By Ikhide R. Ikheloa
Friday, December 7, 2012.
The
writer Richard Ali has a debut novel out, City of Memories. A digital
native and an Internet warrior, Ali is a leader of a pack of young Turks
actively promoting African literature on the Internet. A renaissance man, armed
with a law degree and a way with words, he is currently the editor of the
online magazine Sentinel Literary Movement of Nigeria. He also
recently teamed up with friends to establish a publishing house in Nigeria, Parrésia Publishers Limited, also the publisher
of his book. I love his poetry; it is new, different and
politely divorced from the poetry of protest, anguish and despair that
used to be the hallmark of postcolonial African poetry. Ali is also a
passionate youth activist, most notably one of the leaders of the highly
successful but short-lived #OccupyNigeria that in
January confronted the Nigerian government over its decision to eliminate the
fuel subsidy and raise fuel prices.
Ali
is the face of a generation of feisty writers that I admire immensely. I
applaud their ingenuity and can do industry. For they are doing for African
literature what the West did for the older generation – they are building their
craft and their own publishing industry. The older generation had Heinemann and
Fontana publishing houses. These writers have nothing but themselves and that
wild frontier called the Internet. They are insistent on a mission whose
mystery is beyond their understanding, the need to tell a story. Overall,
Nigerian writers in the Diaspora have been good for Nigerian literature,
pushing our stories beyond frontiers that were once unassailable. However,
Ali’s book reminds me why I enjoy reading Made-Inside-Nigeria Nigerian
literature. The language is distinctly homegrown and you can almost taste and
feel every page, there is nothing like a home-cooked story. The tenderness is
indigenous, not contrived. Ali excels at dialogue the way you would imagine two
people actually conversing; the conversations between the lovers Rahila and
Faruk are sensual and convincing.
With
City of Memories, Richard Ali has established himself as perhaps the
most important Nigerian writer at home or in the Diaspora writing about Nigeria
from a Northern perspective, bar none. We have not had a Nigerian write about
the North with such passion and intellect as Ali. Not since Cyprian
Ekwensi. Ali demonstrates a good mastery of prose, employing nuanced
turns of phrases.
“Long
stretches of road were poorly maintained and every now and then the highway
broke up into vague stretches that threw up geysers of dust the minute the
tyres touched them. On both sides of the road, dry savannah bore the intense
heat without bursting into flames. Yet there were nomads all along the way in
the heat, herding more cattle than he had ever seen.” (p 10)
The
book is mostly pretty prose-poetry, time periods swapping themselves in and out
of the reader’s consciousness. It is confusing at first but the reader gets
used to it. Ali is good when there is no fancy footwork with the
dialogue, when the language does not get in the way. He endows the reader with
prose so dreamy and lyrical you forget that no one thinks and talks like that
in today’s Nigeria where the dollar is the only ideology and deity in a
political climate of pretend opposition. Here are my favorite lines:
“It
was the very worst time of the year: November. In Bolewa, it was a time of
wailing harmattan winds, blowing dust and dryness from the Sahara, which lay
not two hundred kilometres away. Everywhere, the sparse grassland was being set
afire and bare-chested young boys made game of the scurrying grasscutters and
rodents. It was very cold. In the old calendar, it was called the month of
Flames. For fire ruled side-by-side with the dry, Northwestern winds. At night,
there was a cold chill and you could find no one in the streets if they could
help it. If you looked hard enough, you could see Mr. Cold raging personally,
menacingly, towards you, bristling and blowing his disdain across the fields.
It was at such a time that Usman left me.” (p 71)
So,
what is City of Memories all about? The book’s blurb says it all:

Richard Ali
“City
of Memories follows four characters [the lovers Faruk Ibrahim Rahila Pam, and
the political adversaries Ibrahim Dibarama and Eunice Pam] negotiating the
effect of various traumas. Towering above them is the story of Ummi Al-Qassim,
a princess of Bolewa, and the feud that attended her love – first for a
nobleman, then for a poet – a feud that bequeaths her with madness and death.
All four are bracketed by the modern city of Jos in Central Nigeria, where
political supremacy and perverse parental love become motives for an
ethno-religious eruption. A thwarted love affair forces Faruk to flee to the
Northeastern village of Bolewa, from where his parents emigrated three decades
earlier. There, he unearths his mother’s tragic past and discovers the key that
just might keep his country one – if he can make it back to Central Nigeria
alive.”
There
is plenty to like about the book. Ali does not waste his (and our) time on a
gazillion characters; he invests his energies on a few well-built characters.
He makes the point now universally known that the North is not monolithic, and
he dissects the ethnic tensions and flare-ups between the Hausa and the
indigenes in the North Central region. The book, Chapter 3 in particular, is a
very thoughtful treatise on individual and communal identity. There are nice
sections on campus life as Ali records the hell that is university education.
The letters between Faruk and Rahila are adorable; they alone are worth the
price of the book.
Ali
tries and mostly succeeds to impress the reader as well read and deeply
introspective. The beauty of the book’s prose however is often ruined by Ali’s
desire to be seen as cerebral. The striving to be erudite grates like nails on
a blackboard. All these alien influences and the contrived grandiloquence of
the language give the book a phony feel. Ali has had more than his fair fill of
Khalil Gibran, Friedrich Nietzsche and he is eager to share. One almost wearies
of all these moody intellectuals roaming Nigeria muttering to the beat of Miles
Davis’ 1959 Kind of Blue album.
