Deductions from Dreams and Assorted Nightmares
By Lechi Eke
Dear Ibrahim, I have read through the rest of your 12-short story collection from Dreams and Assorted Nightmares as I promised you I would, and here is my surmising.
Hmm… you’re a realist, I’m an optimist. In your writing, you reproduce the way things are. In my writing, I go further to proffer solution, what can be done so that I don’t leave my readers worse than I met them. In my little corner, I believe God appointed me a writer to give hope and direction, to encourage. Although not in every story, but that’s my aim.
It was Nigerian famed author, Chinua Achebe, that wrote that stories are not innocent. No story is innocent, I believe a writer should maximise the brief moment he/she holds a reader’s attention to sell to the reader ideas that would not only entertain, but guide and help them.
“House of the Rising Sun” is just a sad account, gloomy. From the onset, it is set in gloom – the protagonist has a job at a petrol filling station, what can be gloomier? The antagonist is “faceless fate” which seems to knock her down at every effort. She has a mentally sick child that needs padded walls in order not to harm himself; who needs 24-hour care, and she being a young mother who is single and needs love? And this child, eventually, costs his mother a potential lover!
Your stories take such realistic approach that if a reader is not strong enough, they will come out feeling gloomier than they entered the story. In this story, the only ray of hope is the death of the poor sick child, self-inflicted! I see no message.
The next short story, “Sajah,” is sad as well, but there’s a message. It is both a spiritual message as well as a secular message. The message is, don’t love the world and all its frills – “Don’t be materialistic!” The story opens with Aminu’s father washing his recently acquired second-hand car. He loves it to a fault. Here, your artistic descriptive skill shines through. You write: “…had I not seen father looking at his car the way my brother, Aminu, stared at Zaynab, who lived next door and had hips like a figurine moulded by an artist, or something Abba Mororo had painted.” How “Father would burnish the car until the paintwork caught the light of the sun and mirrored the adoration in his gaze.”
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You write like the 20th century literary realists who pay much attention to details. You bring out the tiny details of how things are with poor struggling families. In such a family, buying a second-hand car is such a huge thing, a great achievement. Buying the car takes out such important food items like milk, meat and beverages in a family of growing children. Painting the picture with words of how Aminu’s father adores the car, how proud the family, including the mother is, initially when the car arrives, and how the car is christened ‘Sajah’ and the neighbourhood children chant the name; how the car slowly dwindles from a thing of pride to a source of worry, and how eventually, it’s sold, and life returns to status quo, is a work of artistry.
However, where writers of the literary realism give a glimpse of hope (they make their major characters marry well, discover great fortune left them, or find out they have a wealthy uncle or aunt), you tow the line of the literary naturalism school of thought where things end in doom – the owners of Sajah end up returning to status quo – it’s like climbing out of their bottom-rock poverty level is too high a task to attempt, they fall back into the ditch! But as I said earlier, it has a clear message.
“Daughters of Bappa Avenue” tows the line of the naturalists or literary naturalism. A group of prostitutes whom circumstances or their environment forced into such trade suffer the fate of people who provide the kind of services they do. Their services thrive after dark, and such nocturnal services attract all kinds of evil beings who can take people’s lives. It is a vicious circle that doesn’t provide such traders enough gain to climb out of the ditch. The only one who begins to try doesn’t return home, probably murdered somewhere and her young teenage girl who’s on the brink of climbing out of the hole is kicked back into the hole. Sad. It’s so literary naturalism – terrible living condition in the lives of the lower class, social evils and environmental limitations – so determinism, and all that. It made me cry.
“The Weight of Silence” is in a class of its own, a class like Mariama Ba’s “So Long a Letter” – a narrator expunging from her soul, memories, expurgating…, but while Mariama Ba’s So Long A Letter is a narration, The Weight of Silence is a rhetoric exploration where the speaker wanders from one event to the other in a reflective manner that exposes events. Pensive. Again, towing Chinua Achebe’s statement, stories are not innocent. I believe, Ibrahim, you’re selling us the mysteries of some bandied beliefs of karma, voodooism, etc.
In “Naznine”, you repeat the exploration of the sickening habit of addiction as seen in “Sajah”. This time, the major character whose name takes the title is addicted to having a baby girl. Incidentally, I know people who live all their lives in the servicing of an addiction. Perhaps, they want to go to America. Every kobo they make goes into acquiring a fresh passport because they have stamped the old one with rejection, paying visa fees and spending their waking hours drooling over the “great” fortune of living in their dream land, America! That’s what happens to the main character in this story. She hardly enjoys her brand-new marriage in her quest and anxiety to give birth to a baby girl. She spends all her money in buying stuff for the unborn baby and neglects even the love of her dotting husband, drooling over a baby that hasn’t arrived. Things like this doesn’t end well. Naznine, of course loses her mind. Of course, we know that losing her marriage is loading…
I read in shock, “The Book of Remembered Things”. No, not everything shocked me. Anisa, the major character, not being married at 34 and caring for her sick mother in a coma, isn’t that shocking. Even her father leaving his family to go and fight the jihad in faraway place, isn’t shocking to me either. What shocks me in this story more than Anisa’s father raping her when he returns from his holy war is, your presentation of the story of the Muslim holy wars, the author pointing out that some of this zeal to kill and maim others in the name of fighting a holy war isn’t from a sound mind.
