A Rising Voice From The North: A Review Of E. E. Sule’s Impotent Heavens

By Isaac Attah Ogezi The short story sub-genre is no doubt the most neglected aspect of prose-fiction in Nigerian literature. Neglected by its self-professed practitioners, readers and the critics, it toddles behind the novel and novella. To the average Nigerian writer, the short story is an all-comers’ field like poetry; the stepping stone for the apprentice writer before attempting the more ‘serious” full-length novel. It does not require so much talents. No, not at all. All the new entrant to the revered world of letters need do is think up a story short enough to occupy a page or two, scribble it in a hurry, and a short story, nay, a writer is born. Click of glasses and cheers! Consequently, the standard of short stories that litter our national dailies leaves much to be desired. Unfortunately, this ugly scenario stemmed from our first generation writers. Yes, our first generation writers are equally guilty of the fate of the short story today. In their days, the short story was a neglected field; a last resort when an established novelist encountered the writer’s block or when a writer was vainglorious enough to exhibit his versatility. Chinua Achebe in his apprenticeship days at the University of Ibadan tried his hand at the short story before he eventually graduated to full-length novel writing. During the Nigerian civil war, he turned his talents again to the jilted short story with little success as his Girls at War is a far cry from the real Achebe of Things Fall Apart fame. The same can be said of Cyprian Ekwensi, whose Restless City and Christmas Gold and Lokotown and Others Stories fall grossly below expectations. It is the same sad story for our second generation writers. Apart from Ken Saro Wiwa’s A Forest of Flowers, which may earn a grudging pass work without being spectacular, the second generation writers have little or next to nothing to show in terms of short stories. Fetus Iyayi’s Awaiting Court-martial, Abubakar Gimba’s no-book A Toast in the Cemetery, Benue ANA’s hurriedly published Beyond Gold, all speak volumes of the kind of lamentable stuff that we call short stories. Needles to say, Nigeria is yet to produce short story craftsmen of the likes of South African Nadine Gordimer, Alex La Guma, late Richard Rive and Ezekiel Mphahlele. In spite of a deluge of low-quality works in the name of short stories, one cannot fail to notice some promising writers of the new generation who take this sub-genre as seriously as it deserves, viz: Helon Habila, Maik Nwosu, David Njoku, Toyin Adewale, Dul Johnson, Maria Ajima and very recently, E.E Sule, a rising voice from the North. Admittedly, it is quite unusual to discuss the work of a new writer with so much emphasis on the part of the country where he hails from. However, this can be mitigated by the obvious fact that the North is comparatively silent such that any entrance of a new arrival is greeted with a lot of euphoria, especially if such a new writer shows some promise as E.E Sule. Egya Emmanuel Sule makes his maiden appearance on the literary scene with his Impotent Heavens, a collection of sixteen well-crafted stories, unevenly divided into two parts – the gloomy and the humorous. The first part comprises ten harrowing stories that are bound to leave the reader with nightmarish effect. It opens with the ironically titled “Peace Keepers”, where the writer narrates with great sympathy albeit without inhibitions the experience of a family during the Nigerian civil war. Otewo, the ten-year-old child-hero, dreams of becoming a soldier when he grows up because soldiers are “so lively, so jovial as though they have no problems” (p.7). Our sensitive child-hero is carried away by the carefree merriment of the federal soldiers in public, and the fear they inspire on the defenseless villagers. Unfortunately, this innocent dream is no sooner conceived than aborted when his “heroes” rape his mother before his eyes. The feeling of insecurity in life is heightened when peace keepers turn predators. Where else can one turn to? Set in the civil war days, this story is also very relevant in our so- called peacetime where our soldiers and the police mount check-points at every kilometer of our roads to extort bribes from motorists, armed robbers on the highway, busy collecting ransoms from their victims. If one finds “Peace Keepers” haunting and disturbing, wait until you read the title story “Impotent Heavens” and you will weep. To the puritan reader, after reading this blood-chilling story, he is bound to do either of two things – fling the book away or burn it ritualistically as a priest was reported to have burnt Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. But that will not help matter for such a hypocritical reader who detests the bitter truth of the heart of man with passion, for what Sule has so well succeeded in doing in this great story is turn on the torchlight of truth, the unswerving truth, on the heart of darkness that is man and bid us see our real selves; the dark, lady-Macbeth heart of man that is inherently evil. And the story begins…. Once upon a time, there lived two good neighbors of different religious faiths in the commercial city of Kano. Their cordiality was also extended to their children, Razak and Samuel alias Hardy, who were very close classmates. Hardy, as narrated by Razak in the first person narrative, was a precocious orphan on the paternal side, a visionary cripple whose life’s dream was to put an end to violence by eliminating the monster called weaponry which, in his words, “is an anti-human technology monster that swallows human beings now and then” (p.12). As an Arts student, he still topped his class in maths after all, “maths is a bunch of artistry” (p.16). These sterling qualities endeared him to Razak who came to idolize him so much. Then something happened that was to test the depths of their parents’ good neighborliness. Hardy’s widowed professor mother was away when that mad killing in the unholy name of religion started in Kano. Alone at home, a confused Hardy lacked what to do. Should he run outside for refuge? No, not with those crutches that he propped his deformed body on. The timely rescue of his friend Razak who invited Hardy over to their house, saved the situation. But for the meantime. Unfortunately, the