Love v

I am going to limit myself to just two examples, the more and the most recent. The more recent is called Makuo’s-Mother. She was my colleague for a little more than four months may be less. Married, with kids some of whom are probably my age-mates. She is beautiful too, yes, yellow complexioned, tall, shapely, tending to look younger than her real age, yes. But none of these is really the point.
The point is she and I became ‘friends,’ this older, married woman. And those quotation marks I have enclosed ‘friends’ in are not at all idle, make no mistake. By Satan I should have vulgarized language to write, say, Ada and I became ‘friends’! If I had to write that sentence in respect of Ada it should read Ada and I became friends. Without the quotation marks.
Ada was as Makuo’s-Mother another beautiful-woman colleague of mine, only younger, single, and, I think, hoping or is it expecting to be married. Quite naturally if you like. The thing some people might call a ‘typical’ woman in fact. Ada might come to work in the morning and say good morning to me first or else I will say it to her first. Not that it really matters either way. Still if you happen to inhabit my Eastern part of Nigeria you will find that such an otherwise trifle thing as who says good morning first as yet is not wholly bereft of consequence. So though it doesn’t really matter either way, if Ada happened to say good morning to me first and I am in one of my lately more frequent evaluative temper I would hear its attendant hesitancy, like that sort, of an agonized choice, like she’s contemplating whether the granting of this boon would be ultimately worth her while or not. Not that this is Ada’s peculiarity, nor is it a suggestion that she is socially offensive, not at all. Indeed it may be that I am the only one who ever makes this manner of observation. So it’s not really so much about her as about me. I raise it here only because of the elucidating perspective I hope it might give to the point I am making about Makuo’s-Mother and I being ‘friends,’ that’s all. Actually I was friends with Ada too, as I was with the rest of my colleagues at this time, male and female, older and age-mates alike.
On the contrary if Makuo’s-Mother came to work in the morning she says ‘Nnaa good morning’ to me and I would respond ‘good morning Nne m.’ Now following the rules she has no business whatever saying good morning to me first. It’s like your mother waking up in the morning in my Eastern part of Nigeria and saying good morning to you first. In extreme circumstances that might actually betoken something quite ominous. It really might. But there it was. And of course being something of a freak myself I took it all quite in my stride. At any rate it might even be she took a shine to me in the first place because of that freak bit, you see.
After about three weeks of my becoming her and the others’ colleague, we transited to contriving an embrace to go with the good mornings. Again this is not a trifle thing. Face it, my Eastern part of Nigeria is still quite considerably a prudish civilization, and a woman hugging a man so publicly and blatantly is a remarkable degree of big deal as yet. It would be utterly unthinkable to Ada for instance to come to work in the morning and hug me as part of good morning ritual.
If at any event Ada happened to do that it might quite expectedly be as artificial and hesitant as her initial good morning. It might also mean she might have cause, say, to 'ask' me to 'help' her buy 'credit'  to be 'repaid' me later of course. Which of course I won't do. Which of course doesn't mean she's a bad lot. Which of course doesn't mean I'm stingy. At worst it would mean she was being a lady and I was being an ungentleman.
But Makuo's-Mother once we had got to this stage quite so spontaneously in our friendship would not for the life of her leave out the embrace upon any morning. There were days she would come to work and for some reason be constrained to forget that exotic bit of our good morning till she had fixed one or other onus at her table. Then she would suddenly discover that I had been there all along, let out a hushed scream. 'O-o-o Nnaa I don't think you and I have greeted today!' And I would just have to get up, out from my own table and navigate towards her who already is making her own way towards me, riding, both of us, on the wheels of the puckish giggles of the rest of our colleagues. And we would say our good mornings. Needless to say wrapped around each other's embrace.
And I happen to possess an emotional bosom whereas it would seem the more normal, perhaps more natural possession of mankind is an emotional penis. If you plant a spontaneous, fussless, disinterested, unhesitant, blatant hug on my bosom, you can bet to have stirred up all the tenderest emotions in me, every single time. So you may guess how it so ‘broke’ my heart to leave Makuo's-Mother so shortly for a new work place. Not even the convulsed tears streaming down Oge's eyes did that much to me, Oge of the sparkling cheek-dimpling smile.
The most recent example is called Munachi's-Mother. She has been my colleague for only very little more than a month now. Married, three kids, all of whom are still mere infants. I have met her husband too, this one, a black sort of round-headed soft-spoken man who I think is a luckiest man alive for that singular fortune of the sort of wife. But none of these is the point. Again the point is I and Munachi's-Mother are 'friends.'
I was barely three weeks old in this new work place where I met her when on a Sunday I visited their, the female staff, quarters following an innocuous joke cracked earlier while we were at work in the course of a just past week. There are single, younger ladies here too as in the old place. I am friends with them too of course. They were profoundly tickled to see me all right. They asked teasingly what in Satan's name I was doing in their quarters, registered the usual courteous regret about not having cola. Oh well, except for Munachi's-Mother. She sort of managed to ultimately monopolize me as her personal guest following the prevailing submissions of courteous regret. I ended up with a decent dish of foofoo and ora soup. And a can of beer to booth! And that was it. The gesture has repeated itself since, as spontaneously, and fusslessly, and unhesitantly, and disinterestedly, and blatantly, with the result that all the tenderest emotions in me have been stirred up, being a possessor too of an emotional stomach, you see.
Of course the single, younger ones have ultimately on occasion made such another gesture. But then it’s never the same thing. You may find that it’s an initial step in the ‘asking,’ say, a ‘favour’ of you. Like the one who ‘asked’ another male colleague of mine to ‘please’ ride her on his motorbike to the gas station so she can refill her cooking-cylinder. This colleague came back from the granting of this favour only to regret it aloud in my hearing. Something to do with ingratitude I think. Poor thing. ‘Come on man, she’s a lady!’ My belly was bursting from sheer laughter. Of course this again doesn’t mean they are a bad lot, these single, younger ones, not at all. It only means I am probably an incorrigible freak.
So I find that, oftener, I and older, married women tend to be drawn more reflexively, more spontaneously to each other. I find oftener that what they and I feel towards each other, what we have between us, is much much closer to what human beings are striving to nominate when they speak of love. Perhaps because it contains the barest predation and tension and opportunism and… oh it makes you want to do something so mind-blowingly sweet towards them that their men will give you a deathly kick in the crotch! 

