[For Festus Iyayi: radical humanist; writer; neorealist artificer]
What is the decisive shift that occurred in Iyayi’s writings in the 1990s? Can one even talk of a “shift” in a corpus that is comparatively “slim”, comprising, as it does, only four published works of fiction? My response to these two questions is, of course, affirmative: yes, there is a very discernible shift in Iyayi’s writings; and yes, one can validly talk of shifts even within two, not to say four, works of an author – as long as such shifts are so apparent, so decisive as not to even remotely seem to be the factitious projection of the critic’s own fantasies or delusions.
The most apparent, the most undeniable shift in Iyayi’s writings is the one between, on the one hand, the first three published works of the late 70s and 80s, Violence (1979), The Contract (1982) and Heroes (1986) and, on the other hand, Awaiting Court Martial (1996). The most discernible change is formal or generic: the first three titles are works of full-blown novelistic fiction while Awaiting Court Martial is a collection of fifteen short stories only one of which, “Jegede’s Madness”, has the length and the narrative scope to qualify as a novella. It is of course possible that the ten years between the publication of Heroes and Awaiting Court Martial might not really amount to a genuine temporal hiatus since some of the stories collected in the latter could very well have been written either before the publication of the former or contemporaneously with it. But there are clear indications that with the move from the novel to the short story something very decisive, very fundamental has taken place in Iyayi’s writings. Indeed, it is on account of this very fact that I gave this essay its title: writing, as if life itself depended on it. For this title is far more appropriate, far more germane to the kind of writing that we confront in Awaiting Court Martial than what we see of literary art in the preceding three works of fiction, even though there are intimations of this kind of writing here and there in the previous works.
This observation has a rather intriguing aspect that we ought to highlight here: if Iyayi is unquestionably so much at his very best as a writer in the collection of short stories, what is even more enigmatic is the fact that in Awaiting Court Martial we encounter a form of radical writing that is not easy to categorize, a mode of storytelling that inscribes literary radicalism far more complexly than anything we find in the three novels. Let me expatiate on this crucial claim by starting, first, with some incontrovertible differences in themes, style and narrative technique between these two phases of Iyayi’s writings before moving to more substantive points of theoretical and ideological import that I shall subsume under the rubrics of social realism and neorealism.
The plots, the characters and the themes of the first three novels characteristically revolve around the struggles of protagonists against an oppressive, neocolonial social order that is unspeakable in its barbarity, ferocity and mediocrity. In Violence, this takes the form of an unrelenting struggle of Idemudia, the protagonist, to get a better sense of the corrosive effects of this barbaric social order on both his dire social circumstances and on his inner life, especially as this is excruciatingly played out in tortured and uneasy relations with his wife, Adisa, and with his co-workers. In The Contract, this oppressive social order seems infinitely more entrenched, more impregnable, so much so that the protagonist, Ogie Obala, decides that the best thing to do is to find out how best to compromise with it on his own terms so as not to be eaten up and destroyed by it. And in Heroes, with graphic, terrifying accounts of atrocities on both sides of the Nigerian civil war as its searing backdrop, the protagonist, Osime Iyere, is in a world even more horrific in its dehumanizing and brutalizing acts and effects than what we had encountered in the two previous novels. For this reason, Osime Iyere finds that he must do something that neither of the protagonists of the two previous novels have had to do and that is completely and existentially unlearn virtually everything he had always thought and taken for granted – about his country, his neighbors, the combatant forces in the civil war and their conflicting claims and, above all else, himself.
In all three novels, Iyayi writes so powerfully and so truthfully about the Nigerian neocolonial version of what Hannah Arendt has famously called the banality of evil that it is no exaggeration to state that the sheer vigor and eloquence of the testamentary quality of his writing in these three novels is almost without equal in postcolonial Nigerian literature. In all, I have read these three novels several times and each single act of reading finds me in the profoundly disquieting stance of being compelled to actually like the novelistic depiction of an order of existence in our country about which there are almost no redeeming things to write about. In such moments when I have been either reading or rereading Violence, The Contract and Heroes, I have had to remind myself that I also liked Dante’s literary depiction of purgatory in Inferno; the difference of course is that the “inferno” so memorably rendered in Iyayi’s three novels is one that we are living in, the one that continues to haunt us at the present moment when this essay is being written.
