Editor's note: Nlebedim Nzube Harry pens down a comprehensive review of Tunde Ososanya's collection of short stories, entitled Later Tonight. In this review, he goes into each of the ten short stories and informs the readers what the book is all about.
Tunde Ososanya's Later Tonight is a collection of ten short stories that deftly capture an ample cut of, not so much of the African or the Nigerian but the human condition. The ten stories are in a sense Nigerian, but the issues raised are those that tell of a global and universal problem, and the author in turn proposes a future of hope. Ososanya opines that after the bleak day there would be a burst of sunshine. This is captured in the sentence, Let us weep more tears, Father, for they are tears of joy. The stories are well-crafted and narrated in simple language that embraces people of all intellectual as well as ideological levels. The language is also easily accessible and relatable.
The stories are essentially Nigerian, more in their scenic and linguistic forms, but less so in their thematic preoccupations. They tell of unique Nigerian experiences; of disillusionment; of the aspirations of simple Nigerians in their quest for a good life and worthy living; they tell of The Nigerian Dream, of the struggles to live and not just to survive.
READ ALSO: NAIJ.com’s Editor-in-Chief Bayo Olupohunda debuts with new book “Are you not a Nigerian?”
In The Burning Food, Ososanya presents the protagonist Bolaji, a university graduate whose dreams are reduced to mere bleak fantasies at the end of his university education. He is plunged in poverty and struggles through adultery to get a better life for himself and his immediate family.
Talking with Ghosts tells the story of Sekinat, a northener who is murdered in a reprisal attack for the murder of Emeka, an Igbo student who is killed by a northerner during an excursion in the north. The story describes the fiery but unspoken vindictiveness still mined in the souls of Nigerians as a result of the 1967-1970 internecine war also known as the Civil War between Nigeria and the breakaway Biafra group. At the core of the story is the message that, even though the war has long ended, it yet rages today, playing on the mental, more than physical domain of our collective existences.
In UK Visa, Dotun in his quest for "the better life" in America is defrauded of his money by his unscrupulous neighbour. Dotun symbolises the everyday Nigerian who seeks for greener pastures in America and is frustrated by dubious agents.
When is Daddy Coming Back? explores the metaphysical in Itunu the only daughter of the protagonist who foresees the tragic death of her father in the hands of suicide bombers on his journey for a better life for them in Northern Abuja, Nigeria.
In Later Tonight, Ososanya once again explores marriage and its complexities in the characters of Damilola and Dele who continuously seek for the fruit of the womb but deliberately turn a blind eye to the real cause of their problems.
Ososanya engages his readers in the beautifully-crafted metaphysical story where the protagonist Arinze relives his unspoken Freudian fantasies through dreams in Arinze and the Ghosts. In the short story, the eponymous character transcends from the somatic to the metaphysical to experience ideals in sleep he cannot reach in real life.
In A Step-Daughter's Diary, Ososanya presents a typical dysfunctional Nigerian family. Omolade, a victimised fifteen-year-old transfers her unspoken feelings and thoughts to her diary from where we experience her pains and sense her intense sufferings and suicidal thoughts.
Face Me I Face You presents in vivid and gruesome details the experiences of people living in despicable conditions in Nigeria. It explores visceral emotional pains experienced by the characters in their private battles; poverty, and the love that binds the protagonist Wole to his mother and sister, and to Bisi his girlfriend.
A Poisonous Fruit tells the tale of Segun and his experiences of want and deprivation with his family. It also tells of the temptations inherent in "making it" in Nigeria. However, unlike Bolaji in The Burning Food who gives in to his sexual urges by sleeping with an older woman to get a job, Segun succeeds to overcome his own temptations.
In the final story, Weep More Tears, the author, Tunde Ososanya, presents another family ravaged by poverty and shows how they are rescued by an unprecedented deux ex machina.
The ten stories explain how the sociological construction of the Nigerian milieu plays a great role in determining what each character does and how they do what they do.
In addition to other equally important issues raised in the text, the readers are to understand that Tunde Ososanya's works revolve around three central motifs, namely the supernatural, poverty, and sex, both as a process and a sociological construct.
Tunde Ososanya plays around the seemingly overarching theme of the supernatural in the text with his constant usage of Freudian dream symbols and dream displacement. This psychosupernatural motif is exploited in Talking with Ghosts, Arinze and the Ghosts, and A Step Daughter's Diary.
In Talking with Ghosts, Ososanya brings the protagonist's grandfather Christopher Okigbo, who had died fighting for the Biafran side during the Nigerian Civil War, together with his granddaughter. Through dreams which play out as real events, Okigbo relates with the protagonist and they share their experiences: Okigbo of the unchanging past and the protagonist of the foreseeable future. In Arinze and the Ghosts, Arinze displaces his unresolved anxieties, needs, hopes and aspirations through dreams. He wakes up only to realise the whole events had been a dream, and he resolves to live up to the real life the events experienced in sleep.
