A Celebration Of Zaynab Alkali's The Descendants
By
Isaac Attah Ogezi
The literary enclave is indeed full of cynics who parade themselves as critics. When an unknown writer scores a literary success, these avowed cynics would quickly dismiss it with a snobbish wave of the hand as a stroke of luck. Let us see how he or she will repeat this performance. When Chinua Achebe stormed the whole world with his Things Fall Apart in 1958, the cynic-critics called it a flash in the pan. Luckily enough, Achebe made them swallow their phlegm a few years later with his groundbreaking Arrow of God. Zaynab Alkali is not an exception. In 1984 when her first novel The Stillborn came out, while the world was still gripped with euphoria, these wet-blanket critics capitalized on trivial issue such as the length of the novel. It is too slim, yet it is lengthier than Mariama Ba's NOMA Award-winning So Long A Letter! The dust of the celebration was yet to settle down when these literary philistines were busy bidding their time like kingfishers, poised to pounce on her next work.
In 1986, Alkali baited her detractors with The Virtuous Woman. One could still hear the snarling sound and fury of these critics as they snatched at it with the ferocity of mad dogs. They compared and contrasted it with her first work and passed their final judgment why the new work is a dismal failure. To this parochial clan of critics, criticism begins and ends with the comparison of a writer's latest work with his widely accepted magnum opus. The only mistake these critics made was that they failed to identify Alkali's target audience when she set down to write The Virtuous Woman. It is very obvious that she had young readers in mind and not adults, the same way Achebe fondly called his Chike and the River as 'a novel for the boys'. The Virtuous Woman is certainly a novel for the girls and should not be subjected to the same criteria of The Stillborn. In fact, it would not be wrong not to class it as her second novel.
In her third book Cobwebs and Other Stories (1997), Alkali proved herself as a craftswoman of the more difficult art of short storytelling. However, what irked her critics most was not the quality of the stories in this collection but the title story 'Cobwebs'. No, unlike Li, her major character Mama in this long short story is a radical feminist. This of course, did not go down well with her egoistic male readers in the North. They cursed and raged fire and brimstone in their ignorance, for 'Cobwebs' is a story that many readers misconstrue the writer's attitude to her major character Mama. As a benign feminist, Alkali lampoons her fellow women like Mama who wreck homes in the name of radical feminism as championed by Doris Lessing, Buchi Emecheta and Flora Nwapa. She portrays Mama as an anti-social, despicable woman who abuses the opportunity offered her to go for further education. Instead of using this knowledge to develop her home, she is estranged from her husband, children and society like a fish out of water, panting for air on the hot beach sand. The title is not only symbolic of the obnoxious trappings in our traditions and religion that hinder the woman from attaining her full potentials in life, but also the pitiable mind of a social pervert like Mama. Alkali seems to be telling us that women like that are confused beings and are destructive elements in our midst. Little wonder then, that Mama is the most inarticulate female character ever created by Alkali! In a word,'Cobwebs' is a sharp criticism of the evil called radical feminism in our society and should be applauded as a sisterly admonition from a home-builder of a writer to her wayward sisters and not vilified. Other stories include 'House of Dust' (perhaps the best in the collection), 'Saltless Ash', 'Footloose', etc.
Alkali followed this up with her latest novel The Descendants (2005), unarguably her most ambitious work till date and a well-deserved successor to The Stillborn. In this work, Alkali places herself the more difficult task of handling several characters spanning many generations with the spellbinding power of a literary matriarch. She tells the epic story of the descendants of the famous Lawani Duna and Magira Milli, the greatest female creation of Alkali. After losing her husband and four sons to Azreel, the Angel of Death, she decides it is enough and leaves the land of her ancestors to settle at Ramta with her only surviving son and grandchildren. A magnificent woman, Magira Milli is a he-woman who bestrides the Ramta dynasty with the formidability of a woman-warrior, comparable to Achebe's Ezeulu. She rules the family of her son Aji and her grandchildren with iron hand. Though without any Western education, she is a visionary like her creator Alkali who believes fervently in the education of the girl-child, for '…without a sound Western education, a woman has very little chance to make a success of her life' (p. 189) Thus, unlike other old women of her generation, she opposes early child-marriages and openly encourages the dissolution of her granddaughter Peni's marriage to the village butcher. She is indeed a woman ahead of her time. As it would come to pass, her dream finds fulfillment in her granddaughter Seytu who was twice married and divorced ('was married at 13, hurt and abandoned by an old village head at 15') yet proceeds to qualify as a Consultant Paediatrician. At the end of the novel, Magira Milli dies a fulfilled woman, an unforgettable heroine in recent Nigerian fiction.
