Friday short fiction #36: Nigeria
Irene Becker Posing Children 2010
"Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do -- it can make us identify with situations and people far away. If it does that, it's a miracle."
- Chinua Achebe, The Altantic Online, 2 August 2000
“The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re-dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re-dreamed. Each reality can have it.”
- Ben Okri
For no readily apparent reason, this week I picked another country that, like Pakistan, a) I'd like to know better than I do, b) has a hard time shaking off negative stereotypes, and c) is clearly a significant creative force in world literature. Of the dozen or so Nigerian short stories I read this week, these six go from the traditional to the mainstream to the fantastic and science fictional.
Chinua Achebe, 'Dead Men's Path' (1953)
A new and ambitious headmaster of a Nigerian village school comes up against local folklore concerning the spirits of the dead. This is the kind of story which may be emblematic of what Nigerian fiction used to focus on relentlessly: the clash of local beliefs with the civilising influence of 'progress' and colonialism. The story reads with a rather dusty air of antiquity when compared with the liveliness of what's coming from Nigerian writers today.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 'A Private Experience' (THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK, 2009)
Two Nigerian women, one a rich Christian and one a poor Muslim, take shelter in an abandoned shop to escape rioting in Kano. This is a mature and understated story, one that also encapsulates the huge gulf between cultures that precariously co-exist within Nigeria's borders.
Helon Habila, 'The Second Death of Martin Lango' (THE GUARDIAN, 7 SEPTEMBER 2011)
The latest in The Guardian's series of short fiction connected with the tenth anniversary of 9/11. A Nigerian immigrant in Washington DC relates how he met up with a man he believes he once met in Lagos, someone who may not have been who he claimed to be. This story feels authentic and gives a good sense of the long passage of years between that day and today. I have a fair amount of respect for Habila's debut novel Waiting for an Angel, and last week I added his third novel Oil on Water to my TBR pile.
Nnedi Okorafor, 'Spider the Artist' (JOHN JOSEPH ADAMS, ed., SEEDS OF CHANGE, 2008)
In the near future, killer spider robots protect the oil pipelines in the Niger Delta, but one woman finds an unexpected connection with a spider that shows some creative intelligence. Nigerian American Okorafor is already a winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature, and this is an uncomplicated tale that makes me want to see what she wrought with last year's novel Who Fears Death.
Ben Okri, 'Worlds That Flourish' (STARS OF THE NEW CURFEW, 1988)
My only previous encounter with the writing of the Booker-winning Ben Okri did not end well, in fact I reacted rather emphatically against Astonishing the Gods and have long felt I needed to give the guy another chance. His 1988 collection Stars of the New Curfew is a good place to start, and opens with an evocative epigraph from poet Christopher Okigbo ("We carry in our worlds that flourish our worlds that have failed") that gives shape to this story. It describes the increasingly hallucinatory journey of a man who leaves his apartment in an abandoned African city to find a strange group of people living in the jungle in a different kind of reality. It's dark and a little dangerous with some strong imagery in which nothing is as it first appears, and ends with a clever looping back to an earlier point in the story. This was a marker on the road for Okri's use of more imaginative imagery, and his increasing rejection of more conventional forms of fiction. I'm now becoming far more inclined to pick up The Famished Road.
Favourite short story of the week: E.C. Osondu, 'Waiting' (GUERNICA MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 2008)
In a Red Cross camp for war orphans, teenagers await the day they will be picked by American families and transported to a new life abroad. This has a truly great opening paragraph that somehow sets the scene without actually doing any scene-setting, and the story is then fleshed out admirably with great dialogue and incident right up to the ending, which leaves the reader hanging but wanting more. This is vivid writing.