Bola, a university undergraduate shows how an individual handles adversity
By Lechi Eke
One of the themes of Literary Naturalism is examining how the environment affects the individual, not the masses. Literary Naturalism as a school of thought came on the heels of Literary Realism. The focus of the latter was on ordinary people, examining how the developing world was affecting them – the poor masses. For example, the new technologies like the telephone, etc., focusing on everyday experiences without drama or figurative language.
This school of thought emerged in protest against the Romantic school of thought which was about emotions, imagination rather than reason; the worship of nature, love and beauty; loftiness, the upper class, individuality (not society), etc.
So, writers of Literary Realism rose up to point out that the world wasn’t made up of the rich and noble only, and all things are not rosy and beautiful and emotional. In fact, the world had and still has more poor people who are struggling to make ends meet than the rich and noble.
While they were concerned with the masses, the naturalism school inspired by the theories of David Darwin rose to examine how the environment affects an individual.
This happens to be the basis of this short story. Something as terrible as multiple deaths (a taboo) in a family, how does an individual handle it? Also, the author examines the effect of military brutality on an individual.
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Habila, using the characterisation of Bola, a university undergraduate from a middle-class home, loved and pampered by his parents and siblings, a privileged individual, a regular person, shows how an individual handles adversity.
So, this is what this is all about – the meaning in this story.
Theme
Habila deals with a taboo subject: multiple deaths in a family through an auto crash. One day, Bola is comfortable, happy and privileged. The next day, he loses his beautiful family; everything crashes around him with his parents and siblings being involved in a fatal motor accident.
In addition to the theme of taboo, Habila sneaks in the theme of violence using the social situation in military-ruled Nigeria at the time to examine its effect on a citizen, just a single individual (Bola is treated without pity, harshly): social environment. Then, there is the theme of Determinism. Bola sees a thick line of ants migrating near his room in school. He reads the superstitious meaning into it that something as terrible as death has happened to his family, coupled with the dreams of dead bodies and fire he had.
So, the concept of taboo, determinism, violence, environment, for example, what’s going on around an individual, shaping their life, are used to weave this short story titled Bola.
Plot (storyline)
In the short story titled Bola, Lomba tells it. Bola and Lomba are course-mates and roommates at a university in Lagos. The story opens with Bpla waking up with fright on a tumbled bed, his eyes wild. He says he’s had a bad dream, of dead bodies and fire. Lomba tries to quieten him telling him to return to sleep believing the dream came from a multitude of businesses.
The previous day, there had been a demonstration. The students protested the continuous holding to power of the military junta in Nigeria as they learnt of the postponement yet again, of his date of vacating office. It doesn’t sit well with the students.
Lomba had left the protest ground after listening to the students’ union president for a while and returned to his room, but his friend and roommate had followed the demonstration through and returned late chanting dissidents’ slogans. On his friend’s insistence, Bola related the decision by the student body to boycott lectures to Lomba.
So, Lomba believes that Bola has carried the previous day’s agitation like a hangover, over to the next day. He tries to calm him down. But Bola refuses to go back to sleep, but follows Lomba outside to where he’s brushing his teeth outside their room on the balcony. There, Bola encounters a thick line of black ants migrating. This he reads superstitiously to mean that it is a sign, an omen that something terrible has happened in his family.
He tells Lomba that he’s going home to see his family because he believes something is wrong. Lomba looking at him cannot dissuade him but follows him to his Ikeja GRA home where they met a strange car in their drive. As they approach his family house, sound of wailing hits them and Bola’s legs fail him.
When they manage to go in, they see no member of Bola’s nuclear family but his extended family: his uncle who lives in Ibadan with his wife and four other adults: a doctor friend of his family, another man and two women trying to console his uncle’s wife.
His uncle says he sent his twins to call Bola from school. And in his room, with his friend, Bola learns that his parents and two siblings were in an auto-crash the previous day and all but one sister died.
He receives it well, and even is able to make conversations as if nothing happened. He is sedated and falls asleep and remains sleeping until the wee hours of the morning when he wakes up and takes his family album, going through it while Lomba pretends to sleep watching him.
Eventually, Lomba falls asleep, wakes up in the morning, but finds Bola’s trousers and shirt, but not Bola. After a while he begins to look for him, and is later joined by Bola’s twin cousins. The search leads them to the bus stop where they see Bola standing on an upturned dustbin addressing a crowd like a preacher (replicating the previous day’s students’ agitation. After singing a Christian hymn, he begins to chant anti-government slogans and say things inimical to military rule.
Secret service men pick him up and throw him into their Peugeot 504 car. When the crowd protest after hearing Lomba and the twins tell the security men that he is their relation and he’s not well, the men shoot into the air and carry Bola away.
The following day, when Bola’s uncle returned from Ibadan from checking on the surviving but injured Bola’s sibling, they trace Bola to SSS (State Security Service) office where his Uncle Bode takes time explaining things to them. Still, they ask him to return the day after. He’s told to go to “Yaba Left” to search for him. Bola is there, lying on a hospital (a little digression, please. In Africa, we don’t lie in bed but on the bed because of the heat (chuckle)) bed “staring at the ceiling”.
Lomba narrates, “We flinched as our eyes fell on his bare torso every inch was covered with thick punctured weal. He had been beaten systematically from his face to down to his legs. One arm was fractured – it lay by his side in a thick plaster. And he didn’t recognise us. His eyes passed over us incuriously before returning to stare with mindless vacuity at the ceiling.”
The short story ends with this:
“They had beaten him all night, shouting questions at his bewildered whimpering face. Finally, they had realised that something was wrong with him. Disgusted, they had dumped him at the psychiatric hospital.