FLASH-LIGHTING ADICHIE'S 'WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS'

  For what it’s worth Chimamanda Adichie’s Ted Talk, ‘We should All Be Feminists’, is an excellent speech. Still I thought at the time I heard it that there were quite a number of points in it which begged clarification, as otherwise they might easily emerge somewhat rash, a bit too hurriedly thought up, and as such liable to misappropriation. In this regard three propositions from that speech stand out starkly fresh in my mind: first that literally ‘men rule the world;’ second that ‘bottom power is no power at all;’ and third that ‘culture does not make people rather people make culture.’ Now about the first two I believe that thinkers like Chinweizu have argued elaborately and convincingly enough against them. For example he has argued and logically enough too that for the claim that ‘men rule the world’ to be incontestably true ‘it would need to be also true that…public structures (captured in Adichie’s speech as ‘positions of power and prestige’) exhaust the modes and centres of power in society.’ But these don’t. For there indeed are other more subtle, less apparent modes and centres of power, namely, as Chinweizu has articulated some of them, womb power, cradle power, kitchen power, among others.   Incidentally what Chinweizu has nominated womb power is more or less exact same thing presented as bottom power in Adichie’s speech. With the difference of course that for the one this power is not at all a joke but terribly real and potent, whereas for the other it is ‘no power at all;’ at best it only means that the woman has a good root whereby she can tap into someone else’s power. And perhaps to buttress the shamness of this power Adichie points out that all we need do is consider where the man in question is either sick or in a bad mood or downright impotent. What she forgot however is that this said man is in reality the exception not the rule. Well perhaps one can really understand Adichie on this. It is probably only a woman who can actually say of bottom power that it is no power at all. Because what the rule-man actually is in reality is a most terrifyingly, most helplessly pathetic thing! As Chinweizu has put it, he is a ‘woman-fixated…macho’ who actually considers it ‘right and proper’ to give a woman sexual pleasure and even pay her for it into the bargain! He is the man who has the endowment or is it the handicap of a ‘deranging penis.’  Now this rule-man is not necessarily a natural phenomenon. If anything he is a cultural phenomenon. Which brings me to that third proposition from that speech which I consider worthy of elucidation, namely that ‘culture does not make people; people make culture.’ In fact for me in a way this is the most problematic if disturbing submission in that otherwise excellent talk. Particularly in the manner of its formulation. And not so much because it is downright false as that it is really only half-true. With the result that if it is not properly taken and understood it might be prone to a serious even dangerous misleading. For culture is an optical lens of sorts. And true enough the people who wear this lens probably evolved it in the first place and put it on. To that extent of initiation it would be definitely true that it is the people who make the culture. But having put this lens on, henceforth, it can no more be true that this culture does not make the people as it would be true that this lens they have on does not colour their vision. Indeed it might even turn out that culture makes people first and foremost even before they come themselves in turn to make it; for as Albert Camus once argued man begins living ever before he begins thinking. And is culture not a people’s way of life, nay their very life itself?   Now look again at the rule-man or ‘the heroic-macho’ (if you prefer Chinweizu’s terminology) who I have started arguing is a cultural phenomenon. How has he come about? In two really complementary ways basically: one, by the ‘magnification’ of the already potent enough womb/bottom power, and two, by a simultaneous ‘weakening’ of the male powers of sexual restraint. Chinweizu elaborates to us how these are worked out and there is hardly any question that they are an intensely cultural engineering. I will crave the reader’s indulgence here to quote him now at some length:   ‘For the magnification of womb power, mothers primarily rely on female sexual restraint as taught through codes of modesty. Codes which teach a girl coyness; which train her to defer her gratification for as long as possible, on pain of seeing herself (and being seen!) as sexually forward, loose or even immoral—such training makes a girl more sexually restrained than she would otherwise be. In some cultures, this training is combined with clitoridectomy, an operation which reduces the sexual excitability of a woman. This restraint, regardless of how achieved, gives a woman an enormous advantage in her dealings with sexually deranged men. Mothers magnify the advantage of female restraint by not teaching boys to restrain their sexual appetites, and even by teaching them to become hopelessly addicted to the female body. Now, weaning is meant to break a child’s natural attachment to its mother’s milk-bearing and warm, comforting body. However, many mothers continue to cuddle their boy children long past weaning time. Some allow them into their beds till they are four years or more. Further training to addict boys to the female body is done quite consciously, not only by mothers, but also by aunts, [female friends] and older girls generally [who hug and kiss and penis-tickle small boys].  ‘A child introduced to carnal pleasures by women’s expert hands will be willing, even eager in adult life, to do anything required of him in order to get what, for him, would have become the greatest reward on earth. The subconscious memory of that addictive pleasure will drive his behavior long after he attains puberty.’    There we are. There goes the cultural making of our rule-man, the result of which is a most compulsive female body addict!  However then can bottom power be to this man no power at all? However can this man in the last analysis really be nominated the ultimate ruler of the world? Being so effectively ruled by another element constituent of that world? Indeed however can it subsist that culture does not make him? Has not made him? And for that matter the woman to whose power he has been with such subtle expertise given over?   Of course Adichie’s speech is not by any means lacking in this awareness that culture in fact does make people, or else she would not have gone on to propose a raising of children differently. It is for this reason that I have said that the problem with her statement about culture is more in the manner of the formulation than in its spirit. It is therefore so vital that that real spirit and proper sense of it be highlighted to forestall the dangerous possibility of misappropriation.   I do not by any mean at all consider myself a feminist. As a matter of fact I mind the label very strongly. It’s even a sort of visceral thing for me: I find that the label is quite abrasive to my temperament. I even have an indefinable suspicion that the lot of the world’s problems in the end boils down to labels and labeling. At least initially. Which is not to say that I do not appreciate the feminist awareness and posture and argument. Actually I do. But it might be that the real feminism, the ultimately worthy and worthwhile kind the world seems to stand in dire need of, is less a question of the imputable disempowering of one half the human family by the other half than that the modes and structures and dynamics of power, and how these ought to justly and equitably operate among themselves and bear out in the interaction of the two constituent sexes of the human family have been culturally, and perhaps evolutionarily too, warped and violated by vulgar, primitively crippling denominations of gender. For we will find that several different kinds of feminisms are recognizable. Broadly the kind that really only seeks a sort of tilting of the balance so that a swap between the former exclusively male-dominant and former exclusively female-dominant modes and centres of power is enacted. This would merely amount to the kind of thing I think it’s Jauss would call a ‘quantitative’ change, with no real decisive, substantial change having taken place. Then there’s the kind which seeks real radical, ‘qualitative’ change, breaking the borders of prescriptions and definitions and labeling, ridding all the modes and centres of power of all any imposed and falsely particularizing feminine and masculine shackles, restoring to the categories their original primeval undefilement. Such is the feminism of Joan D. Chittister for instance 'geared to the creation of a society that rejects decisions, roles, and categories based on sex alone' and 'depends on the equal partnership of women and men'; obviously of Chimamanda Adichie; and, for all its curiosity, yes, even of Chinweizu, insofar as these all are really in the last analysis advocating a fairest, most equitable egalitarianism.