Like all feminists, Alkali's theme in this novel cannot be said to be original. But is there anything like original theme in modern literature? We must hasten to answer this question in the negative. For what distinguishes a work of art from another is not necessarily the theme but the treatment, the approach to the theme. The ability to strike a correlation between theme and plot or content and form is the hallmark of a great writer. Thence lies the greatness of Alkali's latest work. As a social crusader, Alkali is preoccupied with the plight of women in our male-dominated society and feels that the only way forward is through the medium of Western education as only this way guarantees a woman's economic independence and the awareness of her fundamental human rights. She effectively tells us this by contrasting Seytu and Peni. While the former is self-sufficient owing to her education, the latter is illiterate and primitive who only thinks of consulting soothsayers with a view to gaining undue favours from the former! As a great writer, Alkali does not flaunt her themes at the readers like Abubakar Gimba and Chukwuemeka Ike but challenges her reader to read between the lines and puzzle them out for himself. This brings us to another important quality of Alkali as a writer, a quality which works so well in her short stories as in this novel. Alkali deserves to be commended for her cryptic manner of narration which is more suspenseful than the mindless sensationalism of lesser writers with penchant for melodramatic surprises. For example, the reader is aware of Hassan's unexpressed love for the child-mother Seytu in the first part of the novel. Nothing is heard about this budding love affair even when the former later becomes a Consultant Paediatrician. On page 107, the reader is told of the clandestine hospitalization of a colonel and a General at the State Specialist Hospital Garpella. A friend of the colonel accosts Seytu during a symposium and a rendezvous is arranged. We learn that the stranger in spite of his scar is a ghost from Seytu's past. Who is he? We are not told.However, in a friendly chat with her bosom friend Glo Medina, the name of Hassan resurfaces. Where is he? Alkali keeps quiet. Then on page 224, we are told of Seytu's new husband who is a colonel. Could it be the injured colonel? We hold our breath. On page 228, Alkali tells us cryptically in a sentence: 'Colonel Hassan Sulay, his wife Dr. Seytu Ilia'. We are later told that the other colonel hospitalized is Colonel Samba Batancha on page 229 who loses his sight in an attempted coup. Similarly, the reader must have found Professor Zaki, Seytu's philanthropist boss an enigma when he always steals into his room to look at the picture of his family. On page 226, we are told that he loses his family in a plane crash and adopts a son Adam Zaki whom he trains to be the Chief Community Officer with the hospital.
The beautiful front-cover of the book shows a strong-willed, middle-aged woman, attired in Islamic traditional mode of dressing (our Magira Milli) in a goddess-like posture and a young woman in a doctor's outfit (Seytu), with a stethoscope draped over her neck. Underneath are locally-thatched mud-houses in an African village. A quick, curious turn of the back-cover rewards the quixotic eyes with a smiling Alkali holding her conference bag. Then the unavoidable question: why would a big name like Alkali choose to publish her much-awaited book with unknown publishers like Zaria-based Tamaza and not her mega-publishers Longman or Malthouse? Well, she made the fortune of a midget publishing house, though not without a heavy price. A few typographical errors such as'all these misery' (p.37), '…was reining abuses on him' (p.28), 'just one more number greater that his' (p.115), 'One of the hospital's senior medical officer' (p.132), 'Its sharpness lent him a kind of seriousness that belie his age' (p.141), 'to follow his instructions to the latter' (p.163), etc, sicken the eyes. One wonders that if an ungrateful publishing house could do this to a famous writer like Alkali, where lies the fate of an obscure writer?
Apart from these few errors and the rather over-crowdedness of her characters, The Descendants is a well-made novel that takes one back to the golden age of Nigerian literature (the bygone Soyinka-Achebe age of excellence). In a bid to evade the likely question of comparison-critics, The Stillborn and The Descendants are both good works of art with their 'peculiar attractiveness'. However, to plagiarize Achebe a little, The Descendants is the only novel of Alkali which I am most likely to be caught sitting down to read again!
