crime, for in any good story the writer must display his knowledge of the form beyond mere narrative. It is in this enigmatic nature of the story that The Taste of the Tale … edited by Onukaogu et al can be said to be an appreciable departure, a fresh breath in this asphyxiating corner of our literature. The Taste of the Tale … is a montage of a country on the precipice of self-destruction. It comprises forty-one stories of uneven lengths and subject matters that traverse the entire spectrum of the Nigerian society such as insecurity, greed, environmental degradation, drought, religious bigotry, poverty, women’s oppression, social relationships, and so other many existential issues that beset our polity. In Onukaogu’s ‘Smiles Were Not Enough’, the reader is impressed by the stoicism of the major character despite the fatal injury she sustains in the auto-accident. The writer achieved his desired aim of invoking pathos from the reader for the plight of the lady in question and lampoons the beastly disregard for human lives in the country. A surgeon ‘who specialized in repairing veins was needed urgently so that the rate of blood loss could be controlled’ (p. 6), what with the lower part of her anatomy a ‘chaos of mangled flesh’ (p. 6). Out of the three or four specialists, one of them ‘answered from a background of organized noise’ (p.6) that he is in church, being a Seventh-day Adventist, and cannot leave the presence of his God to attend to the emergency case at hand. This provokes the ire of the narrator who could not understand that: ‘…someone who called himself a doctor, who had a duty to humanity, would sit in church, while someone he could have saved was dying. Was saving this soul not part of serving God? Would God not understand if he quietly stepped out to defend and propagate the course [sic] of humanity, and demonstrate love, which was the central crux of the gospel of Jesus Christ?’ (p. 7) To help save this soul, desperate arrangements are made to move the lady to Port Harcourt to the only surgeon willing to help. But they had bargained without ‘the miserable road to Port Harcourt, the eminent, ever-present Port Harcourt hold-ups, even more notorious on weekends’ (p. 8). This story is reminiscent of an apocalyptic line from Saro-Wiwa’s prophetic story ‘Africa Kills her Sun’, to wit: ‘Africa kills her sun and that’s why she’s called the Dark Continent.’ Onyerionwu’s masterful ‘Guilty as Charged’ appears to thaw the gloomy mood of Onukaogu’s heart-rending story. Here a kidnapper, not more than nineteen years old, meets his waterloo when he runs into his victim in a banking hall. At first the reader sympathizes with this deceptively innocuous young man with a ‘round and smooth face’ for being pummelled by a middle-aged woman old enough to be his mother. She accuses him of raping her after his gang had kidnapped her much to the amazement of her audience who feels she is suffering from an ‘unwarranted case of transferred aggression by a disgruntled woman who was probably suffering from the psychological tremors of a shaky home’ (p. 13). To disabuse their minds, she has to show the bite mark she inflicted on his thigh in her struggle not to be raped by him. The subject of kidnapping may appear topical and trite, but the writer’s effective use of humour and suspense more than mitigates this. In an anthology dominated by dark stories of angst and pessimism, it is with a sigh of relief to find the occasional lightheartedness in Kennedy-Oti’s hilarious ‘The Campus “Aje”’ which brilliantly satirizes poor female undergraduates who try to keep up with the Joneses. Vivy, a campus ‘ajebo’ who pretends not to have ever seen cockroaches before in her life, is brought to her level when her room-mate visits her unannounced at her shanty residence in Ajegunle, a popular Lagos slum. The dexterity by which the writer handles her characters, spicing their language with the requisite campus ladies’ Pidgin English, lends verisimilitude to this story. On the other hand, Ogezi’s ‘The First Stone’ is a chilling tale of a woman condemned to death under the Sharia legal system. Set in a fictional Kasanga State in Nigeria, Ogezi examines the plight of an independent woman, Hafsat, caught in the web of a retroactive law for the offence of adultery. But who will cast the first stone? ‘Was it the men who always drank themselves to stupor at the mammy markets of Army barracks where the long arms of Sharia could not reach them? Or their sanctimonious women who always veiled themselves in the daytime like angels, but before the night spread her black muslin upon the sullen earth, would be seen going about visiting men in the unholy name of “going to Angwan?”’ (p. 233). For Hafsat, taking leave of such a puritanical world is without regret even if it means her impending death by stoning. In this blissful marriage of prose and drama, Ogezi adroitly exposes the hypocritical nature of world sexist religions. A master of the short story, Umez’s two vignettes are centred on adultery. In ‘Restaurant Conversation’, a young man’s regret of wearing his wedding band in a date with an unmarried lady is subtly and unmistakably registered in the reader’s mind. By way of contrast, a woman wins her promiscuous husband back in ‘Meltdown’ without raising hell but by simply stooping to conquer. These sketches affirm the postulation that the short story shares a closer proximity to poetry than the novel. Umez’s rather Chekhovian vignettes conform to what the editors observed about the short story genre in their introductory note, that ‘the beauty of a short story lies in the fact that, very much like an expertly constructed poem, it says so much in a little space.’ (p. v). Bala’s ‘The Blank Book’ and Bula’s ‘Three Suitors and the Lily Flower’ are equally well-crafted. However, one wonders what stories like Egbuta’s ‘Shoshoro’, Ifi’s ‘Ikenba’ and Imam’s ‘The Amigo Sisters’ would be doing in such an anthology. Worse still, it is ironic that the editors who bemoaned the inability to include other stories on the ground of ‘space constraints’ (p. vii), could allow room for Urum’s nine stories of indifferent quality. Lastly, the work could have benefited from better editing if the editors had taken their time to remove glaring errors such as ‘a quick bathe’ (p. 26), ‘I held my breathe’ (p. 32), ‘they decide our faith’ (p. 46), ‘the lightening was threatening’ (p. 104), ‘he had no qualms taking what belongs to others’ (p. 302), ‘four day’s later’ (p. 305), ‘rented the air’ (p. 319), ‘about to breath his last’ (p. 320) and ‘touchlights flashing on him’ (p. 323). Though The Taste of the Tale … is a pointer to the fact that the average Nigerian writer still flounders at the seemingly slippery terrain of the short story, there are a few strong voices who are the future Alice Munros especially those that their stories were briefly examined above. This anthology is recommended for those who want to learn the craft of the short story and, in a few instances, how not to write short stories. The taste of the tale is in the reading.