A Review of A. N. Akwanya’s Visitant on Tiptoe and Other Poems, Kraft Books: 2012

Visitant on Tiptoe and Other Poems is Akwanya’s third and by all means his fattest collection of poems, containing altogether over sixty poems spread out across seven sections. There is ‘Mother Teresa of Calcutta’ in which the persona is in amazed if worshipful wonderment at a certain elusive facility in Mother Teresa by which she seems to have carried out an otherwise forbidding life ‘cause’ almost as if without effort, as if she has been ‘created/ for [the] cause;/ for this cause given three or four times/ the normal size of soul’ (lines 2-4) with the result that ‘in the face of the assignment/ no decision need be made/ no thought exercised’ (9-11). But the almost incredible reposing of the facility in her is not all the fascination for this persona; even more wonderful to him is ‘that it be granted a Mother Teresa/on moving on/ to have impassioned another/ with a double share of that unmeasured soul’ (54-57). And this persona’s lingeringly enchanted tone may have already given him away as this one impassioned, Elisha-like, with a double share of that unmeasured soul.

            There is an anguished anxiety of roughshod displacement in ‘Vision and Mission,’ and perhaps because it is such a dreadful and mind-racking consciousness, the ultimate gesture is to banish the thought:

Better not think of the day

of all the measurement by theodolites

and hardy pathfinders;

the roar

of great earth movers

and the fatal charge

for trees unconscious

of their history,

their burden,

the unsigned peace they tower

over’ (last stanza).

The ‘conspiracy’ in ‘A Statistic’ may already also pertain to the ‘bats’ of ‘Vision and Mission,’ for the relentless voracious ‘encroachment’ that ultimately displaces the bats from ‘their undisputed property’ well parallels the ‘statistic[ization]’ of the ‘poor’ in ‘A Statistic’ with a similar roughshod unconcern, already signalled  perhaps by the flippant indifferent unnominality of ‘No one’ who will not take notice of his victim, no matter ‘how many countless numbers of them,’ no matter if they ‘grow to eighty percent/ or ninety’. This unheard cry of a sufferer subsists in ‘Footprints Indelible’ though there is an underlying sense throughout that this cry is unheard, cannot be heard because the inflicter of the suffering is the primordial elements themselves. The result is that any manner of confrontation will quite amount to hitting one’s head against  a wall to use the Underground Man’s idiom, that all the sufferer may do is hope  that the ‘killer winds/ hav[ing] leave/ to do another try’ (50-52) will ‘perhaps finally dislodge [his] blight’ (53-54). But even this hope is already weighted with dreadful foreboding, as the hearing of the hitherto unheard cry, the oil-land’s in this instance, even for the brief duration in the third stanza unleashes catastrophe and adversity to the bafflement of oil-land:

Though your prayers have been heard

and ferocious winds unleashed

to drive far

and scatter

the evil brooding over you

they have levelled

whole towns in faraway places

so that you have watched

dumbfounded,

uncomprehending;

the Highs too have wandered

all over the north

spreading draught

and chill

and misery

and have given new traction to the Sahara’s

southern surge (Stanza 3).

The same sort of hope is probably what is nursed by the ‘parents’ in ‘Best Names’ in regard to the ‘delicate bundle/ which served for some months/ as the centre of their world’ (Stanza 2), being so invested with ideality, a cushioning shock-absorbent facility which is more in the unreality of what may be than the reality of what is.

            The brevity of youth, the relentless advancement of ageing, and the curse ultimate of mortality are some of what exercises poetic impulse in ‘Losses Yet to Go’ as ‘gullies [are]/ eroded on either side/ by countless smiles’ over the rapidly accumulating years, while in ‘Home is a Feeling’ the exhausting terror of ‘run[ning] (line 8) from ‘hunting parties/ suspicious of your antelope limbs’ (4-5) manifests the awareness of this life-peril. There is a laborious quest for ‘refinement building to perfection’ in ‘Under Rule’ with the frail supineness of ‘the merely human’ eternally threatening the accomplishment of the ‘settled existence’ in ‘The Human Spirit’ where gratitude, a sentiment encountered already in ‘Losses Yet to Go,’ reappears again, now as a category of industry which ‘folks’ live, love and toil at (line 16).

            In ‘The Wrestler’ age has already wreaked havoc on youth wasting his muscles (stanza 3); with the result that ‘the wily old reaper’ can no more take him seriously as he well might ‘in his days,’ if he charges ‘these days’ bare-handed for ‘a tumble in the sand’(line 3). The putting out of ‘both hands’ (18) despite that all the ‘energy’ left is just what ‘he could charge/ bare hands with’ is itself a degree of resistance of age’s rather peremptory enfeeblement of youth, a level of confrontation of the monster, even if this is always already impotent, or as ‘Back on Track’ has it ‘pathetic’ (21). So that ‘to fight down laughter’s/ splutter behind averted hands’ (19-20) at these feeble ‘attempts/ in old age/ to get the good old terms/ back on track’ (21-24) amounts to an act of generosity and benevolence (17-18). For otherwise this resistance, the attempt to get the ‘good old terms’ back on track is enough grounds ‘more keen than the Christ’s sword’ (4-5) for the unleashing of domestic strife and division.

            But the lure of this pathetic attempt may be premised on the sort of firm belief in ‘This World was Made for Us’ that ‘this world was made for us’ (line 4), indeed ‘exists for us’ (6). At other times as in ‘Right to Life’ it may spring from a nagging horror of a dreaded ‘thunder/ spoken to the stricken ear alone’ (stanza 2) that drives the persona to double anxiety and fearfulness. But it is in this poem also that the persona discovers from this anxious horror ‘as nothing else could/ what [he] secretly long[s] for/ some device of magic or science to make’ these necessary fatalities of his being and existence a mere ‘folly richly instructed/ day by day’ (Stanza 4). It may equally, in the light of ‘Best Things’ at least, derive from a sense of the fervent temporality of these things, nominated ‘best’ in the parlance of the poem, no matter how much diligence, and tender care, and sleepless nights invested in the forestalling of their frustrating impermanence. This sense of the demoralising frustration of transience is heightened in ‘I Know at Once’ perhaps because now it is not so much the longevity of ‘best things’ at stake as that of the persona himself, with his acute consciousness of ‘the self/you want saved/beyond now/ beyond culture’ (stanza 3), a self he is ready to displace even into fictionality if that is the price of rendering it eternal:

ah,

to climb into one now,

enfold my self

within its pages,

form my self into its characters

in indelible black!’ (lines 35-40).

            The career of capricious and rampaging evil, material and moral, in the guise often of murderous intolerance whether theocratic or secular is the charm of poetic impulse in some of the poems in the collection. And it may be artificial as in ‘The Difference,’ ‘Twenty-first Century Civilization’ or ‘Adult Troubles’ where the toddler-persona craning his neck to the point of dizziness from being so intent on glimpsing the ‘unseeing eyes’ of those busy with technological and scientific advancements, is rudely earthed by votaries of a grim god whose appearance coincides with ‘endless [non]peace’ blighting every aspiration and difference in its intolerant unaccommodating shadow; or it may be elemental as in ‘Conversation with Myself,’ ‘Sufficient for the Day,’ ‘Existences Greater than Ours,’ ‘Democracy’ or ‘The Difference.’

