Tag: Festus Iyayi

[For Festus Iyayi: radical humanist; writer; neorealist artificer]

Jacobinism: 1. The principles and practices of the Jacobins. 2. The egalitarianism and terrorism of the Jacobins of the French Revolution of 1789. 3. Any violent or revolutionary political extremism
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged), 1993

An Awaiting Court Martial there is a great, romping delight in telling stories and telling them well, much greater than what we get in the earlier novels. This is the most distinctive literary mark of this book of short stories. Of course the fictional imagination is not without considerable merit in the three novels, but simply in terms of stories as stories, of tales told for their gripping or spellbinding effect, we are almost in a new imaginative territory in this particular work of Iyayi. Much of this effect depends on the stories themselves, on their haunting, spectral quality. Let me give a few examples.

In “Jegede’s Madness” which, at about 42 pages is not only the longest story in the collection but is also formalistically a novella, the tale climaxes with the maniacal search of the protagonist, Jonathan Alawa, for a cure for his sexual impotence. He consults experts in scientific medicine, to no avail. Then he turns to the “witchdoctors” and every single one he consults tells him that he must sleep with a particular madwoman, a prescription which at first he rejects until desperation pushes him to try to sleep with every madwoman in surrounding cities and villages, still without any success. Meanwhile he does not know that the madwoman he must sleep with is his own wife, Elisa, a great beauty of surpassing aloofness who had gone mad after a White Colonial District Officer had tried forcibly but unsuccessfully to seduce her, the seduction being something Alawa himself had arranged in order to become a fabulously wealthy middleman with the colonial and commercial lords of the land. At the end of the tale, Alawa himself goes mad as his entire palatial mansion is overrun by the miasmic stench from the gargantuan mass of his unflushed defecations.

In both the title story, “Awaiting Court Martial” and the sixth story in the collection, “When They Came for Akika Lamidi”, we find harrowing tales of characters who are completely crushed by a military dictatorship whose assumption of power over life and death is however compromised and undercut by the paranoia of the rulers. In the title story, the victims of this paranoiac, sadistic power are two siblings who, from within the ranks of the autocratic military machine itself, break ranks with the arbitrariness of militarism and confront the madness of the rulers with – laughter, a laughter that rings out powerfully at the very moment when the victims should have been shaking with terror. Akika Lamidi, the eponymous protagonist of the story in whose title his name features prominently, is a newspaper cartoonist. On the fateful night on which “they” came for him, he and members of his family at first think the “visitors” are armed robbers. But from the terror of what to expect from lawless bandits, Akika soon moves to the more paralyzing terror of what is coming from the “lawful” squad from the SSS that has come for him on account of his subversive cartoons against the regime. He is very brutally killed, but before the termination of his life he has a short but riveting conversation with the murderous visitors during which Akika experiences the satisfaction of discovering that the supposedly omnipotent military rulers have an irrational, obsessive fear of him and his corrosively subversive newspaper cartoons.

I do not wish to give the impression that in all the stories in Awaiting Court Martial, it is a recurring case of terrifying or harrowing endgame for the protagonists. Definitely, except for “Sunflowers”, the shortest and the last story in the collection which ends on a hopeful, optimistic note, no story in the collection affords the reader an unambiguous relief from the parade of life-changing encounters with the darkest impulses of the human psyche. But there are stories – like “Na Only One Pikin”, “Our Father Is Coming Home”, “She Will Be Buried Here”, and “Three Times Unlucky” – in which, metaphorically speaking, after the purgatory comes the redemption as profoundly chastened characters learn more about themselves and the world than they had ever remotely thought possible or anticipated. What I can affirm as true to all the stories in the collection is the fact that Iyayi goes to the roots of characters as individuals driven either by their passions and appetites – for sex, for love, for life, for fulfillment – or by their fears, their weaknesses, their manias and eccentricities.

In such a wide and capacious canvas, workers and the poor do not occupy the centre of narrative or thematic attention as in the three previous novels. All classes and fractions of classes are present in the totality of the stories. What is even more subtly and sensitively hinted at but deliberately never made explicit in the stories is the fact that class is refracted through desires and manias that fuel the narrative energy of the stories as Iyayi constantly weaves into narratives of existential crises brief but unforgettable snippets of description or dialogue detailing the nightmare that reigns everywhere in a country under the heel of a draconian, corrupt and dehumanizing military rule. The nightmare reality is there, omnipresent and suffusing, but it is so ineluctably rendered by Iyayi that the casual reader might miss it, almost in the manner in which blood runs through the arteries and the veins, invisible to the naked eye but incontrovertibly there as the source of an organism’s life or, conversely, ill-health. This is what makes Awaiting Court Martial perhaps the most subtle, the most powerful literary work that we have on militarist misrule in Nigeria in particular and the African continent in general. Thus, radical class consciousness is very present, very clamant in these stories, only it is no longer consciousness of class as seen primarily or exclusively through the prism of oppressors versus the oppressed, of exploiters ranged against the exploited as we encounter it in the three novels, Violence, The Contract and Heroes. This is the mark of the decisive move in Iyayi’s works from social realism to what, for want of a better term, I am calling neorealism in this tribute.