Monday, April 7, 2008
Friday, February 29, 2008
The Pale Light of Reality in Yerima's Hard Ground
The Pale Light of Reality in Yerima’s Hard Ground
By
Isaac Attah Ogezi
No country baffles the international community to a state of inertia like the contraption called Nigeria . As the most populous black nation in the world, she is endowed with both natural and human resources yet toddles behind other nations of the world like the man-child in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are not yet Born. She is in the forefront of Third World countries caught in the quagmire of cyclic movement reminiscent of the revolution of the earth around its orbit. There seem to be no marked changes or growth in the polity or the economy except the usual bumper harvest of corruption, ethnic militias, political assassinations, plane crashes and several indices of underdevelopment. Indeed, the current happenings in our body-politic is like the replay of the events that took place during the First Republic , as superbly captured in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People. The question now is: what is the role of the writer in this season of anomie? Is he a self-seeking entertainer aloof to the socio-political climate of his time? Can he still regurgitate half-digested theories such as art for art’s sake in the face of an impending doom that threatens his very existence? Or is his art so sacred and pure that he must remain an apolitical animal until the end of his life?
During the pre-colonial African society, the role of the griots, which the modern-day writer occupies, was that of a prophet, a priest, a seer and a marabout. The society looked up to him for direction. If there is a consensus that literature is the soul of every nation, then what is the role of a writer if not a man of action, the voice of the voiceless? Achebe and Ngugi are two classic examples of why the writers must not shy away from politics of his times. A few months after the publication of his A Man of the People in 1966, the military struck. The ending of the novel was so prophetic that some politicians suspected that Achebe must have had a hand in the coup that overthrew the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa government. In an interview in 1970, Achebe had this to say as regards the role of the contemporary writer:
“Right now my interest is in politics or rather my interest in the novel is
politics. A Man of the People wasn’t a flash in the pan. This is the begin-
ning of a phase for me in which I intend to take a hard look at what we
in Africa are making of independence – but using Nigeria which I know
best … It is clear to me that an African creative writer who tries to avoid
the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up
being completely irrelevant – like that absurd man in the proverb who
leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames … What
is the place of the writer in this movement? I suggest that his place is
right in the thick of it – if possible, at the head of it”.
When asked further if he considered himself a protest writer, Achebe retorted thus: “Well, according to my own opinion of protest, I am a protest writer. Restraint – well, that’s my style, you see”. After A Man of the People, Achebe followed it up with an equally politically charged, Booker Award-shortlisted Anthills of the Savannah in 1986. Similarly, before the environmentalist-cum-writer, Ken Saro Wiwa was hanged by the military junta in 1995, he delivered what could well pass for the raison de’tre of his mission as a writer. He said:
“Literature in a critical situation such as Nigeria ’s cannot be divorced from
politics. Indeed, literature must serve society by steeping itself in politics, by
intervention, and writers must not merely write to amuse or to take a bemused,
critical look at society. They must play an interventionist role … The writer
must be l’homme engage: the intellectual man of action”.
It must be conceded from the outset that literature cannot shoot a gun nor depose a corrupt, totalitarian government like ours, yet there is no gainsaying the fact that it is the most potent weapon above all other forms of art. When Sharia was introduced in some parts of the North in 1999, there was a lot of vitriolic attacks from the press all to no avail. The press cannot take the place of literature as it obviously lacks the necessary wherewithal of capturing human experience that is inherent in the latter. In his book, The Revolution of Hope (New York: Harper Row, 1969), Erich Fromm posited and rightly too that:
“Poetry, music and other forms of art are by far the best-suited media for
describing human experience because they are precise and avoid the
abstraction and vagueness of worn-out coins which are taken for
adequate representations of human experience”.