            There is the bewildering uncertainty at the inscrutable workings of the elements and Providence in some other of the poems, notably ‘Seasonal’ and ‘Easter I;’ and the paradoxical often self-debilitating processes of very ‘civilization’ itself in ‘Easter II:’

oh, to have squelched like a cricket

under the rampant boots of the beginner and sustainer of civilization.

            In a number of the poems the phenomenon of death is the poetry’s enchantment: the ambitious if daring optimism looking to its ultimate defiance in ‘Last Enemy’ for instance. But to the extent that this optimism is equally mutinous and recalcitrant to the customarily nonnegotiable ordinations of Providence it must be accounted Faustian, which means already the occultation of its innate self-defeatism. In ‘A Dream’ the terror is of the human personage ‘finding’ himself eagerly ‘awaited’ by the dreadful phenomenon, its ‘mysteries’ offered quite ‘forthrightly’ to his utter confoundment and horrification, especially as he has been led to nurse a ‘hope’ that all ‘unprovided for effort will be mounted/ to save [his] last gasp’ (‘Alive or Dead’). In ‘Bird of Passage’ death is perceived as the frustrating signal of the futility and sheer vanity of very life itself and all its endeavours—called not with envy ‘earth-bound compensations’ in ‘When You Grow Old and Knowing’—the fatal factor of levelling everything sublime and base alike to the pointlessness and vacuousness of ‘a-bsolute equality.’ Which is arguably the logic of the persona’s passionate longing in ‘When You Grow Old and Knowing’ that the ‘lad retain ‘[un]like all the rest of us’ his craving and striving for the ‘clouds,’ perhaps because this is one endeavour that does not ultimately prove futile nor tiresome. But is this not precisely because the kind of occupation here is in principle unattainable as opposed to ‘our earth-bound compensations/ and dissipations’?

            The present is contrasted to the ‘past/ comfortable and cosy’ as a nameless arbitrary dread in ‘Terror Anonymous,’ and the desperate desire is to go to this ‘past’ or else ‘divert’ oneself by ‘rage and tears and throwing of stones,’ a miserable enough rebellion as ‘glacial fear’ nonetheless goes on ‘eating/ and slowly grinding your soul to dust.’ 

            The vision of perversion and evil is as ‘outrage’—political opportunism, religious bigotry, the vulgar obscenity of war—in ‘There Comes a Time’ and ‘Amnesty.’ Their tenacious viciousness and capacity to terrorize and agitate the human element is not just in the corporeal pain and privation but also in the pervasive ‘randomness’ (‘There Comes a Time’) of their operations ‘leaving out lulls altogether,’ not ‘following expected patterns’ (‘Amnesty’). Yet the singularly demoralizing intensity of ‘Amnesty’ is that here even ‘God’ so long subsistent as the sole infallible factor of retaining if only a wishful sense of moral stability seems too to have become overwhelmed by and subsumed in the sheer preponderance of the depravity and moral confusion:

Today

a sacker of a rebellious Arab city

receives a woman’s threat

of God’s anger!

What a pure, innocent babe

Dostoevsky would have shot back!

If you were God

where would you start? (lines 48-55).

And might not the peculiar fortune of the ‘chap’ of ‘Visitant on Tiptoe’ be that somehow in his own cosmos this sole factor of retaining a sense of equilibrium still abides, ‘whose…hands…broke his fall/ snatched back [a nearly miscarried] play/ from disaster’? Which is not to say that this fortune of survival is any happier than the misfortune of those who know consummate catastrophe. For it does not go unattended by agitation and silent terror (VII. Survived). For Providence retains its bewildering awesomeness in benevolence as much in malevolence; at all events it manifests in either aspect as randomly, and indifferently. And though those who may happen to have been ‘passed over/ without comment;/ for no reason’ (‘There Comes a Time’) by the seemingly severer providential visitations such as the survivor-chap of ‘Visitant on Tiptoe’ has—his whole career is a veritable display of being ‘fed more than once/ into the gaping mouth of a crocodile/ and withdrawn/ just at the closing of the powerful jaws: he loses his way almost irrecoverably in a forest; he is fed ‘strong disinfectant’ by ‘an impish maid’ and recovered luckily again by ‘the man with the scorpion’s remedy;’ he is ‘nearly taken in…war’ and then again ‘narrowly misse[s]’ the fatal lot (‘Visitant on Tiptoe’)—might be more inclined to reckon existence fair and just (‘There Comes a Time), and perhaps for that account themselves happier, it would still be a lopsided summation of the case. For it cannot be in the last analysis that survival here is any less severer lot than non-survival; the fairness and justness of existence might turn out eventually to be much more in the unvarying irregularity and arbitrariness than the variety of lots. Anyhow it is the survivor who bears all the burden of memory, vital and rancorous, of ‘fear of death’ (II. So Long Ago), of loss of dear ones, the shoddy memorials staged for these, and the cruelly tantalizing visions of their disembodied apparitions that ‘were over before he was minded to take [them]/ by the hand’ leaving the survivor with all the bitter agony of unaccomplishment; of ‘the silent terror’ of ‘something’ that may have been ‘missed,’ something so delicate that it dictates the utmost caution to the ‘visitant’ who must return only on ‘tiptoe,’ seeing that  

nothing of those days

must be shifted

from under the dust

settled over them…(VII. Survived).

Silence

By Chukwujekwu Nweke

Before these sacred groves

Darkness gathers to keep trysts;

Silence re-echoes in this cold labyrinth

And belches in feeble innocence

Over this celestial horizon

Where earthen vessels are borne

On the shoulders of strangeness!

Dark winds whirl by, rustling,

In spontaneous emergence

Bearing hearths weaved with blood.

Anthills rage in chaotic melancholy

Rummaging and splashing the jaws

Of earth; tossing up carcasses

In shreds and in deepening gloom.

Marauding myriads of vultures

Your freshness waiting to ruminate;

Feeding on that sacredness

Ever for me preserved.

The gold has rusted;

And the spring from which

I sip now astray gone.

The music remains silent

And the drumbeat echoes no more.

Coldness folds me in his fingerless arms

As here emerge mounds

Interlocked with wild rumpled faces;

And grave ruins of muted hearts.

Here, in this cold crypts,

Nature has belched thee

Where mortality abounds no more.