“I didn’t stay long with them. I couldn’t continue to stare at that silent, blinking form on the bed any longer. I told them I was going back to school. They said they’d take him to Ibadan for traditional treatment. They said they’d let me know when to come for the burial. But now I had no address. I was simply walking down a deserted road with nowhere to go.”
Point of View (POV)
Point of View is First Person narrative. Lomba tells the story. This point of view is apt considering that the main character cannot tell the story of the falling apart of his life. It’s best through the eyes of a close pal.
Characterisation
People in the story are: Bola, the main character, Lomba, Bola’s friend, course-mate and roommate through whose eyes we follow the story; students; Bola’s uncle, Bode; Auntie Rosa, his uncle’s wife; Peter and Paul, Bola’s cousins from his Uncle Bode; sympathisers (two men and two women, one of them a doctor). Others are government agents (men of the secret service), crowd at the bus stop.
Through a flashback, we meet Bola’s dad, mum, two sisters: Peju and Lola.
The characterisation of Bola, as an undergraduate with a privileged background who on hearing about the sudden and tragic deaths of his parents and sibling in a car crash, goes mad, is apt. Habila, dealing with the unexpected and sudden demise of almost a whole family in a ghastly motor accident, creates an environment that begs for the answer of how the surviving family member is handling the loss.
So, the characterisation of Bola as privileged, jovial, full of life and zeal, having a solid background – middle-class family, a comfortable home in the same city as his university, loving parents and doting sisters, and like a sudden change in weather, he loses all and runs mad, is great!
Characterising Bola as a privileged young university undergraduate, who goes mad because of his inability to process a tragic accident in his family resulting in the death of most members of his family, is very apt. The experience is surreal and to the carefree young man, it is impossible to handle.
Bola has not been through anything in life; even passing JAMB came on time for him. Hence, he is a year younger than Lomba. So, when the first hard thing happens to his untrained mind in the journey called life, he cannot handle it. He runs mad.
There’s an element of pathos in Bola’s end as we follow the narrative from his carefree and privileged beginning to his unfortunate end.
Lomba doesn’t fare any better. We see him at the end of the story wandering.
Habila’s characters in sync with naturalism concepts seem to change in a downward turn: they depreciate!
Diction
Habila uses words that create the moods he wants to achieve, either of euphoria or sadness, dismay or mourning, according to his need. The Bola short story opens to the hoarse croaky voice of Bola who is waking up from sleep. His bed is tousled, his sheet hanging down and his pillow on the floor. He says he couldn’t sleep. And his eyes are bleary; his forehead glistening with sweat and it’s hot…
The words paint pictures we can see.
But it is not a hangover from alcohol, or the students’ demonstration the previous day. He’s had a bad dream of dead bodies and fire. The next moment, he’s seeing a thick line of ants that sets him in frenzy. He’s sure that it’s an omen of something terrible happening to his family so he goes home, with Lomba tagging along trying to calm him down.
As Lomba brushes his teeth, he recounts what transpired in the campus the previous day suggesting that it could be the reason Bola had the bad dreams. But he has no explanation for the thick line of ants although he mentions that it’s the beginning of the rainy season and ants are migrating, he agrees that he has never seen them so thick on a line.
We read zealous words filled with euphoria such as, “We’re tired of being tired!”; “Yes! Tell them Sanke!”; “Great Nigerian students!”; “G-R-E-A-T!”; “We’re tired of phantom transition programmes that are nothing but grand designs to embezzle our money!”; “Down with the junta!”
From these confrontational words of insurrection, the reader follows Lomba and Bola home to read words that express pain and mourning and great dismay: “As we approach the house… we heard the cries… women crying. That was when Bola’s legs failed him. He sat down abruptly on the concrete ledge circling the veranda. He was sweating freely now; when he looked at me I saw deep terror in his eyes.”
The situation doesn’t grow any better. When the news is broken to Bola and Lomba, of his parents’ and sibling’s sudden demise, we read: “His voice was too cordial. His eyes were too bright – but there were no tears in them.” Here, the sentences become short and jerky. Everything seems unnatural and awkward.
Then, the story ends with words that can break the hardest hearts: “You can’t take him away. He’s our brother. He’s not well.” This is the twins talking to the powerful SSS officers who are taking Bola away; reminiscent of the scene where Obierika in Things Fall Apart talks to the white man, the District Commissioner, with the helplessness and wretched feeling of one in great dismay and impotent frustration, at the scene of Okonkwo’s suicide.
Also, we read words like, “He didn’t recognise us. His eyes passed over us incuriously before returning to stare with mindless vacuity at the ceiling.”
Setting
Bola, the short story, is set in diverse locations: a university in Lagos, Bola’s family house in Ikeja reserved area, a bus stop and a psychiatric hospital in the Yaba area of Lagos.
The Mood of Bola, the short story, fluctuates from fear to anxiety to euphoria to pain and pity.
Structure
A cause and effect structure is used by the author to create scenes and situations that deliver the message of hopelessness, determinism, violence and some of the other themes of literary naturalism.
Bola wakes up with the fear of an exceptionally bad dream. The fear turns to dismay and fright when he encounters a thick line of ants migrating. This prompts him to go home, his friend and roommate in tow. Meanwhile his roommate thinks his anxiety and dream come from the previous day’s business of students’ demonstration, and narrates the event to us showing us the euphoria and energy of students’ demonstration.
However, on reaching home, the duo of Lomba and Bola find out that Bola’s dream is true. He has lost his parents and a sibling, at once! Bola loses his mind. He wakes up and goes to the bus stop near his house to play back scenes from the students’ demonstration.
Government secret agents pick him up and take him to their office where they beat him silly and wound him, only to realise that he’s mentally ill. They dump him in a psychiatric hospital.
And here ends the story of a lively young undergraduate from a privileged background with the world at his feet who encounters tragedy.
