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!

Introducing my new play: Under a Darkling Sky

Publishers: Hybun Publications International Author: Isaac Attah Ogezi Cover Design: Sylvester Ukut Pay layout: Sundex Final Touch, Suleja. Number of pages: 92 ABOUT THE PLAY: “… I have devoted my intellectual and material resources, my very life, to a cause in which I have total belief and from which I cannot be blackmailed or intimidated … In the quest for justice for my people, neither prison nor the threat of death nor death itself could ever deter me. No imprisonment nor death can stop our ultimate victory.” Those were the last defiant words of Ken Saro-Wiwa to the kangaroo tribunal, the Ogoni Civil Disturbances Tribunal, that tried, convicted and sentenced him along with eight other Ogonis to be hanged on trumped-up charges of complicity and incitement of the deaths of four Ogoni elders in May, 1994. Under a Darkling Sky dramatizes the life and times of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the renowned environmental activist-cum-writer, who placed his community far above his individual life, and had to pay the supreme price by dying for his Ogoni people in the Niger Delta region of the West African nation-state called Nigeria. WHAT PEOPLE SAY ABOUT THE AUTHOR “With his fresh and inventive use of language, excellent dramaturgy and multifaceted characterization, Isaac Attah Ogezi has all it takes to reinvent and reinvigorate the declining Nigerian drama.” -Ismail Bala Garba, poet and literary scholar. “Isaac Attah Ogezi, with this outing, the third in his emergent repertoire, is steadfastly making his way to reckoning as an accomplished literary dramatist from the north of the Niger.” -Denja Abdullahi, poet and culture expert. “Over the years, Isaac Attah Ogezi has consistently carved a niche for himself as an important dramatist on Nigeria’s literary landscape, what with the outstanding dramatic outputs from his creative arsenal. Already prize-laden, his recent award of ANA/Esiaba Irobi Prize for Drama 2011 for the record second time consecutively was the icing on the cake.” -Patrick Oguejiofor, author of Sin of the Father (2011). “With the variety I have observed so far from his creative forte, not to mention his altruistic love for humanity in his plays, it is easy to say that the young Nigerian playwright, Isaac Attah Ogezi, is a star whose iridescent light will not twinkle so briefly like a match-flare in the wind but linger on so long in our literary firmament.” -Ahmed Maiwada, author of Musdoki (2010). THE AUTHOR Isaac Attah Ogezi is a legal practitioner, poet, playwright, short story writer and literary essayist. He currently practises law at Keffi, Nasarawa State. This is his third published play, after Waiting for Savon (2009) and Casket of Her Dreams (2010).

Introducing my new play: Under a Darkling Sky Publishers: Hybun Publications International Author: Isaac Attah Ogezi Cover Design: Sylvester Ukut Pay layout: Sundex Final Touch, Suleja. Number of pages: 92 ABOUT THE PLAY: “… I have devoted my intellectual and material resources, my very life, to a cause in which I have total belief and from which I cannot be blackmailed or intimidated … In the quest for justice for my people, neither prison nor the threat of death nor death itself could ever deter me. No imprisonment nor death can stop our ultimate victory.” Those were the last defiant words of Ken Saro-Wiwa to the kangaroo tribunal, the Ogoni Civil Disturbances Tribunal, that tried, convicted and sentenced him along with eight other Ogonis to be hanged on trumped-up charges of complicity and incitement of the deaths of four Ogoni elders in May, 1994. Under a Darkling Sky dramatizes the life and times of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the renowned environmental activist-cum-writer, who placed his community far above his individual life, and had to pay the supreme price by dying for his Ogoni people in the Niger Delta region of the West African nation-state called Nigeria. WHAT PEOPLE SAY ABOUT THE AUTHOR “With his fresh and inventive use of language, excellent dramaturgy and multifaceted characterization, Isaac Attah Ogezi has all it takes to reinvent and reinvigorate the declining Nigerian drama.” -Ismail Bala Garba, poet and literary scholar. “Isaac Attah Ogezi, with this outing, the third in his emergent repertoire, is steadfastly making his way to reckoning as an accomplished literary dramatist from the north of the Niger.” -Denja Abdullahi, poet and culture expert. “Over the years, Isaac Attah Ogezi has consistently carved a niche for himself as an important dramatist on Nigeria’s literary landscape, what with the outstanding dramatic outputs from his creative arsenal. Already prize-laden, his recent award of ANA/Esiaba Irobi Prize for Drama 2011 for the record second time consecutively was the icing on the cake.” -Patrick Oguejiofor, author of Sin of the Father (2011). “With the variety I have observed so far from his creative forte, not to mention his altruistic love for humanity in his plays, it is easy to say that the young Nigerian playwright, Isaac Attah Ogezi, is a star whose iridescent light will not twinkle so briefly like a match-flare in the wind but linger on so long in our literary firmament.” -Ahmed Maiwada, author of Musdoki (2010). THE AUTHOR Isaac Attah Ogezi is a legal practitioner, poet, playwright, short story writer and literary essayist. He currently practises law at Keffi, Nasarawa State. This is his third published play, after Waiting for Savon (2009) and Casket of Her Dreams (2010).