Inertia

(In Memoriam Anayo Ogujawa)

Joshua says to be still
and know that he is god
only there's no knowing
as always with him
what precisely he so means
how exactly a seven-year-long heaving heart
convulsed by so much tears torrential
pouring down eyes swollen
from whole immersion baptismal
in the supposedly sobering sorrow's sea
reemerging again giddily drunk
may be securely still

For when the patrol car convoy
tearing down the Nigerian road
a peerless roaring legal terror
driving all the other less legitimate mobiles
whether mechanical or manual
from its oh yes god-given bearing
lost its own streamlined stillness
from so much, why, god-speed of course
the fleeting faltering enough to knock down
a huge metal signpost standing still, see
to the right-flank of the reprobate road
and the fatal fall in turn knocked Anayo down
who crashed on the tarred thoroughfare his brain
with all that profusion of god's mercy -
decidedly disproportionate for a single head -
reposed within it
he was himself standing still, see?

Ash Wednesday 2014

Ash is solemn sobriety

and

a birthlong cultivated contrition

Wednesday is felicitous midweek

for forward-looking backward looking

over every individual day

every tiniest roundly reflexive doing of week-life

And there are emotive memories

of non-imputable days

when mother-clinging lads

queued enchantedly up

for inscription with the ascetic season

immersion in mindful mournfulness

saddled in sack clothes

Now perfumed participants

pricey ointment poured on fattened fleshes
foreheads take in choice cosmetic strides

ash-shines of cultured contrition. 

Ifeakandu's 'The Short Life of Maria' and the Discourse of Absurdity

To the extent that suicide, that is, ‘[j]udging whether life is or not worth living,’ is the ‘but one truly philosophical problem,’ Arinze Daniel Ifeakandu’s ‘The Short Life of Maria’ must be accounted a deeply philosophical literary output, dealing in the same question, ‘the fundamental question of philosophy’ (Camus 4). And whether or not this young incredibly gifted author was consciously aware of this is ‘a matter of profound indifference’ as Albert Camus would say, ‘a futile question,’ for the purposes of this discussion. The central concern here is the story, and it alone, and the extent in which the said question animates it, giving it all the engaging vitality of a literary work of art. The question itself is not at all new in the tradition of strong writing, as it is the same for example already in Shakespeare, in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, the question of being: ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’ (Hamlet III.i.56). According to Camus the sort of question is an essential one because of running either ‘the risk of death or…intensify[ing] the passion of living.’ Which is the particular relation to suicide, being one of the ways in which this fundamental question may be answered; and also the direct consequence of answering that question in one certain fatal, and as will finally appear, tragic way, especially with ‘men inclined to be in harmony with themselves’ (Camus 6). The other way of answering it is by what Camus calls ‘eluding,’ the invariable game of tricking a death-dictatingly absurd life, which consists now in ‘hope,’ now in sheer ‘habit.’ But in Hamlet it equally consists in ‘irresolution’ and ‘dread’ of the unknown; as there is no knowing ‘in that sleep of death what dreams may come/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil’ (lines 66-67) into that ‘undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns’ (79-80). There is even a certain temperance in this too, as in the end it means bearing ‘those ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of’ (81-82). And there will be reason to argue ultimately that this second way is the way of comedy; so that in ‘The short Life of Maria’ for example Maria is seen to eventually take the former way, and her mother, Mama, the latter, responding to the same question ‘to be or not to be.’

            But before the individual comes to the awareness of these mutually opposed alternatives, he has to have first attained another kind of awareness, a certain form of thought, of reasoning, that Camus calls the absurd. And between this kind of thought and suicide he makes a direct connection with the result that the first ‘dictate[s]’ (7) the second, that following this thought all the way through to the ‘bitter end’ (7) means necessarily to toe the line of suicide, of death that is, in answering to the question of being. Beginning this thought in fact is already ‘beginning to be undermined.’ And in the end whether or not the individual follows the beginnings of this thought steadfastly, faithfully, to the last is the one decisive difference. Yet the thought itself remains a purely ‘individual’ one; for this reason the suicide or eluding it may engender is ‘[a]n act…prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art.’ This relation to the work of art is especially interesting in a culture which still often takes for granted that art, literary art in our specific instance, must be verifiable. But ‘[w]hat sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable’ (5) Camus punctuates. Either way, whether one is choosing the one path or the other, the ‘absurd thought’ having been attained, what can no more be evaded is the urgent confrontation of the question whether or not life is worth living, to be or not to. The occasion for Hamlet for the attainment of this thought is the arcane demise of his father, and the indelicacy, to him at least, of Gertrude’s immediate marriage to Claudius virtually right over the barely interred deceased’s remains; then the appearance of the said father’s ghost confirming to him his very suspicions and fears. Suddenly the world has lost its familiarity for him, as these events prove profoundly inexplicable, unreasonable. His mind henceforth is ‘deprive[d]…the sleep necessary to life’ (6); he has known ‘the feeling of absurdity,’ which means he has come up against the urgent question of being, a question that must be solved one way or another.

            The line Hamlet toes in answer to the question seems to be a middle ground between the two extremes of yes and no, as in the lingering indecision of his soliloquy he quite easily enters Camus’s—the majority really for him— ‘those who, without concluding, continue questioning’ (6). Mama’s own mode of response on the other hand is easily determinable as ‘eluding…. The invariable game’ (7); for early on in ‘The Short Life of Maria’ is glimpsed what may well be her earliest occasion for the attainment of the absurd thought: she is heavy with child in ‘January; that time of the year when dust clouds gathered in the air, coating windows and cars a mottled brown. Kano was on fire in those days: people running helter-skelter; women getting raped; churches being burnt down’ (The Muse No. 41: 44). Then ‘Alhaji’ had seen her in these circumstances in ‘Badawa, a seventeen year-old girl crying her lungs out.’ Alhaji’s emergence seems ‘that secret complicity that joins the logical and everyday to the tragic’ (Camus 81) taking a personal hand in the affair, especially in regard to how Mama will ultimately have to respond to her feelings of absurdity. For Alhaji ‘gave her a black scarf to cover her hair, took her in his car, and drove her to his house’ (The Muse 44). What has happened between Mama’s crying out her lungs and being seen and helped by Alhaji is the short-circuiting of the full pursuance of the absurd reasoning, that is, all the way to the bitter end, resulting in Mama’s world which has been suddenly estranged in that brief beginnings of her consciousness of absurdity when Kano is a chaos-stricken de-familiarized universe, being forcibly reined back ‘a familiar world’ (Camus), a world that can be once again ‘explained’ even if with only a flimsy reason as Alhaji being ‘a good man, God bless him.’ Then on, this pattern is established and the way of ‘eluding’ becomes with considerable consistency Mama’s mode of solving her visions of the absurd. It would in fact seem that this interval in which Alhaji sees her and reinstates her familiar world, Mama fashions into a quite potent ‘pause’ (The Muse 44) which she every so often falls back on to re-familiarize her world to herself and thus save herself from the other more dreadful, fatal route to solving the absurd thought, namely suicide.

