Yishau’s 2018 debut novel, In the Name of our Father, that made it to the hallowed longlist of the Nigerian Prize for Literature in 2021 is one of those novels that promises to tell a great story – a promise the reader would discover few pages into the novel is like that of Nigerian leaders (who also featured as characters in the novel): this promise never materializes. In fact, at the end of the novel, the reader feels, and rightly so, that they are being mocked for believing in this promise.
The novel opens with Justus Omoeko, a journalist whose love life is falling apart and his own existence threatened by people who want to ensure that his novella, Angels Live in Heaven, centered on the life of crimes and deceptions of the man known as Prophet T.C Jeremiah, is never published. The section that immediately follows this introduction of the supposed narrator, Justus, is Justus’ novella itself.
In Angels Live in Heaven the reader is shown how the poor and hungry Alani was transformed into the rich, popular and powerful Prophet T.C Jeremiah. Alani (now Prophet T.C Jeremiah) joins the upper echelon of the society, comprised of diabolical men who use religion (in this case, Christianity) to cage, manipulate and extort the innocent citizens. They are referred to as the “Elders Coven” or the “Brotherhood” and some may call it “[a] secret society.” To join this coven, one needs to perform some initiation rites and the author goes at length to describe what these rites comprise of. I wish he had not; I wish he had saved this reader that initiation scene that looks like a product of the typical defective Nollywood (over)imagination (I must state that I do not wish to insult the country’s film industry, especially now that she is showing more efforts to improve; whether the efforts have been successful though is a topic for another night).
The horribly imagined initiation scene encountered early in the novel I did not know would be the least of the defects in the novel. The author seems to be reading and following a writing manual that talks of allusions and symbolisms and how the weather and the surrounding physical environment can be used to reveal more to a reader without actually making a direct mention of these revelations. The problem has never been following guides though, especially guides that have proven successful time and time again, but in following it well. Here, the author reads his guides upside down. His integration of natural occurrences, especially as it relates to the weather, with the happenings in the lives of his characters – with special reference to Prophet T.C Jeremiah and the narrator-character, Justus – announces itself in such ways that it becomes obvious that the writer is just throwing in weather observations, hoping that it sticks and illuminates whatever it is he wants illuminated at any point of the narration. So, when the Prophet is told that he will provide the “blood of babies to feed the two charms given to him by the Brotherhood,” the author feels compelled to inform his readers that “suddenly, there was a crash of thunder, which brought with it a torrential rainfall, the sort the earth witnessed only on rare occasions.” Also, when the prophet had a disagreement with his wife Rebecca – a lady he had met and fallen in love with when he was on his routine duty of engaging the services of commercial sex workers – he took an evening stroll and “[as] he made his way back home through the boulevard, he discovered that the dark-blue cloud had wrestled the moon into submission. The silvery beams hitherto pronounced had lost its glow.” These two cases, though terrible enough, are unfortunately not isolated instances. The pattern runs throughout the novel. One recalls the kind of soundtrack played in the Old Nollywood that tells the story even before the scene is acted; our author here has found an ingenious way of bringing it into the novel: thanks to his forced weather observations.
Life can present shocking unexpected realities and sometimes fact can even sound more unbelievable than fiction. That is a given but when we have a string of almost unbelievable catastrophes lined up by an author who seems to be more interested in the manufacture of misfortunes than in the production of art, even that can no longer be used as an excuse. Things happen in the novel in such ways that even a Nigerian living in Nigeria (where the novel is set) who is already used to absurdity, carelessness and the inexplicables cannot begin to imagine. It is a contest to see how much the human person can believe and explain as coincidence or the ugly turn of life:
Alani’s father was a big time farmer then. In fact, he had a very large cocoa farm. And because Alani was an only child, there was a lot of money to throw around. But soon after his father died, the farm caught fire during the dry season and everything perished (30).
In another instance, a man impregnates the prophet’s side chick and runs away; the side chick, Nkechi, foists the pregnancy on the prophet who was so happy to father the son since his own wife Rebecca cannot successfully carry a pregnancy to terms (which we are told is a consequence of the prophet feeding babies to his charms); the real father of the child is found by his wealthy biological father who had in his own time also denied him as a fetus; the man inherits his newly found father’s wealth and is now back to claim his child, making it the last in the list of punishments the author prepared for the prophet. In a characteristic manner, the reader learns of Tosin at the beginning, Prophet Jeremiah’s girlfriend when he was still Alani who dies while trying to abort a fetus she made together with Alani. Her father would die out of shock learning of her death and her mother would also go mentally insane.
The issue here is not that there are not living human beings who have witnessed even more gory happenings in their lives, very far from it, but that, just like the weather observations, these misfortunes read forced. Not even describing the novel as fantasy – which it clearly is not – can begin to excuse these events.
Research is one tool not in this author’s writing kit, at least judging from the novel in focus. While the sham that passed as a court scene earlier in the novel where the prophet stands trial for the death of Tosin can be excused on the ground that it happens in the dream world, a world where the illogical reigns supreme and laws inexistent (and dreams are generously used as a narrative technique in the novel), no excuses whatsoever can be made of this description of the aftermath of Tosin’s abortion: “Tosin was sleeping on the bed, writhing in pain. She had never known pain like this. Pain that seemed so assured and intimate, knotting together parts of her that were convenient to take for granted. She wanted to cry for help, but there was no one around.” One thing is clear is this picture: the fact that proper research about the kind of pain women can feel when an abortion procedure goes wrong was not carried out; it is not clear though whether Tosin was sleeping and wanting to “cry for help” at the same time.
