A Tangled Tale
Deji Toye
When the manuscript of Roots in the Sky (Roots) won the Prose Prize in the annual Association of Nigerian Authors in 1996, poetry – not prose, especially of the longer version – was the most important genre in the opus of emerging Nigerian writers of that period. By the time of its publishing some eight years later, prose was already in the ascendancy. While social concern would appear to be common to the works of the novelists that have been publishing since the early 2000s (e.g in the novels of Helon Habila, Chimamanda Adichie and Sefi Atta), Adesokan’s seems to have distinguished itself in the resurgence of the shared attributes of the more ebullient elements of the Nigerian prose-writing. (We shall return to this later).
In Roots, Nyaze, a self-taught writer with a mysterious past leaves his three idealistic friends, a group of young squatters in the city of Lagos, ostensibly to search for a pregnant girlfriend. He does not return until two years later, tethered dangerously on the edge of a nervous breakdown but carrying with him a secretive memoir. The novel is a ‘trilogy’ comprising that memoir, another account of related events written by one Esther Tabuki, a fringe character in Nyaze’s memoir, and the concluding story of the life of the idealistic Musin, Chidi and Kamo as they struggle for survival as artists in Lagos and watch their friend jump over the cliff that overhangs the mental wreck.
Nyaze’s memoir begins as an imaginative recreation of his growing up days, told with the stream of childish reverie that often borders on the magical. Grandson to one ‘Laifa Adigun, otherwise called ‘Sage of Ilogbo’ whose career of political agitation takes its legend from the colonial days, Nyaze never met the Sage but believes that his life is so inexorably bound to his grandfather’s that he writes that his life began the day his grandfather was born.
In Nyaze’s narrative, we encounter the intrusion of the supernatural in the affairs of man. Nyaze’s birth was the subject of a contest of supremacy between two claimants to the clairvoyant in the tiny village of his birth – a herbalist and a christian priest. Or may be, more accurately, it is man manipulating both man and the ostensibly supernatural, for it appears the supernatural often needs more than a fair measure of the agency of man in its dubious intrusions. In Nyaze’s native village, which starts as a squatters’ camp, we witness how the ignorance and poverty of the populace is manipulated by the priest and herbalist for their selfish ends. Kilanko, an activist disciple of ‘Laifa Adigun who has chanced upon the village and now visits regularly to provoke some “organization”, constitutes the third leg in the tripod of leaders struggling for the soul of the village. In their league-like clashes, Kilanko regularly loses to the wily priest, who, Jero-like, manages to see opportunity in the common misery. The villagers doubt Kilanko’s motive and often leave him to go to church and take a slurp of spiritualism for dinner. The village is demolished.
Really, in the characters of Kilanko and his mentor, ‘Laifa Adigun, we come across persons for whom activism and philosophising has become an end in itself, bound as they are, like an adventure hero, to the romance of their vision. Highly symbolic of their smugness of vision and social distance is the founding of Miracle City, a commune where radical students, university professors, journalists and other persons in the fringe of the social equilibrium come together to muse and mate. Esther Tabki, a Miracle City dweller hints on this smugness when, in her ‘testimony’, she writes, in apparent exasperation at the irritable intrusion of state agents: “It didn’t matter if a piece of writing, or any sign of happiness existed on its own, oblivious to power and those wielding it like sword.”
Esther’s testimony, the middle story in the book, throws useful light on certain characters earlier encountered through the often times wild prism of Nyaze’s memoir. But beyond this, that story comes across, on the whole, as a sore thumb in the book. One is left to wonder whether its real value in the story is not to play to the prison themes that have become recurrent in Nigerian prose fiction lately.
In the third segment of the book, we encounter in the trio of Chidi, Kamo and Musin, the helplessness of another group of visionaries. These young men, mostly unemployed or under-employed university graduates, do not belong to the generation of Wole Soyinka’s ‘Interpreters’. Beyond a highfalutin claim to social vision, these young men also have their daily vegetable survival to tend. Yet, they set out in prosecuting their dreams, resolved against ”the society’s ways of ‘rising in life.’” This struggle produces its own fallen angel – Chidi who has to resort to ‘checking out’ through the unorthodox route of Uruguay, in order to prosecute his acting career. After all, frustrated radical professors, like ‘Lekomi, have been canvassing the convenient doctrine of the wider field of the struggle to explain their quite understandable drift into the brain-drain train. But Musin, witnessing in the gradual mental wasting of Nyaze “what the end of the history would look like if the children of those who queue up for everything and would jump the queue if no one was watching failed to act…” resolves to publish his friend’s memoir as well as Esther’s testimony. At the publishing of the first tranche of the latter, the offending newspaper has its premises sealed up by the military junta, along with the rest of the manuscripts.
Use of language is as vibrant as it is diverse in Roots, changing in turn with the narrator, or the point of view, or even the mood of the story. Indeed, language use goes beyond informing or even entertaining. It becomes part of the overall instrument of conditioning, used, along with the plot and characterisation to extract, now fear or pity or anger, then frustration or simply resignation, from the reader.
In Nyaze’s memoir which begins with fantasia of childhood, we see how verbal twists, repetitions and exaggerations become the handmaid of the fantastic, the magical turn toning down towards the end, but not its exaggerative verbosity which is still pressed into service, at recounting the orgies of blood and violence that permeate the society. At certain points, the law and order of grammar simply break down, as language is drawn into the fray. Watch as punctuation marks take flight, even before Dunbi can, and lines run into lines, when the journalist’s mother pours out her frustration and vituperations on a son that seem bound to a meaningless, yet wasting, cause of social redemption.
Sometime in the 1970s, Bernth Lindfors noticed two strain of prose style in Nigerian literature – the sober and didactic/the ebullient and entertaining. Lindfors’ configuration of these strains around ethnic (Igbo/Yoruba) lines may be contentious deserves a closer examination of its won. Yet, this writer has, on a different occasion, noted this trend, beyond language use, in the realm of story structure and characterization. The significance of Roots, within the ranks of new Nigerian novels, is in the bringing together in a single canvass of all the shared attributes of the more ebullient elements of the Nigerian prose fiction, both in form and content, in story-telling technique and in social concern.