            The ‘pause’ is first observed in her recounting the story of Maria’s being born in Alhaji’s kitchen to the daughter: ‘Her water broke just as Alhaji’s wives took her in, she’d say, and then pause; she always paused whenever she said that’ (44).  Perhaps the very recounting of the event is enough provocation, anew, in Mama’s consciousness of the world’s absurdity. So what does she do? Taking the brief duration afforded by the facility of this ‘pause,’ ‘She would sift rice in an aluminium tray or pat Maria’s hair, depending on whatever she was doing as she told the story,’ as if by the trivial familiarity of these domestic gestures to prop back up her accustomed ‘setting’ (Camus) threatened even so briefly by the dense strangeness of the absurd; as if a ‘prince[] of the mind’ (8) to ‘initiate,’ instead of abdicating her own life, ‘the suicide of [her] thought in its purest revolt’ (8). And if Maria has grown up to remember Mama as a woman who ‘never cries. Never,’ is there not again a certain relation between this and Mama’s cultivated facility of pausing and re-familiarizing her world to herself, so that her travails may not prevail over her, reducing her to tears; especially as it is known that a seventeen year-old she cries out her lungs? Might there not be a vital relation between tears here and suicide, especially as pertains to their both equally indicating a certain fatality? At other times this redemptive pause manifests a ‘a slight spell of silence’ (The Muse 46) which either is Maria forcibly eliciting its saving potency by ‘shut[ting] her ears with her hands’ (46), or is Mama’s interval of considering a certain fresh upsurge of the absurd, such as Papa’s saying Maria’s ‘big breasts and big buttocks’ are consequent upon her being ‘not innocent. God knows how many boys have touched it’ (46). In this another instance Papa himself becomes, like the rice-sifting or hair-patting, the physical anchor for reinstating the ‘familiar world;’ for ‘[a] world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world’ (Camus 6). Thus when the ‘slight spell of silence’ lapses, together with the ‘infinitesimally brief’ peace it occasions, it is for Mama to lash out against Papa: ‘Maxwell, I hate you!’ That is, Papa is effectively put for the absurd; ‘but from then on’ Camus reminds us ‘it has ceased to be the absurd’ (85), being now ‘recognized, accepted, and…resigned to’ (85) in this case as a determinate object of hatred. Which is not to say that this cures (82) the absurdity altogether; on the contrary it merely makes it acceptable by bringing the ‘malady back into normal life’ even making it possible to ‘cherish it’ (82).

            The possibility of cherishing that which one at once finds revolting and hateful is of course an aspect observed in Mama’s character, for though every so often she has course to fall out with Papa, yet it is observed somewhat surprisingly that she does without any hearty complaint what may properly be considered Papa’s exclusive onus: she pays the rents, ‘our rents’ (The Muse 50), which in the end might really prove an unwitting complicity in Papa’s giving ‘all [his] money to that fat pastor of [his]’ (50). For one might ask how else can Papa have afforded so much crazy luxury but that Mama fills in the lapses that should have resulted there from? Can it not be that the absurd has bound them ‘one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together’ (Camus 81)? Why is Mama suffering such an otherwise untraditionally lopsided union almost willingly? Can it not be that she is only merely acquiescing in the union so as to retain if even the vaguest semblance of a rationale for living? That having recognized the absurdity, it has become a passion so harrowing (81) that all she may do now is deciding whether or not to ‘accept their law, which is to burn the heart they simultaneously exalt’ (81)?

            It might even turn out eventually that the difference between Papa and Mama is really in the mere detail of the device employed in the ‘invariable game’ (7) of re-familiarizing the absurd to themselves. For one, his saying about Maria’s ‘too fast’ (The Muse 46) growth manifest in her developing big breasts and buttocks before her age-mates, ‘it’s because she is not innocent. God knows how many boys have touched it’ (46) may well be his own mode of rendering an otherwise unaccountable irrationality again familiar, insofar as ‘because she is not innocent’ is a reason, an explanation, even if a bad one. By the same token but perhaps only now to a more limited degree, even his reply to Mama’s confrontation over the foolery of giving his whole monthly earning to a ‘greedy’ pastor, ‘it was for the work of god, Ndidi’ (47) is a level of rationalizing, that is, of re-familiarizing the absurdity of his marginalizing Maria, about whose legitimate needs he eternally has not any farthing to spare, whereas he is now seen to spare so much irrationally generous immensity for his pastor. But for some fleeting moment the vision of the absurd seems to have confronted him with as much intense severity as it does Mama. And the occasion is still the same as to the sensibleness of the forfeiture of his whole monthly income to a pastor. It happens that to the initial bit of his reply Papa adds ‘You insult God. He could strike you dead now, but he’s merciful’ (47), to which Mama makes this unanswered perhaps because unanswerable challenge ‘Sharrrap! ...Which god, eh? Is it the same God I go to see every day at St Rita? Gwam, tell me. Is it the same God?’(47). And it is obvious that this is not a purely novel challenge, but it has clearly struck Papa this time in a new light, vouchsafing him arguably a sudden staggering vision of the absurd. For where before ‘he would have said, “Catholics are idol worshippers. When I was a catholic, I was in the dark. Ndidi, come out from darkness,”’ (47) that is to say plunged headlong into re-familiarizing the perception, by fashioning out a logic for it, ‘today he was silent’ (47). Perhaps it is only Mama’s own accustomed mode of solving the absurd awareness, silence, the pause, which will do this time in trying to come up against this severer light in which the thing has shown itself. And one senses that his silence is ‘pregnant’ (47) with a similar vital potency as Mama’s, for in the subsiding of the expletives following their fall-out, the aura and weight of this silence is still perceptibly on Papa who ‘seated on the bed. He was shirtless and his stomach made [Maria] remember how Mama’s own looked five years ago, when she was pregnant with Chimdi and Emeka’ (47).

            At other times what obtains between Mama and Papa is a sort of role-reversal with Mama now suddenly serving Papa the material pivot for the domestication of the absurd where before it has been the other way around. Such is the case when the absurd presents itself in the guise of Maria’s teenage pregnancy. Of course Mama has begun the process of domesticating this latest absurdity in her practised manner, namely ‘silence’ (50), never mind that this time it is ‘angry’ (50). But after the ‘angry silence hung between’ mother and daughter ‘for days’ it proves as usual productive; so that ‘when Mama finally spoke to [Maria], it was to find out who was responsible’ (50), and try and see what salvaging actions may be taken. She settles for an abortion finally, reckoning that ‘it’s murder…to let her have this child, without a husband. I won’t let her make the same mistake I made.’ In this passionate case wrung from Mama for the securing of an abortion for Maria in the face of Papa’s opposing, indeed forbidding it, is overheard the subtle declaration that having had to have Maria without a husband for Mama is in its own strength an instance of the absurd. And this perhaps is equally the insightful glimpse into the logic of Mama’s acquiescence in a union with a hated Maxwell. But now—the point we began to make— it is Mama in turn who is serving an immediate tangible reason for this absurdity of Maria’s pregnancy for Papa: ‘It’s your fault,’ chuckles Papa. ‘You sent her to hawk, eh? I told you, the street is no place for a child’ (50). This speech is specifically significant especially in the way it helps to foreground the lingering curious slipperiness of Papa’s character. For it cannot be here that he has suddenly warmed up and become partial towards Maria, any more than his initial ‘It’s because she is not innocent’ can purely mean he is just being unfeeling or even outright wicked towards her. As a charge of wickedness is one that cannot be held against Papa for any considerable length. To begin with he is tender towards Chimdi and Emeka. What appears in the event is that he, like the lot of other characters in the story, is coming up against his own ‘individual thought’ of the absurd in his own individual terms. If there are those in the course that go down, it is only too bad. Otherwise one runs the risk of reducing the whole question to a mere moral one, trivialising it thereby; one runs the risk of forgetting that the story one has before one is still a tragedy, insofar as the characters are ultimately helpless in the face of the choices they make.