The Danger of the Single Story in Yerima's Heart of Stone

By Isaac Attah Ogezi In a 2009 seminal TED Talk on “The Danger of a Single Story”, Adichie berated the Western literary establishment for reducing the African story to one definitive story, a stereotype of mindless violence and debauchery which has come to cling to Africans. In the eyes of the West, Africa is only viewed as a heart of darkness, replete with war, famine and all other indices of a Third world continent, where life is short and brutish like the Stone Age. Where this is not the intent of this review, it shall examine the danger of a writer being fixated on a single story to the point of cloning his own stories. Yerima’s recent play, Heart of Stone, is a stage dramatization of the contemporary social reality that is Nigeria today, the nebula of fear that dogs our lives, total disregard to life, terrorism and religious uprisings. It tells the sad story of an orphan, Musa, who endured the vicissitudes of life as an Almajiri, teacher in a Koranic school, political thug to being a borehole digger before joining an extremist religious sect as a terrorist to unleash violence on innocent victims. The irony of these acts of terrorism is that nobody is spared both kith and kin. They “are not trained to think” (p. 47) but to wreak havoc on a docile world in the name of defending “themselves against the infidels. The non-believers.” (p. 48) Musa’s last operation brings him to a church where a wedding is in progress between his cousin Gladys and Miri with a disastrous effect. The church is bombed to smithereens. Amina , his heartthrob, paints this gory scene with chilling images when she laments: “Everyone in the church was blown to their deaths. Kaka Vero, Gladys and her husband are all gone. Their blood splashed, their bodies strewn in tiny bits and pieces were packed in different bags and brought to our hospital… Headless bodies, Kaka, torn from limbs to limbs. We cannot even tell them apart.” (pp. 50 – 55) Vero, who is later involved in the above inferno that terminates her life, had earlier warned Musa, who upon becoming a teacher in a Koranic school, suddenly saw his non-Muslim relations as dirty pigs, unbelievers fit to be slaughtered. In a plaintive voice, she says: “Let me speak, Son. From the day I saw you as a little boy join a group of Almajiri to force a car driver to stop and with your mouths you drew fuel from his car after beating him up for refusing to recite the Fathia… In a frenzy of madness, you all ran towards our church, poured the petrol under the doors, while the other wild boys broke the church windows and threw in burning rags into it… As the church burnt, and the police and the Fire Brigade siren vehicles screamed and screeched, our eyes met ….” (p. 42) A later victim of these wild boys on rampage, Vero goes further to narrate how her cousin’s house was burnt on page 42: “When my maternal cousin’s house, Bitrus’ house, was burnt in Koghum village in Wang District of Jos, with all five members of his family burnt alive, again it was another trip of madness? Millions have died after.” The alibi of most religious terrorists of Islamic sect especially Boko Haram and Al-Shabab is that they are fighting for Allah. As the author put it into the mouth of Musa, “It was what we were told to do. The Ustaz had said Allah decreed it. We were used.” (p. 42). Fortunately, the playwright shows a ray of hope at the end of the tunnel in the fight against terrorism when Musa is eventually arrested during his last operation and brought to book. In this timely play, like his previous plays such as Hard Ground and Little Drops…, based on the Niger Delta crisis, Yerima displays his talent as a journalist-playwright chronicling every facet of our chequered lives. A social crusader, he refuses to keep mute in the face of the Boko Harm insurgency in our polity even though no mention is explicitly made about them. On the contrary, it is in this obsession with the single story in a rather recycling manner that therein lies his albatross in this play. Musa is a slavish replica of Mimi and Kuru in Yerima’s Hard Ground and Little Drops… respectively and ape their speeches with no serious effort made by the playwright to recreate a different character. For