duo had reckoned without Razak’s fanatical father Alhaji Bako, who came home raving on how the Christians killed his Muslim brothers and sisters, and destroyed the central mosque, only to discover in his own house his Christian neighbor’s crippled child! What a great dilemma indeed between the boy’s life and the Islamic injunction to kill “kafiri” during war and the concomitant rewards in paradise! Alhaji Bako had no difficulty in choosing the latter option because “in my religion, I don’t deal with things that are human; but things that are of Allah” (p.27). To buttress his argument, he asserted that “It is not possible for me to hide a Kafiri in my house. By Allah, it means I’m a Kafiri” (p. 25). In spite of his wife, Hajiya Binta’s tears of womanhood and pleas, he reiterated “No, we can’t allow him live when ours are dead!” (p.25). With an air of finality, he made straight away for Razak’s room and mercilessly butchered Hardy, his son’s bosom friend, to death, earning for himself like Okonkwo, his son’s mortal hatred. The beauty of this story lies not only in the beautiful plot and the highly poetic language but more predominantly in the skillful handling of the diverse narrative techniques, switching swiftly from the first person to the omniscient technique with equal dexterity. More so, the treatment of his characters is comparable to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Just like Shakespeare’s King Hamlet and Ophelia are masterfully treated with some touch of sympathy, Sule’s characters invoke in the readers some heart-felt sympathies; one feels that despite the cruelty of Alhaji Bako, he is a pitiable victim of his religion, a prey caught in the spiderweb of fanaticism. As the religious crises in both Kaduna and Jos show, Alhaji Bako is we: man at his most cruel. And we cannot vindicate ourselves. Never! Other stories of interest include “My Fasting Period”, which dwells on religious hypocrisy, the timeless theme of appearance versus reality and the faultless “Doctor Apu”, an excellent story centered on man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. The second part comprises six stories, which act as a comic relief from the gothic horror of the first part. It shows us the humorous side of the writer, who can also spin a hilarious tale, especially as evident in his most successful satire, “At a Poetry Reading.” Thematically, Sule is primarily concerned about the timeless, never-changing nature of man: his bestiality, hypocrisy, fear, pride, vaulting ambition, love etc. He is, first and foremost, a humanist. In most of the stories in his collection, he unsparingly indicts his society on the kind of adults it is producing when its children are daily traumatized. As a child’s rights activist, he makes the plight of children his focal point and draws our attention to it. Worried over all these upheavals in his society, his pessimism drifts towards atheism. In other words, Sule as a writer doubts at all if there is a Supreme Being, a God who looks on unconcernedly at the evil wrought in our Adam-and-Eve earth without any divine intervention. To quote him, “even heavens, impotent, stared at the hideous dramas of a purposeful religionist” (p.30). In almost all the stories in the first part, the writer seems to be yearning for the seemingly elusive answer to the timeless question: “Is there a God in heaven?” If the answer is in the affirmative, why are all these things happening to our world, to us, unintervened? Are we cursed? This atheistic question of the pessimist resounds pointedly to us Nigerians. Given our uncountable number of churches and mosques, we are still the most corrupt country in the whole world! Ours is a land of Sodom and Gomorrah where it makes no difference whether the military are in power or democracy except in the nomenclature. Indeed, we have every cause to bemoan our tragedy because our heavens are impotent otherwise things would not have been going this way. Ah, woe is we! However, what obviously robs some of these stories the hard-boiled realism one notices in Sule is the forced didacticism, the traditional triumph-of-good-over-evil ending that is the graveyard of our literature and films today. For a writer with so much guts like Iyayi, the ending of “Impotent Heavens” is not only improbable but also highly objectionable. How many Alhaji Bakos does nemesis always catch up with today? What price did Okonkwo have to pay for matcheting Ikemefuna who called him father? Of course, he was estranged from his son’s love like Alhaji Bako but was never visited with any malady by Achebe. Another question begging for an answer is why did a tough writer like Sule have to end his great story in so patronizing a way? Was he afraid it could turn out to be another Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and a “fatwa” declared on his head by the Muslims? If that is the case, then he has marred his would-have-been very, very great story because even for the average Muslim reader, the Qur’an is misinterpreted by Mallam Aminu in a bid to pacify the readers. The same thing applies to stories like “Village Mystery” and “From Purgatory” in this collection. A lesson must be learnt from this. When a writer seeks obsequiously to please his savage society, the insensitive establishment like ours, that is the beginning of his ruination. The writer owes his society the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even if it may cost him his dear life. In the past, the appellation of the “poet” was the generic term for a creative writer. And the maxim is “The poet never lies.” And writing is a sacred duty, a religious duty the writer ipso facto owes his society. The true writer, in a word, must be as steadfast as Ezeulu and as uncompromising as Socrates. If he is forced to drink hemlock out of the ignorance of his generation today, he will certainly be celebrated as a martyr tomorrow and for the generations to come. Be that as it may, Sule is an important arrival on the literary landscape from the North who deserves to be read not because of the part of the country he hails from but because he has so many crucial things to say and knows so well how to say them without mincing words. As we welcome Sule to the sacred clan of men of letters with this collection, let us stay put, seat-belt fastened as we expect more and more from his arsenal.