Announcing my new play: Casket of Her Dreams

Publishers: Hybun Publications International

Author: Isaac Attah Ogezi

Cover Design: Sylvester Ukut

Pay layout: Isu Media Ltd (Diego Okenyedo Odoh)

Number of pages: 95


ABOUT THE PLAY:

Withdrawn from school, Zulaira, a girl in her early teens, is forced to marry a
man old enough to be her father in order to save the life of her stepmother.
Unfortunately, her father has reckoned without the tragedy that follows. On the
first night in her new home, she kills her husband when he comes to consummate
the marriage, an act that makes her a fugitive of the law. What happens next
when she is eventually arrested to face the full wrath of the law? Will she
escape the toils of justice? What becomes of her education? These and
several other questions are answered in this thrilling play. Told in simple and
lucid language, Casket of Her Dreams, is a play that will surely appeal to
children as well as adults.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Isaac Attah Ogezi is a legal practitioner, poet, playwright, short story writer
and literary essayist. He is published in several national and international
anthologies, online journals and dailies. His plays, poems and short stories
have won him numerous literary awards including ANA/Esiaba Irobi Prize for Drama
2010, AWF/Zulu Sofola Award for Drama 2009 and CHD/Ford Foundation Award for
Creative Writing 2010, amongst others. A fellow of UNPFA/Nollywood Scripwriting
and British Council Radiophonics programmes, he currently practises law at
Keffi, Nasarawa State. This is his second published play, after Waiting for
Savon(2009).


WHAT READERS SAY ABOUT THE PLAY:

1. "Simply marvellous!" - Ogabidu, Benue ANA Chairman.

2. "It came as no surprise that you can share your success through Casket of Her
Dreams. I went through it. The play is manifestly exceptional. Congralutions."
- Dominic Ochenehi, an Abuja-based lawyer.

3. "The production is great. The subject matter is as old as the hills but the
play is definitely engaging. Congratulations and more ink to your pen." -
Patrick Oguijefor, Abuja ANA.


HOW TO GET COPIES OF THIS PLAY:

All you need do is to indicate interest and I'll send you a copy. A copy goes
for N500 only excluding postage.

My thanks to my publishers, Hybun Publications International, Tena Green,
Hybun's US-based editor (greentmg@yahoo.com), Okenyodo Diego Odoh, my beloved
brother for the masterful typesetting, and Sylvester Ukut, for the beautiful
cover design. This is our joint dream that came to fruition without having a
need for a casket! Thanks. Na gode!

Isaac Attah Ogezi

Announcing my new play: Casket of Her Dreams

Withdrawn from school, Zulaira, a girl in her early teens, is forced to marry a man old enough to be her father in order to save the life of her stepmother. Unfortunately, her father has reckoned without the tragedy that follows. On the first night in her new home, she kills her husband when he comes to consummate the marriage, an act that makes her a fugitive of the law. What happens next when she is eventually arrested to face the full wrath of the law? Will she escape the toils of the law? What becomes of her education? These and several other questions are answered in this thrilling play. Told in simple and lucid language, Casket of Her Dreams, is a play that will surely appeal to children as well as adults.


The Author

Isaac Attah Ogezi is a legal practitioner, poet, playwright, short story writer and literary essayist. He is published in several national and international anthologies, online journals and dailies. His plays, poems and short stories have won him numerous literary awards including ANA, AWF/Zulu Sofola Award for Drama 2009 and CHD/Ford Foundation Award for Creative Writing 2010, amongst others. A fellow of UNPFA/Nollywoood Scripwriting and British Council Radiophonics programmes, he currently practises law at Keffi, Nasarawa State. This is his second published play, after Waiting for Savon(2009).

The Rewards of Stubbornness in Nwokeji’s Red Nest

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.

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.