            And as the difference between Mama and Papa has been shown to consist really perhaps in the variety of the devices employed in the domestication of the absurd, that between Mama and Maria may really be the difference between the comic and the tragic character, in that Maria in answering the question ‘to be or not be,’ of whether life is worth living or not takes ultimately the way of fatality, of suicide, as opposed to Mama’s taking the way of eluding, the invariable game (Camus). But Maria has first to come of age before she attains and answers her own awareness of the absurd reasoning, in which extent her own career is pretty bildungsromanic. Until then, all she can be is ‘fascinated by [the] story’ of her birth, sometimes imagining ‘herself as an Alhaji’s daughter, wearing embroidered gowns, her hands and feet patterned with henna’ (The Muse 44). This is the stage, the foremost in her career, where the universe is yet possessive of its familiarity (Camus) being effectively reduced to the human by the ‘stamping it with [the]…seal’ (13) of Maria’s imagination. And her imaginative powers seem quite acute so. But her world’s retainment so far of its familiarity is equally owing to her tender age and the consequent gullibility thereof. For she was only ‘seven then, and …believed [Rufus] that Mama’s hot moi-moi was the best in Kano’ (44). Then comes her first bout of the perception of the irrational at the hand of the same Brother Rufus, who ‘had dirty brown eyes and his forehead was long and he was black like charcoal. Black. Like charcoal. She did not like selling moi-moi to him because he always asked her to come into his house’ (44). Already is she recoiling from this unfamiliarity of being asked to come into the house as opposed to the norm of merely selling her ware to other buyers and getting right on her way. But again obviously by reason of being yet so tender, her recoil is not intense enough to match the unconscionable Rufus. So she is effectively taken advantage of and violated, an event already containing as in a tiny capsule her ultimate tragedy. Even then she has already started her struggle against the absurd, answering her own question of being in the more lenient mode of ‘eluding,’ employing as device a certain ‘quiet’ much like Mama’s own to try and reduce her ordeal to the familiar: ‘The compound was always very quiet because most people were at work then, and it was about the quietness that she thought as [Rufus] played with her kokoro, shoving his finger in and out of her, rough fingers clamped firmly over her mouth’ (44).

            And thus it is that the difference between Maria and Mama’s career, or any other of the characters for that matter, must needs be the difference between tragedy and comedy. For in the extent that ‘The Short of Life of Maria’ is a tragedy it is principally Maria’s tragedy. Little wonder that she seems eternally under the irresistible pull of some paranormal force field, so that though she is seen to start out her struggle against the absurd awareness and answering to the question of being by the less deadly strategy of eluding, she is ultimately drawn towards the other opposite mode of fatality. And intimations of this are already ostensible even in her more tender experiences. For when upon Mama’s ‘Why are you walking like that, Maria?’ (45) she reports ‘Brother Rufus…she touches my kokoro,’ (45) this is purely because ‘she couldn’t have done otherwise’ (45), that is to say  she is driven to it, a thing typical of tragedy. For she does ‘regret[] telling Mama’ as she ‘pulled her roughly by the hand. The sun beat mercilessly on her head’ (45). But more than Mama’s rough pull and the sun’s pitiless beating on her head, the actual dressing down and arrest proper of Rufus occasion for her quite paradoxically a fresh, more horrible provocation of the vision of the absurd, rousing in her a desperate craving ‘to disappear’ (45), estranging her world and restoring to it what Camus calls its original denseness before it was clothed with some illusory meaning: her ‘world evades [her] because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from [her]’ (11). The result   is that when they return from dealing with Brother Rufus and Mama tells Maria to ‘Ngwa, go inside and wait for me,’ suddenly ‘It was dim inside the room, and she shivered. Bags and boxes…took on new forms in the dimness: images slinking and creeping in the shadows. She crouched in a foetal position on the floor, and sobbed’ (45). And her sobbing recalls at once the symbolic relation already drawn between tears and suicide. Does it not appear that Maria is always already doomed to this fatality? Especially as all this has happened regardless Mama’s original intent being to protect her, save her? Does it not become manifest now that Maria is really only standing at a certain point on a curve that she must travel (Camus) willy-nilly?

            After such an elemental disruption of the accustomed world as Maria experiences, Camus argues, ‘everything begins in…weariness tinged with amazement’ (10). And this ordinarily is ‘Weariness [that] comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugurates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows’ namely ‘the gradual return into the [familiar world] or it is the definitive awakening’ (10) whose consequence is suicide. But Maria’s definitive awakening is not yet. That secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic (81) has as yet to exhaust all of its shamly non-fatalistic enticements, all the tantalizing pseudo promises of evasion of her. For example growing up and attending ‘white-and-white school in Sabon Gari’ she quite picks up some domesticating weaponry to be wielded in the familiarizing of the absurd: ‘First, she would learn the swear words ubanka! Shege banza! She would learn to use the swear words on the streets as she grew up: “You want to touch my breasts, eh? Why not touch your daughter’s own first?” she would add a little Igbo “Onye nzuzu!” And a little English that her English teacher, Mr. Nuru, liked to use “Scallywag! Nincompoop! Bombastic element!”’ (46). And so long it looks as if she is finally to solve her own vision of the absurd by the mellower method of ‘eluding.’ Then quite suddenly ‘she grew old inside’ (46) and ‘At fourteen…knew that there was injustice everywhere’ (46). Thus the absurd has sprung afresh on her, making a mockery of the school-acquired mode of reducing the irrational to the human, recognizable status that has so far served her. And this sudden refreshed vision in the guise of pervasive injustice is owing majorly to Papa’s persistent marginalization of her while at the same time complaining to ‘neighbours that the government was corrupt, marginalizing the Igbo populace in Sabon Gari’ (46), a thing that strikes Maria by its bare-faced hypocrisy. ‘Did he not refuse to give Mama money to take her to a private school? “No money,” he always said, yet he counted out naira upon naira, “for Chimdi’s school fees, for Emeka’s Christmas shoe.” Mama would ask, “What of Maria?” He would screw up his face, as if the sound of her name left a bitter taste on his tongue. “Business is bad,” he would say. “No money.”’