In A Step Daughter's Diary, Omolade is seen to displace her own unresolved depression to her diary. It is from this that she manages to escape her suicidal tendencies. In addition to this, the motif of unemployment and poverty pervade the text in the lives of some of the characters. Bolaji in The Burning Food is a graduate but has no job. This leads him to adultery and the inferred breakdown of his marriage. Dotun in UK Visa is pessimistic of his success in Nigeria and yearns to leave to America. In When is Daddy Coming Back?, Akin, a university graduate, pushed by a desire for a more successful life for his family, goes to Abuja where he is killed in a bomb blast.
The author exploits the reproductive and pleasurable essence of sex in the story. Virtually all the stories involve one aspect of sex or the other. Barring the cases of rape or within the marriage walls, the textual reason for the excessive portrayal of sex is not easily decoded. However, we can deduce that the writer uses sex as an activity to show how the characters pour out their pent up temperaments in a highly demanding society. Another aspect of sex is in gender relations, i.e., the relationship between the men and the women.
Ososanya is aware of the patriarchal nature of the Nigerian society and he exploits it unreservedly in some of the stories. There is a great sense to which we can assume that Ososanya himself is patriarchal, since, of course, we cannot completely cut off the writer's personal ideologies from his work!
Women in the society are seen as objects that can be used and recycled to be used again another time. In A Step Daughter's Diary, the wealthy stepfather of the protagonist wishes that his wife remain a housewife, not so much for care of her but mainly to commodify, objectify and own her. Omolade is seen to say: my stepdad would boast of his financial blessedness and his resolve to pay her double of whatever she earned provided she quit her business and become a housewife.
Also, in Later Tonight, through Dele's mother, we see that the society expects the problem of infertility to be the fault of the wife and never the husband. This raises certain important questions. In Weep More Tears, Engineer Johnson says: Let me drink myself to death! The only male child I have is gone. This is highly significant, but subtle too.
PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigeria’s #1 news
The men in the family are given a place of prominence than the females, and the loss of one is greater than the loss of two female children. A male child is therefore an essential ingredient in the home. Women being the weaker sex are at the receiving end of men's passions and whims, and they can hardly fight against this. For instance, in A Step Daughter's Diary, Omolade becomes a victim of her stepfather's promiscuous urges.
The central idea is that the men are the ones meant to provide for the woman and save her from her troubles. In Face Me I Face You, it is no one else but an old male professor who gives Wole's mother food when hers is thrown away. Also, when Wole's mother asks her husband why women cannot be among the church elders, he says bluntly that women are not even allowed to give sermon.
Finally and more glaringly is the fact that it is Doctor Adefarati who rescues Aina and her family from their turmoil. We would pose a vital question: why were more women not given the chance to render assistance to fellow women or to a man too in the same way the latter are frequently portrayed as Prince Charmings and saviours?
This to a large extent establishes Ososanya's patriarchal temperaments in the text.
Cover of Later Tonight
Tunde Ososanya uses local language, and this portrays the local colour needed in a literature of this mode. He taps into the rich repertoire of Nigerian language. This makes the work readable to the Nigerian audience. However, the author fails to translate dialogues written in the local dialects to English, a globally understood language. In a predominantly English language narrative, dialogues written in deviant languages should be immediately translated to English to enable linguistic accessibility to the wider Anglophone audience.
Another criticism which is more sociolinguistic in nature is the fact that the entire ten stories are tribally-secluded. One would expect that for a Nigerian work, there could have been an inclusion or a pointer to the existence of other groupings such as the Igbo, Hausa and Efik. Later Tonight is a predominantly Yoruba-centred work as the majority of the characters in all of the stories are Yoruba. The names of the characters such as Dotun, Brother Demola, Akin, Itunnu, Damilola, Dele, Omolade, Wole, Segun, Temilade, Oladele, etc are pointers to this assertion. Although this trend is not new as it is also evident in Chimamanda Adichie's short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck and others, it would be tribal-friendly if other tribes asides from that of the author are, if not equally, partially represented.
It is highly impressive how the writer experiments with all three narrative persons in the ten stories. This puts a good stamp on the writer's language flexibility and aesthetic prowess.
You can get the e-book on Okadabooks
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the editorial policy of NAIJ.com
Who is Nigeria's greatest president ever? - on NAIJ.com TV
Source: Naija.ng
from Nigeria News today & Breaking news ▷ Read Nigerian newspapers 24/7 http://ift.tt/2oF2CGV
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment