- Review by: James Tar Tsaaior, PhD
Iveren Damna’s Waves of Pain is a coherent, cleverly-crafted and culturally legible story. It is told with a dedicated social purpose, uncompromising passion and visceral commitment to the imperatives of individual and corporate responsibility in the fulfillment of inalienable familial and societal duties. In the narrative, personal fate, spousal in/fidelity, family mis/fortune, and social solidarity merge with cultural norms, spi/ritual practices, and social expectations in a dizzyingly strange but familiar story with tragic consequences on the lives of individuals, families and society.
In the narrative, propelled by paternal loyalty and affectionate love, Tartaver, a successful local businessman in Naka, responds to a letter by Kwaghtser, his daughter requesting for a ward to assist her in minding her children while she pursues her young, struggling business. Tartaver’s search for a prospective nanny leads him to his maternal uncle, Kwaghzever, a senile, serial widower, who is initially reluctant to accede to Tartaver’s request. But after much persuasion, he agrees to give out her daughter, Hembafan with the expectation that Hembafan will be sent to school. Both Kwaghzever and Tartaver are unanimous that Hembafan’s education will positively affect and transform the future fortunes of the family. But this hope and expectation miscarries soon after Hembafan arrives Adikpo-London. She is ill-treated by her aunt and is not put in school as promised. To aggravate the situation, Ordega, the polygamist husband of Kwaghtser who is also an Adikpo-London-based driver and transporter, sexually abuses the innocent teenager until she gets pregnant. In the whirligig of tragic events following the discovery of Ordega’s sexual predation and marital infidelity, Tartaver dies of shock and heart attack. Hembafan becomes mentally disturbed and family ties become strained and almost irreparably fractured and destroyed. As the story ends, every bit of personal integrity, moral fibre, family cohesion and cultural fabric is severely put to test, undermined and almost blown to smithereens. The result is a tragic story whose narrative motions end on a portentous note.
The title of the novel is imagistic, resonant and symbolic in its layered signifying possibilities. Waves are traditionally associated with water bodies especially seas and oceans. They are rhythmic, restless, repetitive, insistent and powerful. They sometimes even push beyond boundaries in their transgressive outreach and many times cause havoc and destruction as can be seen in the case of hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis with catastrophic effects. Waves of pain signify the repetitiveness of the pain – physical, psychological, emotional, traumatic – many of the characters have experienced in the novel. Indeed, Tartaver is so traumatized by disappointment that he is swept away to the ancestral domain by the waves of psychological pain. Hembafan, the innocent heroine, is consumed by the waves of psychic pain as she is driven to the fringes of life and ends in the refuse dump. Mlumun and Kwaghtser are both devastated by the pain of personal loss of a dependable husband and father in Tartaver. Similarly, Kwaghzever and his entire household are afflicted with the emotional pain of losing a family member to insanity. Ordega, the notorious polygamist and philanderer is wrecked by guilt and psychological pain for spousal infidelity and for repeatedly sexually molesting Hembafan and preying on her innocence and youthful inexperience. These waves of pain are conditioned by the choices the characters make which have spiraling repercussions on themselves, others and society. The novelist, therefore, invites us to be more deliberate, prudent and restrained in our choices and judgements so as not to offend or assault the sensibilities and vulnerabilities of others.
The story is spatially set in Tivland and alternates mainly between Makurdi and Naka in Gwer West (Nagi) and between Makurdi, Gboko and Adikpo in Kwande. It can be safely established that this setting cuts across much of the cartography of Tiv country in Benue State and some of its sights, sounds, cuisine/foodways, social habits and cultural norms. Temporally, it is set at a time when Tiv society is in the throes of modernity and perhaps postcolonial becoming. This is a time the ac(r)t of letter writing as a means of social communication and transmitting information was fashionable. For instance, Kwaghtser has to write her father, Tartaver to request for a nanny and Tartaver in turn resorts to letter writing to be able to communicate his intention to visit Kwaghtser in Adikpo. This means that at this time, science, information and technological systems like the phenomenon of mobile telephony, instant messaging, social/digital media had not been introduced. Today, we sometimes wonder how we were able to live in such epochs and survived meaningfully as the transmission of information was abominably slow, tentative and even hazardous.
