The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma 2015

‘… Mother,’ says 9 year old Ben, who with his three older brothers lives in a small town in western Nigeria, ‘spoke and thought in parables.’ p105. Africa is the continent of parables and proverbs, and The Fishermen, as fables do, speaks about the deeply personal in the same voice as it does about the hardest sideswipes that fate and history and politics can deal out. It no more stomachs the west’s saucer-eyed innocence of crimes against Africa than it countenances life stripped of spirits and myth.

The Fishermen, its four brothers, their mother and father, their two younger siblings, dances step by carefully-placed step into tragedy. But Obioma’s no Sophocles or Shakespeare. Gruesome death there is, plenty of it. Such is the transformational power of Obioma’s writing, however, that his voice is, actually is, the voice of Africans’ oral tradition. There, death isn’t the end of the story. From the book’s last pages, Obioma frees hope. It flies into the future.

The story hinges on one huge event. Father, who works in a bank, is mercilessly transferred to a northern town fifteen hours drive away. Thereafter, Mother, as well as running a small shop in the local market, is responsible for keeping her six children in order, four of them head strong boys. Visiting only every few weeks, in their eyes Father shrinks from ‘mammoth frame … into the size of a pea’ and ‘his long arm that often wielded the whip … snapped like a tired tree branch.’ The four boys ‘broke free. // We shelved our books and set out to explore the sacred world outside the one we were used to.’ pp14,15. They and some of the town’s street boys alight upon the Christian town’s forbidden spirit-riddled river. It’s also filthy. Before the colonists came, it provided clean drinking water and fish. It used to be, quite sensibly, worshipped as a god.

‘Follow us, and we will make you fishermen!’ says Ikenna, the oldest brother, 15 years old, to Obembe and Ben, the two younger brothers. Boja, a year younger than Ikenna, is already a fisherman. Tadpoles, which Ben sees as whales, small fish, grey and slimy, and once a fish big enough to sell, are their catch, metal fish hooks on ropes their weapons, an adjusted hymn their delightful fishing song.

A neighbour whistle blows. Father, on one of his visits, whips the boys raw. But worse, he steals their song and title. He insists that they’ll become fishermen of the mind, of good things. In English, the language of “Western education”, they’re forced to chant, ‘“We are unstoppable.” … “We are menacing.” “We are juggernauts.” “We will never fail.” “That’s my boys,” he said, our voices settling like sediment. “Can I have the new fisherman embrace me?”’ p44.

And from there, the tragedy of Ikenna, on whose shoulders Father casts the mantle of guiding the younger ones, Ikenna, Mother’s first born and dearest, unfolds. It engulfs the family.

They live in western Nigeria, which is Yoruba. Father’s job is in the Hausa-speaking north. English is the desired language of education. But Igbo, spoken in eastern Nigeria and carrying the memory of the 1967-70 civil war, is the family’s first language. Nigeria is said to be a name cobbled together out of ‘Niger’ and ‘area’ by Lady Lugard. Her husband Lord Lugard cobbled the country together. He gets a mention in The Fishermen. I can imagine Lady Lugard’s ghastly accent, called Received Pronunciation, sliding those two words together. Igbo meanwhile, as Ben explains without rancour, is structured to contain hidden meanings. After Ikenna has reluctantly agreed to lead and guide his siblings, Father says, ‘”always remember that a coconut that falls into a cistern will need a good washing before it can be eaten. What I mean is if you do wrong, you will have to be corrected.” … for although the vocabulary for literal construction for cautionary expressions such as “be careful” was available, [our parents] said “Jiri eze gi ghuo onu gi onu – Count your teeth with your tongue.” … it was the way they learned to speak.’ pp45,46. The language itself contains the parable.

The book’s structure contains another layer of parable: each chapter title, first sentence and second paragraph asserts and expands the mythical dimension of its particular protagonist: ‘Chapter 3 The Eagle // Father was an eagle: // The mighty bird that planted his nest high above the rest of his peers, hovering and watching over his young eagles. … Our home … was his cupped eyrie: a place he ruled with a clenched fist. … had he not left Akure, our home would not have become vulnerable …’ ‘Chapter 4 The Python // Ikenna was a python: A wild snake that became a monstrous serpent living on trees, on plains above other snakes. Ikenna turned into a python after the whipping. It changed him. The Ikenna I knew became … a mercurial and hot-tempered person constantly on the prowl.’ ‘Chapter 7 … Mother was a falconer:’ And many others. Locusts are forerunners, the madman whom the gods destroy, dead Ikenna is the sparrow, Boja is a fungus, grief is spiders, creatures crawling, flying, swarming, slapping meaning and drama onto sadly human lives.

Madness is here. Naked Abulu has a grotesquely large penis, lives in a wrecked truck and eerily pretends to cook and fucks a dead woman. He’s a prophet. Ikenna believes his prophecy: Ikenna’s and Boja’s deaths follow. Mother in her grief sees spiders, talks to spirits, sees not Ben but a cow. Boja, Obembe, Ben, the Nigerian elite – presidential candidates murdered, presidents poisoned, civil hatred stirred up – all perpetrate acts of violent madness. Father believed he could violently force his sons to become great men. Early in the book, a mad woman is said to have danced naked in the market.