Justus, a journalist like the author of the book, I initially referred to as the supposed narrator of the story this novel purports to tell because it is not quite clear who does what here (or can it be a case of what Achebe once referred to as “a narrator behind a narrator”?). Authorial intrusion seems to be the foundation of the novel and these intrusions happen mostly in make-believe dialogues/characters’ thoughts (I do not want to say forced dialogues so that the word can have a brief rest). A quick example is Georgina’s (a commercial sex worker just like Rebecca who later became the prophet’s wife) thoughts the night Rebecca stayed out longer than supposed:
“I just hope she is not in any danger, because this job of ours has a lot of minefields surrounding it. If you are not haunted by crazy policemen, you could be the victim of ritual killers or have some other nasty experiences.”
By pretending, obviously unsuccessfully, that Georgina is in thoughts, the author took the liberty to list the risks associated with sex work, especially in Nigeria. The act is not the problem, how it is performed is.
Talking of commercial sex work, it is also important to talk of how women are typically described in the novel. We have “light-complexioned lad[ies], with heavy breasts and moderate buttocks” who are contrasted to “dark ugly lad[ies].” Georgina and Rebecca are used to further this description. For Rebecca, “her breasts were still firm. They had not suffered much from her line of business. After all, her breasts were rarely part of her bargain with her customers” while “Georgina really was the opposite of Rebecca. She was not beautiful. Her breasts were flabby. No thanks to countless abortions.” Here, virginity is still referred to as “womanhood” that can be “traded…for money.” You do not need to be a card-carrying feminist to be discomfited by these descriptions. You do not need Achebe to tell you that this is a need in the Masculine psychology to set women up for the mere satisfaction/approval of the man’s gaze, as bodies at once desirable and divinely accursed. They are nonsense, talking of which this description of a scene where Rebecca tries to seduce her husband can also be added: “The nightie was a see-through, and he could see her pubic hair doing some kind of dance.” This is nonsense, but to tweak Chinweizu et al’s concept of “pleasurable nonsense” a little, I choose to call it a laughable nonsense.
The novel is assigned the duty of informing its readers of the different ways religious deception manifests and that raises the confusion around the gynecologist’s advice to Rebecca who was in search of the solution to her problem of childbirth: “I must not deceive you Madam, there is nothing I can do again. But do you believe in the spiritual ways of solving problems? … Handle this spiritually.” Surely, in a country as superficially hyper religious as Nigeria, inflicted with an abysmal healthcare system, there are certified and licensed medical practitioners who give out advices like this. Some even go as far as recommending their patients to their spiritual leaders, but what exactly is the position of the author in this instance? One may argue that the position of the author is not needed since the attention in fiction should be paid to the characters and not to the author but that will be to pretend that this author has not been committing authorial intrusions, thus making his positions known in many other instances; his silence therefore in this issue is a mark of inconsistency and I may not be wrong to interpret it as an endorsement of what the gynecologist advices. If my assumption is correct, then what is the point of the novel?
On the minor aspects, people do not “stare” in this novel, they “starr” instead. One wonders how human beings crow, but a female character in the novel actually “crowed.” There is no difference between the word “terrible” and “terrific” in the novel and Bible passages are so mindlessly littered even where they are not needed that I begin to contemplate if it is not better to pick up the Bible and read instead. There are also quite pleasurable moments, like when an unsuccessful attempt was made at creating a wise saying: “Dreams are only as valid as the length of the owner’s life; dreams are fragile until they enter the realm of accomplishment and become solid.” What in the name of wise quote is this, especially those that comes after the semi-colon? General Idoti who also plays a major role in the narrative is never introduced until the middle of the novel where he seems to have fallen from heaven onto the pages. Someone may be tempted to defend the language of the novel as being the author’s choice of using simplicity to tackle complexity but that would be just a wish for what is presented is the simplistic actually. Considering that the author is a journalist, it is not much of a surprise that the novel reads more like a journalistic report and news commentary than a novel, but that is never an excuse.
Earlier I said that the novel began failing few pages into it. That is actually an untruthful way of telling the truth. The novel embarrasses itself as art from the very first page. From its opening sentence that attempts to pay homage to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in the manner the opening sentence of Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus does (forgetting that time sometimes determines what can be forgiven and what cannot be; and between 2001 and 2018 is a whole lot of years), to its cliché-laden sentences, one must be a hopeless optimist (I admit I am one) to expect the story to have a worthy telling. Here are some parts of the first page:
The center began not to hold for me when I decided to mount another pedestal. Until then, journalism was what I chose to pursue; but after a while, something else began to pursue me. It was beautiful and marvelous in my sight, but without form and void. I tried to run away from it. Try as I did it would not leave me…With time, I began to admire the muse and got enraptured. Then one day, I decided to give it form by putting pen to paper and by the time I was about to bask in my new joy, hell came down hard on me. My head was topsy-turvy. The beginning of the end began for me that day in my two-bedroom apartment…
The novel sure has a story which was unfortunately killed and buried by the telling. The story though can be summarized thus: a fake pastor connived with a military dictator who got into power by carrying out a coup to make life difficult for a truth-chasing journalist just so they can cover their own evils. In between, we learn of prostitution, betrayal, deception and retributive justice meted by the Divine Beings.
If the novel’s mission was ever to provoke anyone to rethink the deification of religious leaders which provides them the leeway to deceive, manipulate and extort their followers, the novel fails – woefully so – to achieve that. Rather it outrightly annoys, for when the struggle to read to the last page is over – and it is quite a struggle of which winning means teetering close to self-immolation – the reader feels that they have grossly wasted this unrecoverable valuable called time – and nothing is more correct than that feeling. The novel though succeeds in reminding this reader of the evils that are religious deceptions, dictators and all forms of human rights abuse.
Ugochukwu Anadị is the Book Review Editor at Afreecan Read and an editorial intern at Counterclock
Recent Comments