Since the discovery of oil in the Niger Delta in the mid-seventies, and the subsequent environmental degradation in the name of oil-prospecting and exploitation, the Niger Delta is a hotbed of crises. As it seethes in the endless cauldron of violence, the youths are restive, hostages are taken, the press is a toothless bull-dog and not to mention the politicians whose ceaseless holding talks aggravate rather than ameliorate the situation. It is a question that is very relevant to our politics today and may, to a large extent, determine our existence as a corporate entity in post-2007 Nigeria . The poser is: beyond the political overtones that characterize the Niger Delta question, what is the human face behind it? It is in this regard that we have to turn to literature for a solution, for it is the only avenue where the human emotion is well captured. The theatre is the house of emotions and as Shakespeare puts it into the mouth of his character, Hamlet, “The play’s the thing /Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”. Ahmed Yerima’s Hard Ground is a timely play that addresses the Niger Delta question. It takes us into the center-stage of the activities of militant youth movement – the intrigues, betrayals, espionage and counter-espionage, violence and blackmail inherent in all imperfect human organizations. The play opens on a family of Baba. The atmosphere is tense as the whole family gathers around 18-year-old Nimi to tell them what happened at the camp. Nimi is a member of a guerrilla youth movement like Niger Peoples’ Volunteer Force (NDPVF), Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and the Martyrs Brigade and a host of many others who believe that their people are oppressed in the Nigerian federation and “the best way for Nigeria is a federation of ethnic nationalities” (p. 36). Their grievances against the Nigerian State are genuine even though the means of going about their rights is a subject of controversies of our times. The Niger Delta is a sorry sight of environmental pollution as a result of oil exploitation. Farming and fishing activities have been crippled by oil spillage, drinking water polluted and a dearth of infrastructures. Unemployment, poverty, illiteracy and hardship are the lot of the people of the Niger Delta despite the fact that their oil is the mainstay of Nigeria ’s economy. The reader or audience learns from Nimi’s story of the gruesome activities of the militant youth movements in the Niger Delta. They vandalize oil pipes, terrorize innocent citizens, kill, maim, and kidnap in the most dastardly manner to press home their demands. On pages 45 and 46, Nimi describes how the militant youths revel in killing their victims:
“The boys caught him, and hacked him to death, removing his head from
behind as he sped. In the wildness, my boys ran into the shrine, pulled
out the second man … A stick was pushed through his anus until it came
out in his bowels. We then dragged them back into the shrine, and burnt
them”.
These killings are not meant for their perceived enemies alone, no, but also for themselves when misunderstandings ensue among them. Yerima’s thematic preoccupation is the traumatic effect this could have on the youths in the Niger Delta. What kind of youths is the Niger Delta producing when their childhood is already raped like child-soldiers? Nimi is eighteen years old without any academic achievement to show for it but a school dropout, jobless, and in his stark ignorance, boastful of having put a woman in the family way! Indeed, Yerima evokes our pathos for sick youths like Nimi who are misguided in their bid to change the world. The playwright goes beyond the ephemeral Niger Delta question to universalize his play by dwelling on the timeless theme of appearance versus reality as in all Shakespeare’s plays. Man, according to him, is a despicable, hypocritical creature that cannot be trusted. In a world of so much deception and fakery, the light of reality quivers in the face of appearances. Kinsley’s answer to Nimi’s question as to whether he is a priest reinforces this theme. “Am I? Sometimes the light you see flickers, but you never pay enough care to see”. (p. 52) In a world where everybody is a fake, a phantom, a fraud, to whom must one trust much less innocent children like Nimi? It is in this dilemma that Nimi makes a universal statement when he cries:
“Where is God? Why is nobody listening? Why? And worse still, you whom
we thought was our vehicle of salvation, the symbol of our belief in God …
is supremely … fake. Why? [Pause] Nothing is real any more. Nothing.
Father … I don’t even know what to call you now. I have changed my mind.
I am going back to the jungle, where we write the laws and live them, each
day as we feel”. (p. 53)
Alas, it is really a sad, cruel world. We are all surrounded by fakes like Nimi and don’t know whom to trust. His pregnant love, Pikibo, is a police spy in the camp, his mother, Mama, worships God as a Christian in public but turns a traditionalist behind closed doors (p. 57), his father, Baba, is a coward to everybody yet turns out surprisingly to be the Don, the most dreaded man who spearheads the guerilla movement (pages 59 and 60) Like Achebe’s Odili in A Man of the People, Yerima shows us that even Nimi is not a saint but also a fake like all the characters in the play. He is delighted when he is informed that the “Vulture”, the traitor in the camp is eventually found. “Good. Now our ancestors have delivered us” (p. 50). But his hypocrisy or double standards come to the fore when he denies most vehemently that the “Vulture” cannot be his love, Pikibo! He cries her innocence thus:
