[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