The authorial style is lucid, lightsome and accessible in an affirmative sense. The language is simple and seasoned but also nuanced with indigenous idioms and tropes which lend themselves to elastic interpretive possibilities. The author, for instance, liberally deploys proverbs to enrich the narrative. Proverbial language inserts vernacularity and confers cultural authenticity on African writing in European languages. Chinua Achebe’s historical fiction, notably Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine and Akachi Ezeigbo’s trilogy: Children of the Eagle, The Last of the Strong Ones provide a veritable prototype for proverbial idiom in Nigerian fiction. Appropriately, therefore, Damna’s Waves of Pain is in a soulful dialogue with these textual bodies. For instance, “the longer you hold water in your mouth, the easier it is for it to become saliva” (p.70) validates another proverb about how a wound can fester and degenerate into a sore or gangrene if it is not promptly attended to. Here Kwaghzever is pressing the need for Tartaver to understand the enormity of the situation regarding his silence and patience about Hembafan, his teen-age daughter given to Kwaghtser as a ward in Adikpo London.
Ritual performance as an index of traditional culture is hinted at in the killing of dogs, adventitious or deliberate, in the presence of women which inevitably shuts their wombs from conceiving or having miscarriages/stillbirths or losing children in their infancy. This condition persists until sacrifices are offered as ritual requisites for the cleansing of the infected women before health and wholeness are restored. Mlumun, Tartaver’s wife, is a victim of this swende cult which forbids women from witnessing the killing of a dog, not to talk of participating in the killing or its burial. As punishment for helping her husband in the burial of a neighbour’s thieving dog, Mlumun is unable to have more children after Kwaghtser until she reaches menopause before the medical malady is diagnosed by a native medicine-man. The author draws our attention to the tragic fate of many women who have been victims of barrenness due to the materiality of such corrosive cultic practices promoted by patriarchy.
Another Tiv ritual which the author foregrounds is the imborivungu. It is believed to be one of the most consistent and talked-about in Tivland. The imborivungu is a relic made from a human bone or carved from wood or some other material. It is usually figurine-like and shaped in human form. It is credited with a supra-normal essence and believed to attract good fortune, wealth, fertility/productivity of children and livestock and abundance to the owner. For its ritual efficacy, the imborivungu periodically requires blood, particularly human blood, to be able to function optimally. When this ritual performance is consummated, the imborivungu is believed to fulfil its part of the bargain. The modest prosperity of Tartaver and his wife, Mlumun in Naka as their businesses blossom is attributed to this cult. It is believed by the people that the frequent miscarriages of Mlumun is a ploy to harvest blood for the imborivungu until their inability to have more children is otherwise proven to be another cause, the swende cult.
The persistent menace of Fulani killer-herdsmen, one of the most dreaded and vicious terrorist groups in the world, constitutes a hard ground which the author tills only cautiously. The Fulani terrorist scourge appears to be like the proverbial hot yam that the eater has difficulty in chewing properly before hastily swallowing it. Yet it hardly disappears into the narrative horizon as it forms part of the plot even though it does not enjoy elaborate narrative attention. The Fulani conundrum remains a recurring decimal as it is hinted at repeatedly in conversations by characters including Tartaver and Kwaghtser especially the dramatic scene on a Naka market day as they consume burukutu, the local brew at Jigida’s liquor shop. In the dramatic trajectory of the plot, the Fulani t/error menace represents a significant shift in the temporal framing of the story from the past to the present.
The central, governing message of the novel is that the child, particularly the girl-child, deserves diligent devotion and attention. She should not be treated as a commodity, chattel, merchandise or household property. She is not a toy, doll or mannequin for patriarchal manipulation and male sexual gratification and eventual disposal. She deserves functional and full-valued education in the best tradition. She is as much a complementary vector to the male child and so central to societal engineering. This is because an educated girl-child or woman is a blessing to her family and society. Therefore, to educate a girl-child is to educate the entire society. Hembafan’s misfortune as she becomes starved and ill-treated by Kwaghtser and sexually molested and exploited by Ordega, an in-law old enough to be her father, represents one of the greatest social injustices and prevalent misdemeanours ravaging society in modern times. However, this unrelieved spectre is underreported or even kept under a despicable dictatorship of silence. It is gratifying that Damna appropriates narrative rites to speak on this silent but nevertheless deleterious calamity. By so doing she has given voice to the girl-child and brought her vulnerability to the arenas of public discourse.
A story told in the omniscient third narrative perspective, Waves of Pain is remarkably rounded, fast-paced and but also chilling, spell-binding. Its greatest asset is that is ends on a speculative note, that is, without a neat closure thereby instituting a range of interpretations as to what will be outcome of the proceedings. Damna has succeeded in negotiating an important issue which has been gnawing at the soul of society. This is a brilliant and commendable effort which weaves everyday reality into fiction to enable everydayness function within a healthy didactic and pedagogic dynamic.
This story is a powerful commentary on the imperatives of social control and cultural transmission. The author has intelligently discharged her narrative duties but will need to pay greater attention to issues relating to orthography, punctuation and dialogue. I highly recommend this book to all for their reading pleasure and aesthetic cognition.