Famously of infamously, depending on where one stands ideologically, Soyinka once called leftists and radicals in Nigerian literature and criticism of the late 70s and 80s “Leftocrats”, going further to call that stage of our modern literary and intellectual culture a “Jacobin moment”. Soyinka used these terms neither in neutrality nor approval, but with scathing disparagement of what he considered the revolutionary, doctrinaire extremism of the Osofisans, the Iyayis, the Omotosos, the Jeyifos, the Darahs and the Osundares. Well, Soyinka should know, for he also had his own individual Jacobin literary moments in such works as The Man Died, Season of Anomie and Madmen and Specialists!

If there is indeed a Jacobin moment in modern Nigerian literature that produced plays, poems, fiction and essays that were accomplished on literary as well as political-ideological grounds, Iyayi’s first three works of fiction that I have placed within the social realist mode in this tribute loomed large in that formation of revolutionary writings of exceptional force. In this respect, Iyayi is in the company of contemporaries and fellow travelers like Odia Ofeimun, Niyi Osundare, Kole Omotoso and Femi Osofisan, all of whom, without exception, had their own inevitable appointment with Jacobinism and then moved beyond and away from it when, gradually and subtly, we discovered that the revolution was going to come only through a long and complex historical process.

There are two things to note here in passing. In the first place, this was a literary and cultural Jacobinism that was, unlike Soyinka’s ferocious incarnation of it in the works I identified above, a collective movement, a very conscious and in some cases programmatic one. Secondly, it is worthy of note that Iyayi’s “Jacobinism” was more grounded and more systematically thought through than that of any others among his contemporaries, especially in his first and third novels, Violence and Heroes. And for good measure, if we can now talk of a Post-Jacobin phase in our national literature that began in the 90s and persists in many currents to the present moment, Iyayi’s book of short stories, Awaiting Court Martial, is perhaps more paradigmatic of this phase than any other single work of which I can personally think. What meaning, what portents do I attach to this observation, this claim?

By way of indirectly engaging this question, I wish to write specifically now of my rather very astonishing personal relations with Iyayi as a writer. Among the radical, committed writers of my generation, I have had the closest ideological affinities and activist engagements with Iyayi. It strikes me now as very odd that it is precisely with Iyayi that I have never had any conversations on writing. Both within the specific context of ASUU and in the broader framework of the social movement for progressive change in our country, we had long conversations on radical politics and activism on nearly every subject. But we never once talked about writing! With Osofisan, Ofeimun, Osundare, Omotoso, Darah and the late Omafume Onoge I had innumerable discussions about art, writing and politics. But never with Iyayi! It is extremely embarrassing for me to say it now, but it was always as if we had far more important things to discuss and act upon than – mere writing!

Writing – good, significant and radical writing – should never be considered a mere subsidiary activity by a truly mature progressive or revolutionary movement. This deeply problematic attitude has indeed had one deleterious effect on the institutional aspects of the publication of Iyayi’s works, virtually all of them, but especially the most accomplished one, Awaiting Court Martial. Let me state this as simply and directly as possible: the publishers of Iyayi’s works, Longman and Malthouse, did very little of the pre-publication editorial work that all works in general require and significant works positively demand. Indeed, it is no secret that Longman thought of the series within which Iyayi’s novels were published as just a cut above the Onitsha Market chapbook tradition! There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that had Iyayi’s first three novels been published within the imprimatur of the much more professional Heinemann African Writers Series, his reputation and the standing of those three novels would be much greater and wider than it is now. With Malthouse and Awaiting Court Martial, the level of professionalism was even more compromised, both editorially and typographically. It is thus a telling mark of the quality and strength of Iyayi’s writing in these works that they rose above the institutional constraints of the circumstances of their production. But this should not blind us to one urgent task: Awaiting Court Martial needs to be re-issued, this time with the kind of gifted and conscientious editorial work that it deserves.

If this tribute does nothing else, I certainly hope that it has now laid to rest the ghost of that unwitting philistine attitude to art and writing of the Nigerian Left in the 70s and 80s, the attitude that regarded writing as something you did on the side while you were engaged in the “real” tasks of the revolution. This is only one among a host of revaluations that we need to do and I can think of few as rich with possibilities for this task as Iyayi, the writer, the artificer, the consummate storyteller.

Concluded.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

[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