“Noo! Not Pikibo! No! Not my son! He did not offend a soul! Not my
woman. The Don should have spared their lives for my sake. I must
find the Don and kill him too!” (p. 50)
The success of the play lies not only on the topicality of the raging Niger-Delta question, but on the ability of the playwright to turn what would have been a propaganda play into a good work of art that transcends geographical location. However, the play falls short of being rated a great play due to some lapses in the dramaturgy employed by the playwright such as little scenic and character descriptions, inadequate action or movement (too static for a stage play and more suitable as a radio play), unrealistic dénouement and feeble dramatic dialogue. Yerima, like his elder literary statesman, Femi Osofisan, has a penchant for unrealistic surprises in most of his plays. At times one wonders whether this failing would not have stood him in a better stead if he had tried his hand in popular fiction such as the James Hadley Chase series or the Nick Carters. The surprise naively sprung on the reader at the end of the play by the playwright when he unravels Baba as the dreaded Don is too amateurish that even a pupil in a kindergarten will have to swallow with tons of salt! The same thing can be said of his Anton Chekhov-
influenced play, The Three Sisters, where the maid turns out to be one of the sisters, albeit of a different mother! Most importantly, the playwright’s rather obsequious efforts to make all his characters speak in Standard English if anything proved abortive as all the characters speak in the playwright’s tone of voice without any unique speech patterns for each character. Is it not improbable that in real life everybody will use the exclamation “Huum!?” In Yerima’s play, almost all the characters say “Huum!”, to wit: Mama (pages 10, 11, 14), Nimi (pages 9, 29, 31, 38, 46, 47, 48), Tingolongo (page 48), Kingsley (page 53), Baba (pages 9, 43). Also, character Kingsley who parades himself as a Reverend Father is not properly endowed with priestly language by the playwright as compared to characters like Brother Jero and Jeru in Soyinka’s The Jero Plays and Opera Wonsoyi respectively nor like the Manns in Rotimi’s Kurunmi. Unfortunately, the work is not error-free. There are a few typographical and technical grammatical errors such as: “ I should have been allowed to be shot and die for “ (p. 9), “there are younger boys and girls than me” (p. 12), “Papa clears his throat” (p. 14) instead of “Baba”, “ and nothings was “ (p. 22), and “MAMA countenance” (p. 39).
In conclusion, Ahmed Yerima’s Hard Ground is a great contribution to the repertoire of plays on the Niger Delta question and marks the coming of age of a playwright
By
Isaac Attah Ogezi
No country baffles the international community to a state of inertia like the contraption called Nigeria . As the most populous black nation in the world, she is endowed with both natural and human resources yet toddles behind other nations of the world like the man-child in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are not yet Born. She is in the forefront of Third World countries caught in the quagmire of cyclic movement reminiscent of the revolution of the earth around its orbit. There seem to be no marked changes or growth in the polity or the economy except the usual bumper harvest of corruption, ethnic militias, political assassinations, plane crashes and several indices of underdevelopment. Indeed, the current happenings in our body-politic is like the replay of the events that took place during the First Republic , as superbly captured in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People. The question now is: what is the role of the writer in this season of anomie? Is he a self-seeking entertainer aloof to the socio-political climate of his time? Can he still regurgitate half-digested theories such as art for art’s sake in the face of an impending doom that threatens his very existence? Or is his art so sacred and pure that he must remain an apolitical animal until the end of his life?
During the pre-colonial African society, the role of the griots, which the modern-day writer occupies, was that of a prophet, a priest, a seer and a marabout. The society looked up to him for direction. If there is a consensus that literature is the soul of every nation, then what is the role of a writer if not a man of action, the voice of the voiceless? Achebe and Ngugi are two classic examples of why the writers must not shy away from politics of his times. A few months after the publication of his A Man of the People in 1966, the military struck. The ending of the novel was so prophetic that some politicians suspected that Achebe must have had a hand in the coup that overthrew the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa government. In an interview in 1970, Achebe had this to say as regards the role of the contemporary writer:
“Right now my interest is in politics or rather my interest in the novel is
politics. A Man of the People wasn’t a flash in the pan. This is the begin-
ning of a phase for me in which I intend to take a hard look at what we
in Africa are making of independence – but using Nigeria which I know
best … It is clear to me that an African creative writer who tries to avoid
the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up
being completely irrelevant – like that absurd man in the proverb who
leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames … What
is the place of the writer in this movement? I suggest that his place is
right in the thick of it – if possible, at the head of it”.