example, all these three characters in these plays have almost the same reason for taking to violence against an unfair world. Nimi posits that the politicians are behind their creation: “They created us. They gave us the reason to find our place… First, we were errand boys, and so we got guns and money. We started asking questions, they had no answers. We all knew what they looked like before they got into power. We dumped them. They gave us no respect, because of the crumbs they give us while they keep the chunk… We fight only for ourselves. Our lives in our pockets.” (p. 39, Hard Ground) Similarly, as if parroting Nimi, Kuru also says: “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… They think they are smart … But they will see. We shall destroy everything … everything… everything. Total break-up! (pp. 60 and 63, Little Drops…) Also full of angst like these two characters in the earlier plays, Musa, filled with bile and discontentment, makes the trioka when he says: “And politics came. And the new politicians like Danladi your son came. They promised to take us away from our failures, but instead they reminded us that we were failures… Jokers! That was when we proclaimed death to all … They cannot achieve anything by talking with the wrong people.” (pp. 58 and 60, Heart of Stone) This single story of youth restiveness and criminality engendered by circumstances prevalent in their societies, permeates all these three plays and cannot be excused on the ground of the playwright’s use of different locales and cultures. Though a multi-cultural dramatist, Yerima makes no spirited attempt to be a connoisseur of any like the bat in the adage, stranger to the sky and earth. In consequence, he distorts, like most of our Nollywood films, the cultures of many ethnic groups in his plays in the name of multi-culturalism. This is more glaring in the latest of the three plays, Heart of Stone. The old man character, Achief, is a pagan and drinks the locally-brewed beer called burukutu, worships in the traditional way, yet exclaims “By Allah” (p. 10) like other non-Muslim characters in the play and, as if this is not enough, he makes claim to Islamic four-wife polygamy when he says: “I take a new wife to complete the number Allah approved for me as a good Muslim soon.” (p. 15). It is not for the love of being portrayed as a schizophrenic that the author made Achief talk about the gods in the next page: “That we need a megaphone to speak with the gods?” (p. 16). Perhaps, the greatest distortion of cultures and religions in this play is the misuse of Hausa words especially where Yoruba Arabic words are used instead of Hausa’s such as “Aljenah” (p. 34) for “Aljannah”, “Shetani” (p. 38) for “Shaitan”, “Kaffirs” (p. 41) for “Kafiris”, etc. It is obvious that the playwright’s knowledge of Hausa words and their concomitant Arabic expressions is weak. Kaka Patu, a pagan who believes in wetting the throat of her dead daughter “with the burukutu offerings” (p. 13), could not restrain herself when told that Musa is involved in the killing of Vero and exclaims: “Subahanallahi!” (p.53) before fainting! Yerima will not receive any thanks from any Christian for the pastor’s prayer on page 36 as it does not reflect the Christian culture of praying whether Pentecostal or orthodox Christianity. Be that as it may, Yerima is inarguably Africa’s most prolific playwright writing today after his elder countryman, Osofisan. However, the only snag for writers of this ilk is that memorability, the enduring quality of any great work of art, could as well go hand itself, flanked on either side by sublime literary language and originality. Shakespeare is still celebrated today for close to four centuries since he passed on to glory not because of the volumes of his works but for the relentless artistry and self-denial that went into every of his works which are now timeless benchmarks for world dramatic writing. A writer who continues to churn out works without paying attention to the nitty-gritty of what makes great works tick, coupled with a narcissistic disregard to his readers, may suffer the fate of not having his name whispered in the hallowed chambers of the Swedish Academy even if he attains the record feat of a hundred works.

When a Poet Writes the Way He Preaches

Book: Eye Rhymes Author: Ahmed Maiwada Reviewer: Isaac Attah Ogezi Publisher: Mazariyya Books (2013) Pages: 56 The American writer and Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison, was asked once why she wrote her seminal novel, Beloved, and her reply was that she liked writing the books that she would love to read. A writer’s works are a reflection of what he likes reading and his statement of what writing should be, the new course he aspires to chart, and to use the words of yet another American writer, poet laureate Robert Frost, the road ‘less travelled by.’ Perhaps the tragedy in the lives of many countless writers is the unfulfilment of this dream, the ever-nagging inability to write like their ideal masters of the art, much less to take the road not taken. Only a negligible few writers like Ahmed Maiwada have not seen this dream die stillborn, thus the joy of being spared the agony of trudging through life rather sulkily. In 2009, Maiwada’s second collection, Fossils, was greeted by the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Literature judges as ‘pure poetry’, and I hasten to add, undiluted by overt preachments, shorn of tentative strokes on canvass by a suckling poet. If Fossils, a slightly above-par achievement could be greeted with such accolade, Maiwada in his latest collection, Eye Rhymes, came stronger and stiffer, most likely his undeniable tour de force. Divided into fifteen parts of unequal number of poems, Eye Rhymes is a slim, fifty-six-page collection on diverse themes. From the first six parts, the poet, nauseated by what is being paraded as poetry these days, expresses his views of what poetry is and what it is not. He uses the word ‘rhymes’ as the synecdoche for poetry, and at times uses them interchangeably. In ‘Their holes in walls caused culture shock’ on page 13, the poet derides the kind of jejune poetry that philistines at the corridors of power garland with awards: I hear of slam and sister scam – The hall of poetasters brook [sic] no trope! The classics waste; the trash is raised, O, musing now is by power and might. The plates on my table make maggots. Till a pinch of soul is added. Sham is that banquet! The poet goes further in this poem to take a swipe on literarily naïve authorities and would rather prefer if poetry, or arts generally, is left in the hands of experts. He counsels that instead of writing watery and prolix verses, it is better one does not attempt at all: The roll call of bards Is roll call of word-wasting Taliban. Crab is the line I’m trudging on, Marshland the pathway! I wouldn’t irk if you left The child, asleep in the manger; But Herod, you raised your hand And Herodias my anger! I can still remember with nostalgia the handful of poetic rejoinders provoked by this poem when posted by the poet on different listservs, albeit eclipsed by the original. Interestingly, in ‘Rhymes is to come, Rhymes is, and was’ on pages 21 – 23, the poet mocks those middle-of-the-road poets who swim with the current, abdicating their sacred role of writing good poetry in the name of pandering to the whims and caprices of ‘power and might’: Swimming fool has followed the rivers Since our parting with the Common Crown. Yes, I’ve lost the loft, with distance, But the floods I ride are concrete ground! Happily enough, the poet makes no secret of the kind of poetry that is high art; a hybrid of the public domain and the private, the divine and the mundane in a conjugal bliss. In ‘Public, private, divine, mundane’ on page 24, he eulogizes: Your message that has dropped in; The words – chosen, have seeped, The cracks they have filled, Walked on letters; Walked on their water, This water you have turned wine! My eyes can’t stop sipping Your message that has dropped in. The question that begs for an answer at this stage is why does arts appear at its most sublime when used as a weapon of vengeance? If not, why is it that revenge literature and music are so rich and almost mystical? Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Hamlet readily come to mind in literature. Did Tupac Amaru Shakur not take Hip Hop rap music to another level in his Hit Them Up targeted at his arch-rival, the Notorious BIG? What about Akon’s Blame it on Me? It is obvious that Maiwada is not an exception in this collection when he bares his poetic fangs at his detractors. In ‘Limestone around his neck still roam’ on pages 45 – 46, he scoops sadistically his pound of flesh in the following lines: The gallery drowns in blood wine, In the Nazi Party’s banquet hall. Chemical Ali flows, From Goebbels’ swastika teeth, As the German shepherd yelps – The banquet’s baptismal name (Oh the Fuehrer needs Nine bards for the Gas Chamber!) In tune, bad-bass banjo bandies Hard-shell refrains; And when the hands cue him on, Doctor Death gasses the chosen nine! When the drones in his skies still form. Not yet done with these adversaries who cannot appreciate high art, this tiny clique of poetry-legislators, the poet vents further his anger in ‘Should Rhymes walk down gas chamber’s lane’ on pages 48 – 49 thus: There is gas in every tune Oozing from the grand gashole. Listen to the novel tune, O Milton, prince of tunes – Poetry is High Seriousness! The mighty banjo strummed it, And made your chosen people mournful. Banjo is a stringed tool O father – used when power is abusing – Your maid almost to the altar; The stringed one abused her, drunk on gas! Maiwada seems not to be alone in this vituperation against the usurpation of poetry by philistines in power, when he ‘cursed, cried and laughed, then the seizure’ (page 29), Shakespeare even wished for death in his Sonnet 66 when confronted with a similar fate: Tired with all these for restful death I cry, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honour shamefully misplaced, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, And strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority … On the aesthetic level, apart from American fiction ably led by John Steinbeck and William Faulkner which Maiwada adores, he holds American poetry with apparent peevish disdain. Ironically, his poetry bears closest affinity with post-modern American poetry, noted for its avant-garde inaccessibility, derogatorily called ‘poetry of stone’ by some middle-of-the-road Nigerian poets, pathologically fixated with lacklustre market-place poetry. Admittedly, reading Maiwada’s poetry is not a roller-coaster ride to nirvana, but an adventure of which the poet obviously invites his readers to spend as much time as he spent in the labour-room to be able to decipher it. Despite the initial difficulty the readers encounter, they cannot fail to be struck by beautiful expressions such as ‘Rhymes spent their nights in gales/Of prose that sat in vases’ (page 9), the cipher messages in ‘Nine bards for the Gas Chambers!’ (page 45) and ‘Banjo is a tool/O father – used when power is abusing –’ (page 48) and the medical metaphor in ‘Not the cadaver of an unfinished verse’ (page 54). Even the most tone-deaf readers cannot pretend not to hear the crunching, alliterative sound in ‘In tune, bad-bass banjo bandies’ (page 46). In recent times, I have not seen a poetry book that comes near to Maiwada’s Eye Rhymes in terms of high artistic cover design and production in Nigeria. Compared to his second collection, Fossils, in this latest poetic offering, we see a more reclusive Maiwada, strumming his privatist-and-yet-public violin, as original and experimental as Okigbo. Eye Rhymes, to paraphrase Achebe a little , is a poetry collection that I am most likely to be caught sitting down to read again owing to the poet’s original voice, so different from the babel of voices that assail our air-waves, straining for sunlight.

