This book is narrated by
the protagonist’s chi, an Igbo guardian spirit.
He addresses Chukwa, the Igbo chief deity, pleading for leniency for his
host, Chinonso Solomon Olisa, who may have killed someone. The chi recounts Chinonso’s story: he, a poultry farmer, falls in love with
Ndali, a pharmacy student. She is the
daughter of a wealthy, prominent, and well-respected family that objects to her
marrying someone they consider beneath her.
Wanting to improve his chances of being accepted by Ndali’s family, he embraces
an offer of a university education in Cyprus.
He sells his ancestral property and virtually all of his possessions to
raise the necessary funds, but when he arrives in Cyprus, he learns he has been
conned and finds himself penniless in a foreign country. Then his trials and tribulations really
begin.
The epigraph includes
an Igbo proverb: “If the prey do not
produce their version of the tale, the predators will always be the heroes in
the stories of the hunt.” The book gives
voice to one who would be considered the prey.
Unfortunately, as the title suggests, there is little that Chinonso can
do against his fate. The title refers to
the crying of birds that can do nothing about their cruel fate. Several times Chinonso is described as being “deplumed”
and, not surprisingly, he comes to identify with “All who have been chained and
beaten, whose lands have been plundered, whose civilizations have been
destroyed, who have been silenced, raped, shamed and killed. With all these people, he’d come to share a
common fate. They were the minorities of
the world whose only recourse was to join this universal orchestra in which all
there was to do was cry and wail.”
There is a daunting
amount of information about Igbo cosmology and culture. There are long passages which meant little to
me: “Indeed, Alandiichie is a carnival,
a living world away from the earth. It
is like the great Ariaria market of Aba, or the Ore-orji in Nkpa the time
before the coming of the White Man. . .
. The eminent fathers were there. . . . There was, for example,
Chukwumeruije, and his brother, Mmereole, the great Onye-nka, sculptor of the
face of the ancestral spirits. His
sculptures and masks of the deities; the faces of many arunsi, ikengas and agwus . . . The great
mothers dwell here, too. . . .Most notable, for instance, was Oyadinma Oyiridiya,
the great dancer, . . . Among many others, there were Uloaku and Obianuju, the
head of one of the greatest umuadas in history, one whom Ala herself, the
supreme deity, had pomaded with her honey-coated lotion and who poisoned the
waters of the Ngwa clan many centuries ago.”
It is not just this
type of exposition that is challenging.
There are instances of language which is not translated:
-Nde bi na’ Alandiichie, ekene’m
unu.
‘Ibia wo!’
-Nde na eche ezi na’ulo Okeoha
na Omenkara, ekene mu unu.
‘Ibia wo!’
Some of the
conversations are in Nigerian Pidgin which is not always easy to decipher: “’Oh boy, you no sabi wetin you dey talk’”
and “’These Turka people sef, dem no sabi anything oh. Tell am say na so the hair be jare.’”
Having a chi as the
narrator is interesting. He is 700 years
old and has been reincarnated many times so he is wise and able to place Chinonso’s
tragedies into a broader context. His
oft-repeated phrase (44 times) is “I have seen it many times.” He repeats this phrase after making
observations like “loneliness is the violent dog that barks interminably through
the long night of grief” and “things do not always happen in accordance with
the expectation of man” and “A man in need will hang on to whatever he can get
to survive” and “Love is a thing that cannot be lightly destroyed in a heart in
which it has found habitation” and “A man seeking justice with his own hands
must dispense it as quickly as possible, or he risks being destroyed by his own
dark desire.” Of course, the one
difficulty with this narrator is that the reader is always given information
second-hand; this perspective causes some distancing from the protagonist.
Nonetheless, the
reader cannot but have compassion for this humble man who risks everything to
better his life and be worthy of the woman he loves. He is a simple man who doesn’t understand and
cannot defend himself against the forces lined up against him. The humiliations he endures as Ndali’s family
tries to force him to end his relationship will bring a sensitive reader to
tears. When Chinonso writes an account
of his time in Cyprus, he entitles it “How I Went to Hell in Cypros”. Not only does he discover that he has lost
everything, but he also encounters racism:
people demand to feel his hair and mock him by calling him an arap, a slave. Because he is a black Nigerian, his suffering
at the hands of the Turks is made even worse.
The book has some
weaknesses. Ndali is not sufficiently
developed so it is not clear why she is so attracted to this man whose life and
experiences are so different. Is it as
simple as what she says (“From the first
day, I knew you were genuine”)? Some
events are left unexplained. For
instance, Chinonso has a relationship with a woman named Motu but she just stops
coming to see him. Why? Why is this relationship described in
considerable detail?
The book’s length
(450+ pages) indicates its density. It
is not recommended to anyone looking for a light read because this is a serious
book through which sadness permeates. As
the chi points out, there are parallels between the Chinonso/Ndali story and
the Odysseus/Penelope myth, but there is frequent foreshadowing that the tales
may not end the same way.
This novel is a worthwhile
read for those who are ready for a challenge.
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