Anisa’s father is deranged. He treks home the first time from wherever he went to fight the holy war with blisters on his feet and sleeps for such a long time that his little children who hardly know him because they were little when he left waited and waited and got tired of waiting. Anisa can hardly recognise him, even.
The man returns home and asks not about his wife, cares not about his children, but sleeps, eats and prays for long hours and listens to the hate messages on the radio.
He returns home a second time, and rapes his daughter.
The children are at home grappling with living life and managing their silent mother in a wakeful coma.
The Book of Remembered Things explores a family under siege; it explores the evils of religious fanaticism as well as the terrible circumstance of children losing a parent (s) early in life: one to sickness and eventually death, and the other to religious fanaticism.
The children pass their time writing memoirs which they hope their mother will read some day, but she doesn’t make it. She dies, and Anisa continues to write, to unburden her mind, since her mother will no longer read it having died.
Salisu kills his father at the end and goes to jail.
The ending is good, it closes with Salisu going to jail for killing his father because he raped his sister. I like the fact, Ibrahim, that you let people know that one shouldn’t take the law into one’s hands. If you kill a fellow human being, the law will come after you. You will pay for it, no matter the provocation. Such little things as making Salisu end in jail is what we owe the world as writers. Things shouldn’t be left open-ended in my own opinion.
I love “A Very Brief Marriage”. Ibrahim, I think your imagination is at your best here, for me, that is. My heart leapt into my mouth when I read how a new husband abandons his wife and shuts her out of the bedroom and tries to escape leaving her at the mercy of night marauders barely three days of saying for better and for worse – although I don’t know what the Muslims exchange as marriage vows.
A Very Brief Marriage introduces the man who is the terror of Zango, Audu Kore, and his band of criminals. Three days after a wedding, the armed bandits strike the home of the newly-wed. The husband shuts out his wife, and flees for his life leaving her at the mercy of criminals!
Well, Audu Kore and his gang are able to break down the door and get the husband leaving the wife untouched, and they beat him silly. And the story wraps up with emissaries from the wife’s husband coming to beg the young married woman to return to her lawfully wedded husband! I wonder which wife would return to such a man.
The last worthwhile story for me is “Making Monsters”. It is intriguing and engaging. I can just imagine a three-year old boy wearing green clothes whose mother left in the care of someone to buy biscuits for him and never returns, and the boy grows up to become fierce and deadly. He is practically raised by different hands in the roughest place, the motor park!
So Audu Kore is a bandit. He and his gang make Zango unsafe to live.
I love the love between him and his wife, a criminal with a solid relationship where it matters most, at home! Even at death, his wife still believes in him. It is touching to see that a criminal maintains equilibrium at home. His wife is his biggest fan and believes in his business. Zaki, their son turns out to be a disappointment to both criminals. And it is Zaki who in the last short story, “What the Sand Said”, accomplishes what the father set out to accomplish, but death cut him short.
I love the presentation of Audu Kore’s death – it’s so real – how the wife wakes up in the middle of the night and sees him, wakes up in the morning, he isn’t there; then, in the middle of the day, he is seen at home… yet he is not there… this is very skilful (clapping).
In the last short story, What the Sand Said, Zaki brings the tree that holds all the lives in Zango down to bring about the “leaf storm” as predicted by Malam Sadi.
Unfortunately, both this last story and the penultimate story to the last, “Melancholy”, do nothing for me. I look for meaning in stories. I found none in the two last short stories, but fortunately, I’m just one reader. I believe there are readers who take delight in superstition and diabolism. They may find the two last stories entertaining. I don’t. That a young girl named Talatu falls in love with a married retired soldier whose wife is a banker and Christian, kills herself and disappears and reappears as a monster in animal form to torment the family, is not my cup of tea. However, yes, it lives up to your title promise of Dreams and Assorted Nightmares. Melancholy is truly a nightmare, sour to my taste.
Also, the whole of Zango Community stuff doesn’t quite work for me. I fail to see a tight synergy of communal relationship running through the story, my opinion though.
Keep on writing, Bro!
To students of Literature, this isn’t a conventional review, but I chose to do this. Thank you.