Writers sow story seeds. It’s how plots functions. In this book, it’s what the characters do as well: ‘… the seed of what Ikenna had now begun to act out – a lack of interest in fishing – was sown the previous week. He’d had to be persuaded to come with us to the river that day. So, when he said: “I want to go and study. I’m a student, not a fisherman,” no one questioned him any further.’ p25. But Obioma doesn’t harvest earlier events only at the point they become significant, nor do his backstories work straightforwardly. Rather he sets up a beautiful pattern. Characters relate events as though the reader knows as much as they do and only later is the reader equipped to solve the puzzle. Only when backstories are told does the reader realise the gap in her knowledge. Events that have happened simultaneously to the main story are related much later. It’s like Igbo. Much is hidden. Mystery reappears as revelation. The story moves in many directions at once and time moves sideways as well as forwards and backwards. For example, the complex story of Ikenna’s passport, its relationship to Boja’s death, the intricate relationship between the brothers, comes as a revelation more than half way through the book when I believed I already understood the hatred between the two oldest brothers.

Cain and Abel, Jesus Christ, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and WB Yeats’ falconer (both in the latter’s The Second Coming), countless Igbo and Yoruba scared myths populate the book. Achebe’s title refers to Yeats’ rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem. Those lines are peculiarly full of dread. They could refer to the horror of what came after colonialism, after Africa’s and Ireland’s future benign leaders had been slaughtered or overthrown by the departing colonists and replaced, Lugard style, with ghastly puppets. The Fishermen is set in the late 1990s. Father has named Ben after Nnamdi Azikiwe, independent Nigeria’s hope of the early 60s. Ikenna reads a book about an Igbo mam called Okonkwo. In Okonkwo’s colonial tragedy, he sees his own divided family.

The Fishermen is a truly great book from the post-Chimamanda Adichie generation, herself the heir to Achebe. A parable made from a family, a country and a continent, each layer of fable holds the meaning of one in the other, and finally there’s hope. It involves small white rather conscientious birds and Ben’s younger brother and sister, that’s all.

Hatred is a leech in this book but personal blame is absent. When a drama transcends individuals, and the massive forces at play in a person’s life are visible. The sensations of guilt and sin, so hypocritically peculiar to western life, loose their power to diminish the already weak. In this respect, Obioma and Sophocles are relatives.

Salt by Earl Lovelace 1996

 

Salt is about Trinidad and neo-colonial independence. Trinidad’s I million people – Africans (the descendants of slaves), Indians (the descendants of indentured labourers), Chinese, Portuguese, English, French creole and plenty others – won independence from Britain in 1962. The independence movement was led and propelled by Blackpeople (Africans).

To understand the story of neo-colonialism, its crimes and tragedies, you need to understand the older story of Africa and her diaspora, some flung away from African kingdoms and across the Atlantic as far as the Caribbean, as far as Trinidad, 19 kms off the coast of Venezuela and the Orinoco Delta. Arguably Africa is the continent that was most damaged by European colonization, a system founded on slavery and the erasure of pre-European history. All the continents on this earth, apart from Europe and central Asia, were colonized by the European elite at some point from, roughly, 1600 to 1950, but even Saint Mahatma Gandhi hated and despised Africans. The global elite has put a lot of effort into ensuring that they of all peoples, with the exception of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, are not free to use their lands and their energy as they think fit. This also applies to the people of African descent who live in the Caribbean, with the partial exception of Cuba. It explains why Haiti, the first black African country to win independence from Europe, has, since 1804, been tortured so savagely by European military power and finance that it’s now widely reckoned to be the poorest country on earth. It explains, at least partly, why the global powers’ behaviour displays spectacular fear of Africans anywhere in the world: control of the continent’s vast riches, including interest on debt, and control of African labour underpin capitalism, including the Chinese version.

What has all this to do with shiny modern Africa and the Caribbean? If you believe PR pitches on tourism, social media, mobile phones and investment opps, then nothing. If you’re interested in the truth, then everything. You’ll know global authorities lie and cover up, and that one of truth’s best friends is literature, with or without correspondence to reality.

Uncle Bango’s great great great grandfather Guinea John, after bestial reprisals against a slave revolt, travels to Trinidad’s east cost, ‘put two corn cobs under his arm pits and flew away to Africa.’ p3. Those he leaves behind berate him for taking the secrets of flight with him.

But ‘[Guinea John] loved his children. It was their living that would make him an ancestor. His wisdom was theirs to have; but they had eaten salt and made themselves too heavy to fly. … now their future would be in the islands… ‘ p1. The book is about leaving the island or not leaving the island, about escape, or not, about other worlds, the world of obeah and the African orishas, of Britain (though not a lot), the world that emancipation and then independence promised. It creates world- and heart-bestriding figures out of people educated in waiting and ‘secondclassness’, to whom it doesn’t occur ‘that this infant should believe that this world could ever belong to him.’ p9. Further along, when the National Party and the Leader, aka the PNM and Eric Williams in the 1970s, betray the people, cue for shades of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s and the late Chinua Achebe’s masterpieces on neo-colonial betrayal. Shades also of Song of Solomon and Toni Morrison’s great poetic histories of the African diaspora in North America.

