By
Isaac Attah Ogezi
‘The secret of masterpieces lies in the concordance between the subject and the temperament of the author’
The above immortal words of the French writer and philosopher, Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 1880), become more relevant in our age where the school of Art for Art’s sake is obsolete, if not completely dead. Creative writing is not an exception, for if a writer must succeed at all in his creative career, he must write about the cause he fights for. In a word, writing is all about passion. It is the driving force for success in writing. And ‘ a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his sympathies’, to quote Willa Carther (1873 – 1947). It is a truism that a writer with capitalist sympathies can hardly produce a great work of art that will extol socialism which he detests with his very soul. The same can be said of a socialist writer. George Orwell, a spy-writer of the then Western Bloc, lampoons the utopianism and foibles inherent in Karl Marx’s communism when he published his masterpiece, Animal Farm (1945). This single work alone wrecked more havoc in the socialist camp in the mid-forties than any vituperative anti-socialist essay or propaganda. It is interesting to note that the Eastern Bloc is not without its left-wing warriors. Until the emergence of Bertolt Brecht, the definition of tragedy must encompass three basic ingredients – the hero must be a great man in the fictional society of the writer with an inborn tragic flaw or hubris or ‘Hamartia’ which leads to his fall from grace to grass enough to arouse the sympathies of the reader or audience. There must be a purgation of emotions to result in catharsis before a work of art could be classed as a tragedy – Shakespeare’s tragedies, Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, to mention but a few of the most glaring. This famous Aristotelian concept of tragedy received the greatest blow when Brecht proved to the whole wide world with his two classics, The Good Woman of Setzuan and The Caucacian Chalk Circle that the little man, the nondescript peasant in the society could also be made a subject of great tragedies. He brought firebrand Marxism to the modern stage with unprecedented success. While Marxism deals with the downtrodden in a class-segregated society, feminism can be said to be an offshoot of Marxism in that it deals with the exploited, albeit the female gender. It has equally produced champions such as the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (The Doll’s House), novelist Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Kate Chopin, Flora Nwapa, Femi Osofisan (with his now famous coinage, ‘foremothers!’), Zulu Sofola, Zaynab Alkali, Ifeoma Okoye and very recently Unoma Azuah with her novel, Sky-High Flames.
Before the emergence of Flora Nwapa in the late sixties, the Nigerian literary world was male-dominated like our sexist society. The few female characters in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are lifeless beings, mere walking shadows like the blacks in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Irked by this male chauvinism of our male writers, Nwapa responded by showing how women could also be made great heroines of serious literature with her ground-breaking novels, viz: Efuru, Idu and One is Enough. Zulu Sofola took up the fight to the theatre with her A Sweet Trap, Zaynab Alkali fired her canon from the North with her The Stillborn and The Descendants (2005), Ifeoma Okoye with her Behind the Clouds (even men too could be impotent, you know!), the list is endless. With Unoma Azuah’s Sky-High Flames, it is obvious that the gender war is not yet over until it is over, with victory for women. For there can never be peace when violence is daily committed against our women, when our society denies the girl-child equality with her male counterpart. No, we are not yet done with this sporadic stuttering of guns from the women’s camp!
Told in the first-person narrative technique, a technique well noted for its immediacy and potency, Azuah’s Sky-High Flames is a poignant story of a little girl called Ofunne, who is on the threshold of maturity. The novel opens with the heroine-narrator returning from the Oshimili River. She tells us of her father who has two wives – her mother and the one he inherited from his father. To show her naivety, she mentions this fact as a usual thing that happens in her community without strong vilification. However, right from the outset, she makes no secret of her dream to acquire Western education when she says:
‘But for whatever reason my parents were the way they were,
I couldn’t wait to leave home and attend high school.
I wanted to be well educated with a high school certificate.
I wanted to become a teacher and get married to the man of
my dreams. Then my life would take the course I wanted it to
to take.’(p. 1)
Beautiful dreams those were like Alkali’s Li until reality aborts her dreams, leaving her with stillborns. The society gratuitously allows Ofunne to have a taste of high school education only to cut it abruptly in the middle. Her marriage is hastily conducted in proxy to a man who fulfils the stereotype of the male character in women’s prose-fiction. The male ogre with lies as his stock-in-trade, women his Achilles’ heel; simply an idiotic being not worthy of the woman he marries. As if this is not enough, Azuah further afflicts Oko Okolo with syphilis like Dozie’s impotence in Okoye’s Behind the Clouds. At the end of the novel, Azuah makes her heroine take a feminist stand in the farce of a marriage she is coerced into by opting out.
What strikes the reader of this novel most is the sophisticated simplicity of the language partly because of the age and education of the child-narrator and Azuah’s familiarization with the syntax ad semantics of the language she teaches at Lane College, Jackson, Tennessee, USA. Sparse, poetic and evocative, her language truly belongs to the most Standard English devoid of clichés and what people call Nigerian English. This is no doubt a rare achievement in modern Nigerian fiction that deserves all the laurels the work is currently garnering internationally.
Apart from the foregoing, Sky-High Flames possesses all the disturbing qualities of a first novel – weak characterization, melodramatic plot, unrealistic conflict resolution, and one or two typographical errors. The first deficiency a reader-critic will notice is the almost lifeless characters that people Azuah’s fictional world. Flat or stock characters that are reactionary to the cause-effect movement of the plot. Our heroine Ofunne still sees the world from a child’s eyes without any development in her language like Pip in Dickens’ Great Expectations. Worse still, her husband Oko Okolo, like most male anti-heroes of feminist writings, is a devil without a single redeeming feature. All the characters speak good English even truck-driver Zani and his wife Mama Abu in Kaduna. Their creator never makes any attempt to make them real for us. Fortunately, one can readily come to her defence by reeling out names of many of our writers in the Diaspora who are alienated from their roots after a brief spell in Europe and America. Ben Okri wrote his Booker-Award winning The Famished Road without infusing any Pidgin English nor proverbs. Any European writer could as well write such an over-long novel and cash in on the Abiku-Obanje world of magical realism.
In the area of melodramatic plot, what is said here could equally be referring to almost all the prose writers of this generation. The ability to tell a good story is the weakest points of the writers of our time. The iron determination and literary language are there but the same cannot be said of the talents for telling good stories. And yet the average Nigerian writer is so vainglorious that he dismisses our home video industry with a snobbish wave of his hand for what he cannot do better! There is no gainsaying the fact that before the publication of Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus the Nigerian prose-fiction was full of many oaks and many already sagging (apologies to Femi Osofican). Any wonder why our short stories now flourish from abroad? Our best short story writers such as Chimamanda Adichie, Chika Unigwe, Sefi Atta, Ike Ikonta, Segun Afolabi, David Njoku and now Helon Habila are all based in Europe and America.
To cite a few examples of poor handling of plot in Azuah’s novel, an extract will speak volumes of this deficiency. The fighting scene at the public tap is described as follows:
‘ I was so infuriated. I pushed him. Why would I be the one to wait
for as long as I did and then have some unruly boy thrust himself
right in front of me? He didn’t even beg. The people behind me
yelled at him to get out of my face and join the line. But he pushed
me so hard that I fell on my buttocks. He laughed and went to the
end of the line. I ran after him, intending to leave some scratches on
his face, but Oko had already grabbed him by the neck, hurled him
to the ground and landed a couple of punches on his stomach. He
yelped and they scuffled for a while, raising dust. The young man
struggled to lift his weight off the ground, but Oko held him
down…’(p. 102)
Azuah could have done better than that. Also, the scenes at the pigsty (pp 63-64) and the sudden, ghost-like appearance of her husband at the park when she attempts to run away from home (pp. 115-116) are over-exaggerated for the reader to swallow with a ton of salt.
What about the unrealistic conflict resolution in the story? Yes, the introduction of conflicts, complications and denouement are not the exclusive preserve of dramaturgy but also prose-fiction. A story must be properly ended before it can lay claim to be a good one. The early part of Azuah’s story is so delightful when Ofunne goes to the Girls’ Training College in Enugu, the author’s version of a boys’ school in Chukwuemeka Ike’s Bottled Leopard. This world of learning is so peaceful and serene until it is shattered by her sudden withdrawal to be married off in her absence to Oko. From here the story assumes a bizarre, almost uncoordinated form until the unrealistic climax. In fact, some stories are better told when conflicts are not introduced at all. When a writer cannot resolve conflicts satisfactorily, it is advisable he writes plotless stories that challenge the reader to appreciate the flowery language, the psychology of his characters and the powerful description of situations other than stories themselves. After all, some of the best short stories in the world are plotless. The real conflict in Azuah’s work is the near-impotence of Oko as a result of his syphilis as in Okoye’s Behind the Clouds. Here Azuah tells us very little about syphilis. Is it enough to make a woman give birth to a stillborn? Is it enough for a woman to call it quits with her man? But the story must end in a radical feminist way that Alkali’s The Stillborn did not, thus a forced ending. The few typographical errors can only be discussed in passing since they are so few and negligible. The quality of the printing is of the highest order in any part of the world. In short, the shock of stumbling over a few errors is as appalling as finding an Ajegunle-like Harlem in the heart of New York City. They are as follows: ‘…didn’t act knowledge my greetings’ (p. 104), ‘that he would practice some more after he feed’ (p.109), ‘His small muscles were beginning to tout’ (p.145), etc. Also, almost all the characters use the expression ‘when I’m done’ so much that it can be said that there is no speech pattern for each character – Ofunne (pp133, 134, 137), Oko (p. 133), Mama Abu, Mama Oko (pp 136 and 137), Sister Dolan, etc. This becomes so jarring on the reader’s nerves for its monotony.
Be that at it may, Azuah deserves our commendation for mustering up the courage to write a full-length novel after several years of writing short stories and poetry. Her poems are so good that one begins to feel she is specially cut out to be a poet and not a novelist. However, such a conclusion would be rather hasty, as only time will tell. If she makes a deliberate effort to avoid the obvious pitfalls of her first novel, the chances are that she could still write the invisible African novel of our gene
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