            This pattern of events in which Maria is now getting on as though she is finally after all to elude her fate, only always very shortly again to be drawn right back into it is consistent enough to inscribe itself indelibly, hauntingly, in her consciousness, so that she ‘thought about how peace could be so brief’ (46). Henceforward it is as if the consciousness attaches to her as a personalizing property, becoming the veritable embodiment of ‘that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic’ (Camus), her life absolutely constrained within the unbreakable boundaries of its recurrent cycles.  Thus comes Jide on the scene, and even the manner in which they address one another is consistent with this inscribed pattern. The one is My Angel (and so arguably the fleeting much desired peace) the other Bad Boy (and by a similar token the agent for truncating the tenure of this peace, rendering it ever so infinitesimally brief). But the peace must be conceded even its brief tenure. So Jide starts off being ‘different’ (47), playing the perfect gallant till his prey begins to ‘feel all fluttery inside’ (47). For her part she lets it equally linger as long as it will by for example not telling ‘that she attended a government school’ reckoning that ‘it was a scandal!’ (48) and probably possessed the potential to cut the peace abruptly so short. Then he finally asks her out having assured her that ‘All that matters[] is that I like you’ (48). Now in specific regard to this assurance there is not so much of a difference between Jide and Brother Rufus. Both are utilitarians, and insofar as Maria serves them the desired use they both ‘like’ her; for does not Rufus’s own ‘I go buy all the moi-moi. I go buy you Coke. Come’ (44) amount to practically the same thing as Jide’s ‘I’ll take care of you’(48). But Maria does not of course see this ominous relation between her childhood ravisher and this looming teenage rehash. And is this not precisely because it is her tragedy, being the one carried in its deathly spin of repetitive cycles? This blindness to the fatality of his situation is again an accustomed hallmark of the tragic character, the insight into the awareness of fatality being generally reserved to other characters: think for example of Oedipus and Tiresias or Okonkwo and Obierika in the Greek and Nigerian traditions respectively. If at all the tragic character himself is eventually granted this insight, it is at a point where it can be no use more to him, where it can only serve to sharpen his sense of being utterly crushed. It is thus to Mama outside the fatal spin who is granted the insight into the fatality of Maria’s tryst with Jide, just as elsewhere such a privilege falls to Maria herself in relation to Amaka, Jide’s fiancée. Then ‘Maria felt a gnawing pity for her; how could she be so unconcerned about his philandering?’ (50). Now she can afford this clarity of perception, and even pity Amaka precisely because she is without the constraints of what here is properly Amaka’s vision of normality, her own spell of brief peace in which this fiancée is poised to banish and familiarize all intrusions of absurdity even to the point of conceding her man the curious prerogative of conjugal infidelity (The Muse 50). And so Mama tries to step in and save Maria as she does in her more tender experience, whereupon as again in the childhood instance she slips through her fingers, the pull of the paranormal force field being beyond the feeble match of her motherly striving. For where ‘Mama was wary of [Jide]’ and thinks ‘he might take advantage of [Maria],’ Maria herself ‘didn’t think Jide was like that; she didn’t even think that he could do that to her, she who was so grownup. If anything ever happened, it would be with her consent, certainly’ (48). So much in fact is her certainty about Jide that she says to Mama ‘I know him’ (48). About this kind of certainty there is already something demonic, as ‘it often happens that those who commit suicide were assured of the meaning of life’ (Camus 6). For at this time Jide has become for Maria quite an efficient ‘meaning of life.’ When in her extremity therefore Mama tells her ‘From now on, I don’t want to see you with [Jide],’ it is understood that Mama is in reality thrusting, though unwittingly, upon Maria, a fresh vision of absurdity, a choice, that is, between being and non-being. 

            By now it is evident that even Mama herself is too in the tenacious clutches of the inexorable spin, though not in Maria’s fatal sense. For either way there is no escape for Maria: to give up Jide is doubtless a degree of the irrational for her, for it means to give up ‘the great idea’ (Camus 7) by which so far she has tricked, transcended, refined, betrayed (7) an otherwise pervasive absurdity and without him she might as well be dead; on the other hand to remain with him is just as fatal for the life ‘meaning’ (7) Jide represents is in reality sham and can only hold out for so long. It is the second line she toes, as at any rate ‘[i]n a tragic sequence, going back is not a real option’ (Akwanya and Anohu 135). Little wonder she ‘would…think, asking her to stop seeing Jide’ Mama’s ‘greatest mistake ever;’ for then ‘[i]t became a secret affair’ (48) slipping with such precarious absoluteness from the sphere of Mama’s protectively watchful eyes. This quite does it, and the peace exhausts it ‘infinitesimally brief’ tenure! And Maria’s vision of the absurd is reined back with such exquisite cumulative freshness ‘The day she visited Jide and he stood by the door and said “You didn’t tell me you were coming”’ (49). Then comes the finishing stroke ‘the day she met his fiancée at his shop. “Hey, this is Amaka, my fiancée,” he said brightly. “She just graduated from the School of Nursing. Amaka, meet my friend, Maria.” She had smiled because he was smiling, but inside she wanted to scream’ (49). Meanwhile she has conceived a child for Jide, a fact that may now only build upon her staunchly rooted awareness of the absurd, especially as Papa has forbidden an abortion. Yet this is not the thing under whose weight she ultimately crumbles, that finally triggers her following to the bitter end the full ramifications of her definitive awakening, namely suicide. Following Albert Camus the ultimate ‘culprit’ in this regard is Papa, for it is upon his calling her ‘a demon’ that all the rancors and all the boredom still in suspension precipitate (5) and she attains the certain knowledge ‘that she would die;’ and it was equally a necessity, ‘she had to die’ (The Muse 49): ‘All through that night, she saw the Angel of Death beside her, enormous wings flapping….The next day, when the house was empty, she bought a bottle of the foul-tasting concoction that Yoruba women peddled….Inside the house, silence surrounded her. She took a sip of the bitter concoction….she took another sip, and another. A gulp. There was peace’ (50-51). But not even this terminal peace may escape the blight of infinitesimal briefness. For relentless on its heels ‘the pains started. The harmattan wind tugged at her cheeks’ (51).

Works Cited

Akwanya, A.N. and Anohu Virgy. Fifty years of the Nigerian Novel. Enugu: Fulhadu Publishers, 2005.

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sysyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O'Brien 1955. pdf.

Ifeakandu, Arinze Daniel. 'The Short Life of Maria.' The Muse A Journal of Creative and Critical Writing at Nsukka No 41 (2013): 44-51.

Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Scotland: Geddes & Grosset, 2006.