Originally published at ABC Arts Online, September 2015
Anyone checking
the odds for the Man Booker Prize shortlist in the week leading up to the
announcement of the final six novels on September 15, would have found Chigozie
Obioma’s The Fishermen rather languishing
as an outsider among the 13 long-listed works.
Many literary
commentators, however, felt momentum was stirring around the Nigerian’s debut, and so it
proved as the novel duly made the final six. This honour, which comes to Obioma
when he is not yet 30 years old, positions him as among Africa’s most dynamic
young literary voices, with The Fishermen
lauded in critical circles in Europe and the United States, even if it did meet
with some coolness from Africa itself, where the unfortunate
suggestion of tokenism in relation to the Booker has emerged.
Obioma’s
appearance in Australia in August for the Byron Bay Writers Festival came
shortly after he had been named on the Booker long-list, news which he seemed
to greet with smiling bewilderment, and which also ensured that one of the
nation’s biggest regional writers’ festivals enjoyed an extra frisson of
excitement over the nascent author’s presence. “I’m just looking forward to
whatever comes, and enjoying the fun,” Obioma said at the festival.
Obioma was born
and grew up in the southwestern Nigerian city of Akure in a large family, a
fact that heavily informed the theme of brotherhood in his novel. He eventually
left to study in Cyprus, his journey through academia resulting in his recent
appointment as a professor of literature at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, via
a stint living in Turkey. He confesses to missing Nigeria constantly and visits
regularly, but his absence from his homeland has been essential to his fiction.
“I think [being away] has shaped my perspective in a way it wouldn’t have been had
I remained in Nigeria. As much as I miss home, there’s something about that
view that I think I’d lose if I went back to Nigeria and became immersed in the
society there.”
Originally a
short story, The Fishermen was
published in Australia in February. Set in Akure in the nineties, the novel’s
premise is undoubtedly compelling: whilst fishing at a river, four brothers
encounter a local madman, Abulu, who prophesises that one sibling will be
killed by another. The plot that unfolds invokes myth and hints at magical
realism and is sad, whilst asking questions of Nigerian identity, familial ties
and psychological fortitude.
The narrative is
told from the perspective of a grown-up Benjamin, the fourth brother, while it
is the eldest brother, Ikenna, who the prophecy most affects. However, it is
the character of Abulu that is perhaps key to an understanding of The Fishermen. Abulu, a soothsaying
mentally ill vagrant who commits shocking acts of sexual deviance and onanism,
is employed by Obioma for reasons beyond merely driving the plot. Abulu
represents a disturbing nationwide trend in Nigeria of dispossessed mentally
ill people being “unclaimed”, roaming the street, feeding where they can and
sleeping rough. The creation of Abulu was partly designed to draw attention to
their plight.
“It used to
bother me as a child,” says Obioma. “There were times when there were many of
these people in Akure, and sometimes you’d even grow relationships with them.
As children we’d be playing soccer and would see one pass and we would say
‘dance for us’ – we felt this was an adult that we could command and make
requests of. We would play with them and mock them, but then you wake up one
morning and see one of them dead in the road.”
Obioma has
established, with some friends, a website – and potentially a campaign – to draw
attention to and help ‘Abulus’ across Nigeria.
Obioma’s other,
more complex, intention for Abulu reflects another essential theme of The Fishermen: that of colonialism and
its lingering legacy in the author’s homeland. The story is an explicit
allegory for Western influence on Nigeria, which, he says, “came in from the
outside and altered the unity and civilisation of things”. Obioma cites American
historian Will Durant’s oft-quoted words, “A civilisation is not conquered from
without until it has destroyed itself from within”. So as the British Empire
infiltrated Nigerian culture and society to transform it from its insides out,
Abulu’s portent of tragedy for the young brothers works in similarly
destructive ways for this family.
“I wanted an
external force that could come in from the outside and sow a seed within a
structure so that the destruction begins from within, and in the book that seed
is of course the prophecy.”
A further layer
in this, Obioma says, is that in other Nigerian literature, most notably Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958),
perceived madness is aligned with colonial forces. Obioma says, “Anything that
comes in and disrupts what is happening is labelled a madman in African
culture. In Achebe’s book, the white man was foreseen as crazy, but at the end
of the day they were successful in overpowering the tribes.
“The symbol for
the West was the madman, who has entered our house, claiming the single truth
of the universe.” Abulu’s impact on the brothers represents, in essence, the
encroachment of Western imperialism on Africa, complete with its far-reaching
and long-term consequences.
Though the book’s
socio-political priorities are overt, The
Fishermen is also a novel about childhood, family and, importantly,
recollection and memory. The story is told by an adult Benjamin remembering his
youth, with all the unreliable, ambiguous literary qualities that come with
that. Yet it is also a paean to Obioma’s own nineties childhood, with its
madmen, brothers and fishing, and it is into the vat of memory that he has
plunged for his material and inspiration, rather than any more academic or journalistic
form of research. This inexactness and freedom to embellish and exaggerate
personal experience, is partly what defines Obioma’s style.
“I have come to
prefer relying on hindsight, or just what I imagine something was, more than a
complete snapshot of things,” he says. “Recollection works in strange ways, and
it’s good to have it malleable, so I can fill in the blanks. All you need is
the tip of the iceberg and you can draw a massive portrait from that.”
“I still think
fiction is an untrammelled zone, you can do whatever you want with it, even if
you want to write historical fiction.”
As a Nigerian
author writing about colonialism, it is arguably inevitable that comparisons
with the late Achebe, who for many shaped and defined Africa’s literary
identity, will arise at some stage. The New
York Times review of The
Fishermen went as far as to dub Obioma as Achebe’s direct heir. It is an
unfortunate yoke for him to carry – though deeply respectful of Achebe and
flattered by the comparison, Obioma’s more seminal influences include other
Nigerians such as Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka and younger writers Chimananda
Ngozi Adichie and Helon Habila.
In the critical
response to The Fishermen, the
spectre of Achebe shows no signs of going away, however. The New York Times’ pronouncement, Obioma
says, has aligned him with Achebe to the point that “nobody wants to listen to
what I have to say”, while he also points out important differences between The Fishermen and Achebe’s most
celebrated work, Things Fall Apart.
“Although we
both tackle the effect of colonialism on Africa and Nigeria, Achebe did not
have the mythic dimension that my book has, and his setting is very different –
mine is set in contemporary Nigeria and his was historical.”
Achebe never won
the Man Booker Prize for one of his novels, though he was awarded the Man
Booker International Prize, for a body of work, in 2007. The only Nigerian to
date to take the Man Booker Prize was Ben Okri in 1991 for The Famished Road. The 2015 prize is announced on October 13, and
though the odds on his winning will probably be long once again, Obioma will
surely focus on simply enjoying the swell that propels his novel toward further
acclaim and a wider readership. It is conceivable that The Fishermen’s journey could surprise even its author yet.
The
Fishermen is available through Scribe
Publications.
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