Review: Embrace of a Leper by Prof. Egya E. Sule

Review: Embrace of a Leper by Prof. Egya E. Sule *** Let me start by invoking the idea of the poststructuralist historian Hayden White. In all his work, mainly centred on what he calls “the historical imagination”, White has consistently maintained that there is just a slim divide between history and literature. In his view, all historians and philosophers of history, like literary writers, are engaged in narration, in emplotting events; and in doing so historians, like the literary writers, depend on tropes or literary devices such as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (White particularly identifies the four) to tell or to put in perspective whatever they consider as facts. Histories are thus subjective stories, gaining force of acceptability by an imagination which is largely manifested in the historian’s capability to deploy those literary devices. White concludes that histories are “verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences”. Historical events, White has stubbornly insists, are value-neutral. No historical event is, for instance, intrinsically tragic; it is only tragic deepening on how the historian emplots or encodes it. From such perspective, we need not worry about the facticity or what some of you may call the God-given truth of the events Ogezi has dramatised in Embrace of a Leper – a drama that I am sure is capable of stirring debates among historians working on central Nigeria. Ogezi’s book is literary, what literary scholars would call a historical drama – a subgenre, since Shakespeare, that has tended to confound literary and history scholars mainly because of the literary licence the playwright often deploys to excuse her distortion of “facts” in the eyes of the “owners” of the history. Natives of Keffi, descendants of the past emirs and their palace attendants, may consider themselves as the owners of the history emplotted in Embrace of a Leper. They are likely to contest the story in Ogezi’s drama. Daughters and sons of other ethnic groups within the Keffi area (Eloyi, Yeskwa, Eggon, Mada, Panda) are also likely to contest the story. But Ogezi, as a literary artist, as a playwright, offers us a drama, something more than history, a dramatisation of human struggles in the face of colonial domination, racism, and violence. Captain Maloney is His Majesty’s imperial representative in Keffi; his project is to get Keffi and its environs under the absolute control of the British government. He is, however, faced with stiff opposition from the “Mohammedans” installed in Keffi through an earlier colonial project: the colonisation of northern Nigeria by the Arabs and the subsequent jihadist movement that brought the Hausas from the far north to brutalise the natives of Keffi. Rather than see the crisis as occurring between the natives of Keffi and the British colonial government, as some audiences of Embrace of a Leper might think, it is in fact between two colonial powers, the Arab and the British, leaving the real natives of Keffi as the proverbial grass that suffers when two elephants fight. The fieriest of the Mohammedans is Magaji Dan Yamusa, a warrior described by the playwright as “a man of few words, whose taciturnity often finds an outlet in his hasty and fiery temper”. Indeed his few words are disturbing insults on the natives of Keffi and its environs whom he, along with other Muslim Hausas, calls “pagans”, “infidels” or “kafure”. Just like the British colonial government, the Emirate of Keffi is still engaged in its task of colonising the natives, raiding their villages and taking them as slaves. The emirate in Zaria, where Keffi is answerable to, is “not satisfied with a hundred slaves and a handful of crops and livestock annually” from the palace in Keffi. To get more slaves for Zaria and for Keffi, Yamusa is poised to “attack the pagans in daytime. [Because] The infidels are only fit for slavery. We do them a favour by saving them from the wrath of Allah by raiding them. Eaters of pigs!” The shrewd British Resident, Captain Maloney, sees as a veritable excuse to crush Arab colonialism what he considers the Emirate’s inhumanity to the natives. But before he does that by taming the blood-thirsty Yamusa, the same Yamusa, unprovoked, beheads the British Resident. Expectedly, the British take the advantage to deploy their superior weaponry and effectively take over Keffi and other bigger northern Nigerian towns. While it is troubling that Ogezi’s Embrace of a Leper fails to give a voice to the so-called “pagans” (the drama is annoyingly silent on how the Mohammedans institute their power in Keffi, as though Keffi was a virgin land grabbed by the jihadists), the real natives of Keffi and its environs, it clearly portrays the incredible damage Arab and British colonialisms have inflicted on indigenous ethnic groups such as Eloyi, Eggon, Mada, Yeskwa, Panda, Agatu, and others. And although the drama lays no explicit claim to any radical project of contestation and interrogation, it is one welcome attempt at revisiting our pasts – perhaps something in the line of a people, according to Chinua Achebe, knowing when and where the rain started beating them. It is in this regards that I consider the book a vital historical drama especially about a society, about diverse ethnic groups, that still suffers from internal colonialism and cultural haemorrhage. To return to Hayden White: Ogezi has given us a drama in which he emplots historical events from his perspective. We need many more of such literary works, from diverse perspectives, including those with a stronger tenor of radical probing, of radical action towards recuperation. Meanwhile, we must salute the playwright Ogezi for reminding us of one of the most critical historical moments of our lives. [End]