When asked further if he considered himself a protest writer, Achebe retorted thus: “Well, according to my own opinion of protest, I am a protest writer. Restraint – well, that’s my style, you see”. After A Man of the People, Achebe followed it up with an equally politically charged, Booker Award-shortlisted Anthills of the Savannah in 1986. Similarly, before the environmentalist-cum-writer, Ken Saro Wiwa was hanged by the military junta in 1995, he delivered what could well pass for the raison de’tre of his mission as a writer. He said:
“Literature in a critical situation such as Nigeria ’s cannot be divorced from
politics. Indeed, literature must serve society by steeping itself in politics, by
intervention, and writers must not merely write to amuse or to take a bemused,
critical look at society. They must play an interventionist role … The writer
must be l’homme engage: the intellectual man of action”.
It must be conceded from the outset that literature cannot shoot a gun nor depose a corrupt, totalitarian government like ours, yet there is no gainsaying the fact that it is the most potent weapon above all other forms of art. When Sharia was introduced in some parts of the North in 1999, there was a lot of vitriolic attacks from the press all to no avail. The press cannot take the place of literature as it obviously lacks the necessary wherewithal of capturing human experience that is inherent in the latter. In his book, The Revolution of Hope (New York: Harper Row, 1969), Erich Fromm posited and rightly too that:
“Poetry, music and other forms of art are by far the best-suited media for
describing human experience because they are precise and avoid the
abstraction and vagueness of worn-out coins which are taken for
adequate representations of human experience”.
Since the discovery of oil in the Niger Delta in the mid-seventies, and the subsequent environmental degradation in the name of oil-prospecting and exploitation, the Niger Delta is a hotbed of crises. As it seethes in the endless cauldron of violence, the youths are restive, hostages are taken, the press is a toothless bull-dog and not to mention the politicians whose ceaseless holding talks aggravate rather than ameliorate the situation. It is a question that is very relevant to our politics today and may, to a large extent, determine our existence as a corporate entity in post-2007 Nigeria . The poser is: beyond the political overtones that characterize the Niger Delta question, what is the human face behind it? It is in this regard that we have to turn to literature for a solution, for it is the only avenue where the human emotion is well captured. The theatre is the house of emotions and as Shakespeare puts it into the mouth of his character, Hamlet, “The play’s the thing /Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”. Ahmed Yerima’s Hard Ground is a timely play that addresses the Niger Delta question. It takes us into the center-stage of the activities of militant youth movement – the intrigues, betrayals, espionage and counter-espionage, violence and blackmail inherent in all imperfect human organizations. The play opens on a family of Baba. The atmosphere is tense as the whole family gathers around 18-year-old Nimi to tell them what happened at the camp. Nimi is a member of a guerrilla youth movement like Niger Peoples’ Volunteer Force (NDPVF), Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and the Martyrs Brigade and a host of many others who believe that their people are oppressed in the Nigerian federation and “the best way for Nigeria is a federation of ethnic nationalities” (p. 36). Their grievances against the Nigerian State are genuine even though the means of going about their rights is a subject of controversies of our times. The Niger Delta is a sorry sight of environmental pollution as a result of oil exploitation. Farming and fishing activities have been crippled by oil spillage, drinking water polluted and a dearth of infrastructures. Unemployment, poverty, illiteracy and hardship are the lot of the people of the Niger Delta despite the fact that their oil is the mainstay of Nigeria ’s economy. The reader or audience learns from Nimi’s story of the gruesome activities of the militant youth movements in the Niger Delta. They vandalize oil pipes, terrorize innocent citizens, kill, maim, and kidnap in the most dastardly manner to press home their demands. On pages 45 and 46, Nimi describes how the militant youths revel in killing their victims:
“The boys caught him, and hacked him to death, removing his head from
behind as he sped. In the wildness, my boys ran into the shrine, pulled
out the second man … A stick was pushed through his anus until it came
out in his bowels. We then dragged them back into the shrine, and burnt
them”.
These killings are not meant for their perceived enemies alone, no, but also for themselves when misunderstandings ensue among them. Yerima’s thematic preoccupation is the traumatic effect this could have on the youths in the Niger Delta. What kind of youths is the Niger Delta producing when their childhood is already raped like child-soldiers? Nimi is eighteen years old without any academic achievement to show for it but a school dropout, jobless, and in his stark ignorance, boastful of having put a woman in the family way! Indeed, Yerima evokes our pathos for sick youths like Nimi who are misguided in their bid to change the world. The playwright goes beyond the ephemeral Niger Delta question to universalize his play by dwelling on the timeless theme of appearance versus reality as in all Shakespeare’s plays. Man, according to him, is a despicable, hypocritical creature that cannot be trusted. In a world of so much deception and fakery, the light of reality quivers in the face of appearances. Kinsley’s answer to Nimi’s question as to whether he is a priest reinforces this theme. “Am I? Sometimes the light you see flickers, but you never pay enough care to see”. (p. 52) In a world where everybody is a fake, a phantom, a fraud, to whom must one trust much less innocent children like Nimi? It is in this dilemma that Nimi makes a universal statement when he cries:
“Where is God? Why is nobody listening? Why? And worse still, you whom
we thought was our vehicle of salvation, the symbol of our belief in God …
is supremely … fake. Why? [Pause] Nothing is real any more. Nothing.