If Salt has major characters then they’re Alford George and Uncle Bango, the first a naif who doesn’t speak till he’s six, educates ‘his verbs [to be] in more frequent agreement with his subjects,’ p36, and becomes a National Party politician via carnival arts, cricket and a hunger strike for equal education. Although everyone’s more or less related – it’s a small island – Uncle Bango comes from a family which has waited since emancipation and before to claim the land the ex-slavers still own, and now he’s carrying on, he’s marching for independence, for an idea of freedom, he’s giving away money he and his family don’t have, he’s clothing a children’s marching band made up of all the races on the island, he’s marching for every event, political and religious and cultural, that the island of carnival throws up. But he doesn’t, his wife Myrtle realizes on p155, know what he’s fighting for. Certainly not for ownership of the land. Yet he’s the one that Alford, after the National Party fails him, chooses to march into the future with.

Major characters, consistent voice and register, narrative subject (as in 1^st person, 2^nd person, 3rd person), linear time and point of view are all conventions Lovelace gloriously chucks out and/or does exactly as he pleases with, along with facts, notorious and brilliant PM Eric Williams for one. Like Ngugi and Achebe making fiction about Kenya and Nigeria, he doesn’t give a damn how close his fictional National Party sails to the real People’s National Movement. Presumably Faber and Faber consulted their lawyer before publishing Salt in 1996, 14 years after Williams’ death.

What Lovelace does is create so many voices and registers of dialect, so many characters, points of view, so many ‘I’s and ‘he’s and ‘she’s, often grandly and shockingly swapping mid sentence between ‘I’ and ‘he’, that I felt the whole island was the narrator. To tell Trinidad’s story, not just an individual’s story is a fabulous thing: not Alford’s alone nor Bango’s, nor Myrtle’s, nor Florence’s nor the anonymous baker’s son nor any of the others. It’s taking anonymous first person narration, the presence of an invisible and slightly creepy character who’s somewhere between god and Uriah Heep, as in Dostoevsky’s The Devils, a million miles further on. First of all I tried to track the changes and identities of all the narrators, gave up, and then abandoned myself to the perfectly clear – and if not, so what – narrative positions Lovelace sets up. I always knew whose eyes I was looking through, even if I didn’t know who those eyes belonged to. A bit like a carnival mask – the eyes are ‘real’, but the face in particular and the person as a whole assumes magical properties because ‘real’ identity is absent and a fabulously wrought costume dominates the present, the practicalities of wire bending and wining notwithstanding.

So the mask allows the language freedom to relax. Excising his Caribbean dialect would ready Alford, he once thought, for escape to another world, initially Britain. His mother’s ill-health removes that possibility. Eventually he understands his task is to make the island itself into another world, a place people don’t have to leave, just as Bango, having believed in a freedom bestowed by a nature which can’t be owned, realizes that he and his people are owed, at the very least, the land they worked for centuries with less than no reward. They’re owed by the current black administration who failed, at independence, to claim the land for them. By the end of the book, the promise of harmony that Bango’s language initially makes is, you feel realizable, despite Alford and Bango having been forced apart by shame and education and access to the elite. Despite also the interests of the descendants of indentured Indians who were bribed out of British India by the promise of Caribbean land.

‘The sky, the sea, every green leaf and tangle of vines sing freedom. Birds frisk and flitter and whistle and sing. Just so a yard cock will draw up his chest and crow. Things here have their own mind. The rain decide when it going to fall.’ p5. This, in a Bango-inflected narration, is how Lovelace harmonises the many languages his characters speak, Bango’s eyes the ones ‘bathing me [Myrtle] in my own beauty.’ p138

The chapters near the end devoted to the views of Alford’s friends and supporters Sonan the Indian and Adolphe the younger son of the Carabon the white estate owner are a bit problematical, feel a bit shoehorned. Did Lovelace feel compelled to push representatives of the two other major racial groups on the island to the front of the narrative stage? OK, some Indians and some Europeans are good guys capable of throwing their lot in with the African majority, in other words. Lovelace needn’t have worried. He’s written Adolphe’s father, the old and relatively kind estate owner, and Sonan’s father Moon, the Indian store keeper, with love. He only makes characters he loves. The bigoted and cruel estate owners and slavers, the self seeking National Party leaders – the villains – aren’t individualized, described, or given direct speech, let alone a point of view or narrative voice, except, briefly, Adolphe’s brothers. Reported characters don’t take up moral space. That’s one of the beauties of the novel form. As Alford’s political agent remarks, ‘The Prime Minister say plenty things. Be careful what you hear him saying. Listen.’ p124.

Salt, a book about Trinidad, is about the whole neo-colonial African world, and about the whole African diaspora ‘thinking still of that self beyond his [Alford’s] reach in a faraway place, as a loss, as something he had been deprived of. But how do you feel the loss of a self that you did not have to lose? How can you lose an Africa you did not know? But that was what he felt: the loss of not having had that loss to lose.’ p256.