Interview with Isaac Attah Ogezi, author of Under a Darkling Sky by newbooksnigeria

Interview with Isaac Attah Ogezi, author of Under a Darkling Sky by newbooksnigeria Isaac Ogezi, a lawyer and writer, has been variously described as having what it takes to reinvent and reinvigorate the declining Nigeria drama, a star whose iridescent light will not twinkle briefly but linger long on our literary firmaments, and an important and outstanding literary dramatist. For a record second consecutive time last year, he was awarded ANA/Esiaba Irobi Prize for Drama and that was coming at the heels of several other Prizes that have trailed in his literary career. His latest (published in 2012), Under a Darkling Sky, is a biographical drama based on the life of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian environmental activist and writer who was hanged by the Military Government of General Sani Abacha, alongside eight others in the wake of a widely criticized trial on what many insist were thumped up murder charges with the sole objective of silencing his criticism of government and the environmental degrading activities of crude oil extraction multinational petroleum companies in the Niger Delta Regions. In Under a Darkling Sky, Ogezi tackles issues which are as relevant today as they were nearly two decades ago. The playwright talks about his aspirations and motivations for writing Under the Darkling Sky in this interview. The Book Congratulations on your recently published play, Under a Darkling Sky. I consider it an important work of literature for its significance to the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta and Nigeria as a whole, and an ambitious writing deserving applause. OGEZI: Thank you. You have succeeded in making me blush like a young lady who is told that she is pretty and she does know it. Oh God, am I not enraptured? Can you share a bit of your background with us to help us understand what made you write Under a Darkling Sky? What is your particular interest or motivation for telling this story? And why did you choose the genre of drama to tell it? OGEZI: Yes. I was born to the family of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Ogezi about thirty-six years ago. Benue State-born, I attended both my primary and post-primary schools in Nasarawa State. I then proceeded to the University of Jos, Jos, for my LL.B (Hons.) after a brief stint at the then School of Preliminary Studies (SPS), Keffi, where I studied literature at the advanced level. I was fifteen years old and in my third year in the secondary school when I lost my father. His demise opened my eyes to the floodgate of injustices which my mother experienced raising a family as a widowed peasant woman. It was these injustices that I witnessed as a young, innocent child growing up in a cruel, dog-eat-dog world that informed my decision to be a lawyer. What motivated me to write Under a Darkling Sky was not only to expose via the weapon of stage drama the sham trial and execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the eight other Ogonis in 1995 but also to bring into the foggy memories of the living one of the darkest moments of our chequered history as a nation. Man has a penchant to forget the past and in the process, keeps recycling his mistakes without learning from them. The choice of drama as a medium came to me naturally given the fact that the subject matter could be best handled through the instrumentality of the stage, the theatre of dreams and emotions. Drama can speak to the literate as well as the unlettered. In a world of drama, the walls of class differences, creed and colour come crumbling down. Please give us a nutshell insight into this play based on the life of Ken Saro-Wiwa? What part(s) of his life did you set out to capture? OGEZI: Under a Darkling Sky captures the life and times of a post-civil war Saro-Wiwa in a tumultuous period when oil had become the mainstay of his country’s economy. His beloved homeland, Ogoni, bore the brunt of this oil exploration and exploitation. Devastated and brutally raped by the oil activities of multinational oil companies like Shell and Chevron, there appeared to be a concerted disregard for the health-hazards to human habitation, and what was worse, the development in Ogoniland is not commensurate with the amount of environmental degradation. Saro-Wiwa’s almost pathological love for his Ogoni people set him at loggerheads with the demented Abacha dictatorship but he remained undaunted until he was eventually martyred. What I set out to depict in this play was a Saro-Wiwa rather late in his life and his role as an environmental activist-cum-writer who could not compromise his stand until he had to pay the supreme price of losing his life for his Ogoni people. How do you make up for this in the course of the play for the early part of his life that would have told how he came to be the irrepressible activist he was? OGEZI: I didn’t intend to make it up in any way. When I was writing this play, I was fully conversant with the fact that there is a whole world of difference between a stage play and a television documentary. A playwright, who cannot draw a line of demarcation between these two variant forms of communication, may fall foul of prolixity which will definitely nauseate his audience. I totally agree with Soyinka when he said in the early stage of his dramatic career about five decades ago that the cardinal sin of a playwright is to bore his audience. Any aspect of Saro-Wiwa’s life that I didn’t include in this play was either not stage-worthy for me or that it was better suited for a television documentary. What part of researching and writing the play did you consider the most challenging? OGEZI: Well, taking a look back to the periods of incubation, research and finally settling down to write this play, I must confess that the experience was edifying as well as salutary. I quite agree with the truism that when you enjoy what you’re writing, the chances are that your readers will enjoy reading it. I was so carried away with the euphoria of chronicling theatrically the life of a great man that I cannot remember the birth-pangs that accompanied the whole exercise. Perhaps, if there was any challenge at all, I’d say it was the trial scene. Even as a practising lawyer, I discovered that Saro-Wiwa’s trial and conviction along with the eight other Ogonis alone were enough to make a full-length play. So the obvious challenge was how to deploy the dramaturgical resource of selectivity to trim it down to as few pages as possibly without estranging the reader or viewer with unnecessary legal jargons. The play is set in the volatile Niger Delta, would you say this is a volatile play? OGEZI: Not at all. I insist that my play is not volatile like the Niger Delta. This is because I’ve taken my subject beyond the enclave of the Niger Delta to the realm of universality. Just like in poetry, emotion can be individual and privatist and yet be garbed with the toga of universality through supreme artistry or craft. The life and times of Saro-Wiwa as chronicled in this play serve as a metaphor for all minority struggles against the backdrop of oppression and genocide, anywhere and anytime, and I want to believe that even if the Niger Delta crisis is over today, this play cannot cease to be relevant or become dated because the emotion encapsulated therein is universal, timeless and borderless. Is there any particular message you wish to send out with this play? OGEZI: Yes, it is simply the evil of dictatorship and the inexplicable waste of important lives. The “darklingness” of our sky is without doubt foreboding in Nigeria, nay, Africa as a whole and most developing nations of the world. The heart of darkness that is inherent in man despite our highfalutin level of civilization is quite alarming. I expect a lot from this play; I think a lot of people do. I certainly think the whole of the Ogoni people would expect a lot from this play, seeing as Ken Saro-Wiwa was their hero and martyr. Have you, in your own opinion, done this man and this subject justice? OGEZI: Personally, I’m always wary of self-aggrandizement. I’m not also a masochist to indulge in a macabre self-flagellation. I leave the readers and critics to judge whether I’ve done justice to Saro-Wiwa and the subject or not. But let my critics take warning on how they wield the critic’s scythe inordinately because I like taking on my critics on a head-on collision not minding the casualties that may be left behind in the process! Moreover, for a lot of people this might be the only glimpse of the man, back to life, as it were. How close to truth is this work? How much is fact, and how much fiction? OGEZI: In my brief introduction to the play, I did forewarn the reader not to expect a strict constructionist approach to the subject which would have been stale, stilted and jejune. Facts in real life when not skillfully handled in art can be stranger than fiction, and vice versa. Be that as it may, I want to assure my reader or viewer that this play is very close to truth based on my painstaking research, and to prove this, over ninety percent of the characters are real life characters with their real names and most of them are still alive and kicking. I had only utilized the dramatic licence to abridge time and space; to put my words into their mouths in line with their psychological make-up as exhumed by my research. I feel confident to say that the play is over ninety-five percent fact and the other five percent mere literary embellishments on fact to make up for any missing gaps. Merging fact and fiction, how difficult or easy was this for you? OGEZI: It was easy for me because of my free, self-confident spirit as a playwright and also coupled with the fact that I pride myself with knowing the nitty-gritty of the theatre. I was not under the bondage of ensuring that every episode was historically correct as many uninitiated playwrights are wont to be. After all, dramatic licence allows one to tamper with history to suit one’s purposes. In Soyinka’s great play, Death and the King’s Horseman, the incident of the play took place far before the Second World War but in the hands of Soyinka, the war was made to happen during the time of the incident and his aim was more than achieved to expose the beastly, not-too-perfect nature of the whites themselves from the eyes of the Elesin’s been-to son, Olunde. One of the things I find endearing about drama is the immediacy of the medium and how it brokers no romanticising. It doesn’t so much tell as show the character and ask you to draw your own conclusions. Still, it is easy to glamorize a character beyond reality. Does Under a Darkling Sky reveal any weakness in the man Saro-Wiwa? OGEZI: I’m afraid that that is a rather difficult question to answer. If I say yes, I convict myself and the same thing goes if my answer is in the negative. It is an unpalatable choice between the devil and the deep blue sea! Suffice it to say here that any objective reader who has gone through the gamut of historical materials on the Saro-Wiwa saga like I have done cannot help but feel deeply for the man and the other eight Ogonis who were judicially murdered. Admitted that the killing of the four Ogoni chiefs by the mob was unwarranted, unholy, ghoulish and unjustified, but to then kill nine people in their place before it was properly proved beyond reasonable doubt that they aided and abetted the killings was ear-wrenching. Don’t forget that they were executed when the time within which to appeal against the decision of the kangaroo tribunal had not elapsed. When I was writing this play, I did not contrive to make Saro-Wiwa an angel that couldn’t hurt a fly but I allowed the creative muse to guide me. The rest is left for the critics to do their work. And the other eight who were hanged along with Ken Saro-Wiwa, is there room for their veneration in Under a Darkling Sky? OGEZI: In the play, they are shadow or minor characters in this play and belong to the crowd. They only feature somewhat prominently during the trial scene. We don’t know them much about them. Even in the historical materials and sources I was privileged to study, they were unknown until their execution along with Ken Saro-Wiwa shot them into limelight. I leave that judgment for my readers and critics to determine whether I have venerated them in this play or not. I would have imagined that you would have courted a closer association with the historical subject of this work in your title, for instance, or by the use of a sub-title. Was this something you considered and then decided not to pursue? OGEZI: No, I never for once thought of appearing patronizing to the reader. I abhor with every ounce of passion in me any air of condescension and patronage from any author of a work of art to his reader. In as much as I hold my reader in very high regard as an intelligent being, I also feel that titles that court a closer association with the historical figure-character or subject of the work like the use of sub-title would only belittle the artistry of the work. Writing about Sir Thomas More in 1966, Robert Bolt did not need to use an associative title but simply A Man for All Seasons, and it is still a timeless dramatic piece till date. Can you imagine Ken Saro-Wiwa in the year 2012, what do you think would have been different in Niger Delta and Nigeria? OGEZI: Yes, Saro-Wiwa in year 2012 would have been a better Nigeria for us. His fight for his Ogoni people was the microcosm for all the minorities in the contraption called Nigeria and beyond. His life was ruled by passion – truth, justice and true federalism. There would not have been any militant group in the Niger Delta today let alone any fabulous amnesty were the Nigerian nation-state sensitive to the Ogoni and other minorities cries more than a decade ago. Let us not forget that it was Saro-Wiwa’s state-orchestrated death that conflagrated into the Niger Delta crisis that we have today. Since non-violent dialogue of MOSOP was viewed as an anathema by the barbarous Abacha government, perhaps, the Niger Delta people felt the language of violence would be more comprehensible to the government, hence the birth of several militant and counter-militant groups in the Niger Delta. What are your expectations for Under a Darkling Sky? Have you considered staging it for a live audience? OGEZI: What sets drama apart from the other genres of literature is akin to the dichotomy between the written word and action, that is, when the written word is made flesh on the stage. While the former cannot shoot a gun, happily enough, the latter could do worse than that. It can incite the audience into taking to the streets to enforce the changes that it has long yearned for. In 1925, when the American most famous playwright, Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms was staged, it caused a lot of furore just like his previous play, All God’s Chillun Got Wings in 1924. I expect the reader or audience to be touched by the charade of justice meted out to Saro-Wiwa and the eight other Ogonis enough to stamp its feet emphatically on the ground to resist any future re-occurrence. I also expect the reader or audience to be fundamentally entertained and moved by the high sense of the large-scale tragedy of a great man enough to attain purgative height of catharsis. Yes, there are grand plans underway to stage this play in Abuja, Port Harcourt, Bori (the headquarters of Ogoni people) and all the major cities of Nigeria. I see this play being staged on the Broadway in the US and all the major capital cities of the world, not to mention several languages that it will be translated into. I expect it to be a phenomenal box-office success with the author being conferred with a chieftaincy title in Ogoniland. If readers would like to read more about Ken Saro-Wiwa, what books would you recommend to them? OGEZI: I’ll recommend only those works I found illuminating in the course of writing this play, such as Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and a Day, and his short, prophetic story, “Africa Kills Her Sun”, and several internet materials fully acknowledged in my introduction to the play. I didn’t bother to read, and I have no regrets whatsoever, few other works such as Saro-Wiwa’s On a Darkling Plain and Ken Saro-Wiwa (Jnr)’s In the Shadow of a Saint, to mention but two of the most prominent. What is next after Under a Darkling Sky? What are you currently working on? OGEZI: I don’t know as I’m still waiting to hear from God. It may be my first collection of short stories or another play, I don’t know right now. I’m currently working on an evangelistic play which I believe will be more effective than many hell-fire-and-damnation sermons in our churches. I’m also researching for a historical play on a major town in Northern Nigeria. Let it remain nameless in the meantime. Tell us something about you we would never guess from your writing? OGEZI: I have four passions in my life in what I call acronymically the four L’s – Lord, law, literature and love. I’m always in deep communion with the Lord in my daily endeavours and can only act based on His direction. Law brings food to my table as a lawyer, while literature keeps my heartbeat palpitating with life. I’m also a true, honest, committed and passionate lover in the mould of Romeo; in fact, I’m the last love martyr standing on his feet today, no thanks to my childhood addiction to Indian love films!