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FRONTPAGE VIEWPOINT MAGAZINE BY SECTION Special Report Business Nigeria COVER POLITICS BUSINESS & ECONOMICS BACK OF THE BOOK REGULARS NEIL FORD LETTERS PUBLISHERS NOTE AROUND AFRICA POLITALK WILMOT ADVERTISING Email us for advertising information COMPANY PROFILE MISSION TEAM EDITORIAL BOARD DIRECTORS |
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Click here for the NewsAfrica Special Focus Article The real deal from Nigeria THEY ARE TWO highly accomplished Nigerian writers who speak with very different voices. Both have both been received with critical acclaim. Uwem Akpan’s short story collection, Say You’re One of Them, is a recent addition to Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club while former Orange Prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest offering, The Thing Around Your Neck, has confirmed her standing as a potential successor to African literary giant Chinua Achebe. When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, in 2003, she was immediately hailed as a major talent. The story of a young girl’s struggle to come of age in the shadow of her fanatically religious father, it won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the US for black writing a few months after publication, and the Best First Book award in the 2005 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, named after the Biafran flag during the Nigeria Civil War, was awarded one of Britain’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2007. Born in Abba, Anambra State in south eastern Nigeria in 1977, Adichie was educated in Nsukka, where her father was a university professor. At the age of 19, she went to the US to study communication at Eastern Connecticut State University, later gaining an MA in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University. In an interview with NewsAfrica in 2005, Adichie said her main inspiration came from internationally acclaimed author and fellow Anambrarian Chinua Achebe, with Arrow Of The Gods remaining her favourite book. ‘Achebe is more than an excellent writer, he is a man of integrity,’ she enthused. It would be wonderful if her work sold like his, she said at the time. But she added, ‘It is not my goal. I am in the early stages of my career and I am in it for the long haul. At the moment, I am just thinking about being a good writer.’ Published earlier this year, The Thing Around you Neck, is further confirmation that she is, enthralling her readers with 12 beautifully written and perceptive tales. Adichie writes about what she knows best, the corruption and violence of modern-day Nigeria and the dislocation of modern-day Nigerians who go abroad in search of wealth and education. All her protagionists hail from the still-traumatised Igbo heartland of south eastern Nigeria and most are women, victims of cheating husbands and incompetent security forces. The opening story, Cell One, is about the rebellious son of a professor, a bit of a golden boy, who is arrested for being a member of a university ‘cult’ – gang – who create an atmosphere of terror on the campus with their acts of violence. Picked up by the police, Nnamabia has his eyes opened to the brutal and corrupt prison system, clearly shocking him into adulthood. A Private Experience is a glimpse of a chance meeting. between a Muslim and a Christian woman during religious riots that spread across Northern Nigeria a few years ago. Separated from her sister, medical student Chika takes shelter for the night with a poor Muslim woman and their brief relationship affirms the power of humanity. Another tale tells of a wealthy wife who seemingly has it all until she discovers that her husband is keeping another woman in their Lagos home. The title story concerns a young woman who finally gets a longed-for American visa and goes to live with her uncle’s family in Maine. At first it seems just like home but then he makes a pass at her as “payment” in kind. Refusing his advances, she is kicked out and ends up working as a waitress in a small town, rendered invisible by her isolation. An affair with a customer. offers a brief glimpse of happiness – ‘The thing that nearly choked you before you fell asleep, started to loosen, to let go.’. But the power of what she has left behind is strong and in the end it is the girl herself who lets go. In two stories, Adichie even enters into Nigerian no-go areas of homosexuality, one of them concerning a man who reveals his relationship with a married man back home in Lagos. The Thing Around you Neck is not without its faults. In articulating so perfectly everyday lives of ordinary Nigerians, some of the human elements of the stories are lost. Say You’re One of Them, Uwem Akpan’s fictional debut, was immediately recognised for its quality when one story in the collection, My Parents’ Bedroom, was shortlisted for Caine Prize for African Literature in 2007 and published in the New Yorker. This year the book won both the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (Africa Region) and PEN/Beyond Margins Award. To top it all Akpan enjoyed mass exposure earlier this month when he was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey on a live simulcast from Oprah.com, CNN.com and Facebook. Not bad for a Jesuit priest from Akwa Ibom State in south east Nigeria. Now based at Christ the King Church, Ilasamaja-Lagos, Nigeria, Akpan became a fiction writer during his seminary day. Apart from the quality of writing, he has been marked out for his focus on an area mostly overlooked by African novelists, children. The five narratives, all set in a different country, are are both revelatory and affecting. We have a picture painted for us of these victims of circumstance which, for the most part is very one dimensional. These tales illustrate both the lack of control and child/adulthood that these children deal with day to day. The first story, An Ex-Mas Feast, is told from the point of view of 10-year old Jigana, living with his family in a Nairobi slum. His 12-year-old sister Maisha, is the main breadwinner, working as a prostitute, while the rest of the family work as beggars and pickpockets. When hunger strikes and there is no food, their mother gives him and his twin baby siblings glue to sniff. The family are torn between relying on income from Maisha’s prostitution and fearing the world that she is disappearing into. As she tries to fly the nest in order to go ‘full time’, the guilt this arouses in Jigana leads him to fragment his family even further. Fattening for Gabon tells the story of two siblings living with their agbero or ‘tout’ uncle on the Benin Nigeria border. Out of the blue arrives a new motorcycle and a newfound wealth. But where has this come from? Then their “foster parents’ arrive – ‘Mama and Papa from an NGO’ – with new names and passports to take them to over the water to Gabon to an apparent life of riches. It soon dawns on the older boy that they have in fact been sold into a sinister child trafficking ring. Can they make their escape? In Luxurious Hearses Jubril becomes Gabriel as he tries to escape the religious riots of Northern Nigeria by bus. Throughout the truly terrifying drive south, he must conceal all signs of his Muslim identity, including his the tell-tale stump of his arm, which has been amputated for theft. The last and best-realised story in the book, My Parents’ Bedroom, tells of the genocide in Rwanda, as related by a nine-year-old girl whose mother and father are made to pay for marrying across the ethnic divide. ‘I see dirty water dripping down the white wall beside me. It is coming from the ceiling. At first, it comes down in two thin lines. Then two more lines come down, in spurts, like little spiders gliding down on threads from a branch of the mango tree in our yard. I touch the liquid with the tip of my fingers. Blood.’ It is almost as though this horrific story can be more easily digested from the viewpoint of a child and one can take in the reality of the situation without shying away. Each protagonist takes us by the hand and leads us through situations we would otherwise avoid dealing with and although in places it can feel as though you are being addressed as a child, almost as though this were a children’s book, Say You’re One of Them is an eye opener to desperate situations children find themselves in. One hopes that this is just a taster of what Uwem Akpan may give us in years to come. |
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