The
weaving in and out of time periods is awkwardly executed but it keeps the story
alive. Ali is too self-conscious of his otherness; italicizing indigenous
words. It would have been more helpful to provide a glossary at the end of the
book. Many African writers are incredibly well read and worldly. I do wonder if
they ever read other African writers. They quote Western thinkers with glee. To
Ali’s credit, in the book, at the tail end, Faruk the protagonist is reading
Jude Dibia’s book Unbridled. It was amateurish, Faruk couldn’t have read
the book since it was published in 2007 and the book is set in the eighties and
nineties. The reflections on feminism were not convincing although it is a nice
quantum leap from the near misogynic indifference of the Soyinka and Achebe
era.
A
professional editor would have helped the book immensely, like many books
published in Nigeria, the book is plagued by some editorial issues. The book’s
plot seemed elaborately contrived but inchoate; it is not as elegant as his
prose, the conflict is forced and the resulting conflagration seems out of
proportion to the alleged crime. Also the book suffers a problem in many
contemporary Nigerian works: Over-wrought self-absorbed hand-wringing by
idealistic protagonists. Whole sections appear to be long running personal
opinions wrapped in the gele of fiction.
Ali
demonstrates a good grasp of oral history but how reliable is the narrative?
Given the range of the numerous subjects he touched on it would have been
useful to include references and a glossary. On the whole, the research was
sloppy. As far as I can tell, the book is set in the 80s and 90s. However,
early in the book, on page 77, there is a “lemon colored” Apple iMac. This is
highly improbable since the first iMac was released in 1998, in just one color
– blue. On page 70, Bolewa’s population was 80,000; however on page 82, it was
a hundred thousand. There is a large LCD television in the book (p 184).
That would be highly improbable in the 90s. These are all editorial issues that
could have been addressed by a professional editor.
The
main protagonists are idealistic to the point of irrationality, what some would
call an unrealistic moral absolutism. In that sense, the book is hewn from the
Soyinka and Achebe tradition, starry eyed idealists complaining about
everything and proceeding to out-do their oppressors once it is their turn to
be oppressors. It is plausible though; the 90s housed the last of these
idealists. They fled the dictator Sani Abacha and now live abroad where they write
angry essays excoriating Nigeria. Those left behind now suck Nigeria dry at the
breast pumps. In them we are confronted with the hypocrisy of moral absolutism,
the power of empty words.
The
protagonist Ibrahim Dibarama a veteran officer of the Nigerian civil war is a
walking bag of personal opinions. He is angry about the so-called Igbo coup of
1966 and ignores the equally bloody counter-coup organized by Northern
soldiers. He lionizes the Northern leaders. And seems to rationalize what
happened in 1966:
“There
was a breakdown in communication across the north following the coup and before
anyone could get anything together, the myth of the Igbo coup had spread.
Ironsi lacked guts, lacked vision, lacked everything, alienated everybody,
could not impose his authority – and his wife didn’t help matters, promenading
like a victor all over the place. Most of the political leaders simply folded
their arms and let the first killings happen. And of course, we had yet another
supreme egotist in Enugu seeking a place in history with a capital H. Well you
know what happened after that.” (p 52)
[Tafawa]
Balewa was a believer in the country. He saw the northern region as a company
of complementary people who could come together for mutual benefit. And it was
the same way he saw Nigeria. Of all the Northern leaders, he was the most
unafraid of the Southerners.” (p 51)
The
character Hassan Abba in charge of Murtala Mohammed’s troops that carried out
the ethnic cleansing in Asaba tries to confront the massacre but appears to be
offering apologies and excuses at the same time. However, Murtala Mohammed is
accurately depicted as a deadly Don Quixote:
“When
I arrived on the 22nd, all I met were vultures and Biafran corpses, civilians.
Henry, my handpicked battalion leader, what was he doing? Shooting Mid-Western
civilians! It was a mess. A mess! Corpses all over the place. It was criminal.
I reimposed a curfew. That, that was Barbaria right in the centre of my country
– Sir Tafawa Balewa’s dreamed of country. I imagined a race of evil djinns had
run rampant. Ah Hassan, it was just a mess. Some of the finest soldiers – yet,
war had turned them mad. Whatever the rhetoric, I damned Murtala; nothing, no
revenge, was worth what I saw that day. But who would believe me? And yet some
at Supreme HQ honoured me for that fiasco. I am a soldier all that was
unnecessary.” (p 60)
This
is interesting considering that the General Officer Commanding (GOC) Two
Division of the Army during the civil war, Major General Ibrahim Haruna said recently that he had
no regret for his troops’ massacre of over 500 males in Asaba.
We
are different people, separated by the blasts of the muezzin and the relentless
thumping of Pastor Joe’s bible. However, the turbulent 60s was a time of fixed
physical boundaries and homogenous groups glaring at each other. That provided
the context then for the divisions at the time. Today history repeats itself
for different reasons. I look to Ali and others to continue the debate and to
offer innovative ways forward. Finally, let me observe that what limits most
African literature is the monotony of its range. The “fiction” is actually a
collection of observations and strongly held opinions about certain social
conditions. It is a convenient foil and cop out; an author accused of bias
points out coyly that the book is, well, fiction. But then, is the reader
fooled? As an aside, I do think Nigerian male writers take themselves way too
seriously. Sex rarely happens in their books. They must have arrived this earth
by Immaculate Conception. Well, I learned a new dish – balangu. Google it.
Ikhide R. Ikheloa is a literary critic, writer and columnist, and can be reached at xokigbo@yahoo.com . He blogs at http://xokigbo.wordpress.com/ . You can follow him on Twitter at @Ikhide