Father … I don’t even know what to call you now. I have changed my mind.
I am going back to the jungle, where we write the laws and live them, each
day as we feel”. (p. 53)
Alas, it is really a sad, cruel world. We are all surrounded by fakes like Nimi and don’t know whom to trust. His pregnant love, Pikibo, is a police spy in the camp, his mother, Mama, worships God as a Christian in public but turns a traditionalist behind closed doors (p. 57), his father, Baba, is a coward to everybody yet turns out surprisingly to be the Don, the most dreaded man who spearheads the guerilla movement (pages 59 and 60) Like Achebe’s Odili in A Man of the People, Yerima shows us that even Nimi is not a saint but also a fake like all the characters in the play. He is delighted when he is informed that the “Vulture”, the traitor in the camp is eventually found. “Good. Now our ancestors have delivered us” (p. 50). But his hypocrisy or double standards come to the fore when he denies most vehemently that the “Vulture” cannot be his love, Pikibo! He cries her innocence thus:
“Noo! Not Pikibo! No! Not my son! He did not offend a soul! Not my
woman. The Don should have spared their lives for my sake. I must
find the Don and kill him too!” (p. 50)
The success of the play lies not only on the topicality of the raging Niger-Delta question, but on the ability of the playwright to turn what would have been a propaganda play into a good work of art that transcends geographical location. However, the play falls short of being rated a great play due to some lapses in the dramaturgy employed by the playwright such as little scenic and character descriptions, inadequate action or movement (too static for a stage play and more suitable as a radio play), unrealistic dénouement and feeble dramatic dialogue. Yerima, like his elder literary statesman, Femi Osofisan, has a penchant for unrealistic surprises in most of his plays. At times one wonders whether this failing would not have stood him in a better stead if he had tried his hand in popular fiction such as the James Hadley Chase series or the Nick Carters. The surprise naively sprung on the reader at the end of the play by the playwright when he unravels Baba as the dreaded Don is too amateurish that even a pupil in a kindergarten will have to swallow with tons of salt! The same thing can be said of his Anton Chekhov-
influenced play, The Three Sisters, where the maid turns out to be one of the sisters, albeit of a different mother! Most importantly, the playwright’s rather obsequious efforts to make all his characters speak in Standard English if anything proved abortive as all the characters speak in the playwright’s tone of voice without any unique speech patterns for each character. Is it not improbable that in real life everybody will use the exclamation “Huum!?” In Yerima’s play, almost all the characters say “Huum!”, to wit: Mama (pages 10, 11, 14), Nimi (pages 9, 29, 31, 38, 46, 47, 48), Tingolongo (page 48), Kingsley (page 53), Baba (pages 9, 43). Also, character Kingsley who parades himself as a Reverend Father is not properly endowed with priestly language by the playwright as compared to characters like Brother Jero and Jeru in Soyinka’s The Jero Plays and Opera Wonsoyi respectively nor like the Manns in Rotimi’s Kurunmi. Unfortunately, the work is not error-free. There are a few typographical and technical grammatical errors such as: “ I should have been allowed to be shot and die for “ (p. 9), “there are younger boys and girls than me” (p. 12), “Papa clears his throat” (p. 14) instead of “Baba”, “ and nothings was “ (p. 22), and “MAMA countenance” (p. 39).
In conclusion, Ahmed Yerima’s Hard Ground is a great contribution to the repertoire of plays on the Niger Delta question and marks the coming of age of a playwright
Friday, January 11, 2008
A Word of Welcome
2008: ON EAGLES' WINGS
Happy New Year! At long last, we've been able to see the year 2008. A year that holds a lot of promises for earth's inhabitants.
Welcome
Happy New Year! At long last, we've been able to see the year 2008. A year that holds a lot of promises for earth's inhabitants.
Welcome
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