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.