The strength, the quality of the writing in these three novels thus rests a lot on evocations of place, context and environment that are external to the inner lives, the inner struggles of the protagonists. But not exclusively so, for at the same time that he invests so much narrative space and skill to the depiction of external forces impacting on his protagonists, Iyayi manages to get deep under the emotional and psychic skin of these characters. In graphic terms, the characters literally and figuratively have their backs against the wall of material and psychological survival, whether in the jungle of the commoditized public sphere of endlessly crooked business deals or the emotional wildernesses of marital or erotic private spaces in which spouses and lovers find that the “enemy” is as much within as it is outside in corrupt public officials and their repressive political misrule. Indeed, with the possible exception of Soyinka, no radical Nigerian writer has explored so powerfully this interior psychic and moral space of the “enemy within” in his protagonists.
I must of course not fail to note here that occasionally this exploration by Iyayi of psychic and moral self-division within his characters is handled rather awkwardly in a formulaic manner in which “voices” representing either “good” or “evil”, rectitude or cynicism battle for the soul of the protagonists. But side by side with these instances of predictable and “convenient” narrative crutches, there are innumerable instances in which, through either dialogue or extended ruminative authorial description, Iyayi stands tall and ramrod straight as a writer as he confidently and masterfully deploys fresh, probing and often mesmerizing prose to do the work of laying bare the inner moral and psychological torments or, as the case may be, victories of his characters. And to his great credit, Iyayi confers this particular narrative “privilege” as much on the “heroes” as on the “villains”, as much on the workers and the oppressed as on the exploiters and their cronies and hirelings, especially in the first two of the three novels, Violence and The Contract.
So much then for what we encounter by way of characters, plot and narrative style in Iyayi’s three novels of the Seventies and Eighties, all pointing to a radical, committed writer who very deliberately if also often memorably bends the art and craft of fiction to openly avowed ideological and political purposes. The term “social realism” has been applied to these three novels; some critics have even been more specific and have mentioned the more ideologically loaded label of “socialist realism”. There is no denying the appropriateness of these terms to Iyayi’s writing in these novels. But then, there are socialist realists and there are socialist realists. The label, the badge does not automatically confer significance on the writer; significance has to be earned and Iyayi consistently gives proof in his novels that he has earned it. He is definitely one of the most successful socialist realists in contemporary Nigerian writing and one of the important exemplars of the “school” in postcolonial African writing. But more on this point later in this tribute.
With regard to the book of short fiction, Awaiting Court Martial, we are in an entirely different literary, artistic universe than the worlds of the three novels. Perhaps the most compelling proof of this is that no critic or scholar can “accuse” Iyayi of either “social realism” or “socialist realism” in this collection of short stories. There are some very obvious, very easily perceived indications of this shift, but so are there much more subtle factors that require critical vigilance and “readerly” sensitivity to nuances of language and style to discern them. Let us take the more obvious factors first, on the condition that we will then subject their “obviousness” to radical, deconstructive critique.
In Awaiting Court Martial, there are absolutely no characters like Idemudia and Adisa (Violence), Ogie Obala, Rose Idebale and Eunice Agbon (The Contract) and Osime Iyere (Heroes), characters who struggle mightily to come to grips with the crushing weight of the oppression, exploitation and corruption in the land and in their lives. Of the fifteen stories in the collection, only four – the title story, “Awaiting Court Martial”, “Saira”, “Extracts from the Testimony”, and “When They Came for Akika Lamidi” – have characters or themes that entail the depiction of struggles against oppression in its myriad forms and expressions. But in none of these stories are we close to what we encounter in the three novels and the clearest sign of this is the telling fact that in each of these four stories in Awaiting Court Martial, the struggle is utterly defeated. Moreover – and this point is crucial – in the eleven other stories in the collection, the struggles, the conflicts have far less to do with socio-economic or socio-political issues than with confrontations that could more appropriately be described as existential, woven as they are around the dilemma or the anguish of how to live or die well in a world in which deceit, bad faith, cynicism and rampant indifference to human suffering are the reigning values that determine and shape all relationships. Indeed, in comparison with Iyayi’s three novels, it is nothing short of astonishing that the working class in particular and, more generally, subaltern groups and those who struggle on their behalf are, so to speak, greatly “underrepresented’ in Awaiting Court Martial. Conversely, characters with a middle class professional background clearly predominate in the stories in the volume.
These are the more apparent, the more obvious shifts in character, “plot” and themes that we find in the movement from the earlier three novels to the collection of shorter stories in the book that I, along with a few other critics, deem the best work to date of Iyayi as a writer. But what are the not so apparent, more subtle shifts in Awaiting Court Martial the perception of which should lead us, as I wish to suggest, to an interpretation of this work that might lead us to a fruitful, radical and progressive analysis of a collection of stories in which, for the most part, we encounter only catastrophes and defeats? This will be our starting point in next week’s concluding essay in the series.
To be continued.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
