Uche Okonkwo, A Kind of Madness, Tin House: $16.95
Reviewed by Usma Malik
Uche Okonkwo, an award-winning short story writer, is a former Bernard O’Keefe Scholar and recipient of: a Steinbeck Fellowship, the George Bennett Fellowship (Phillips Exeter Academy), and an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant.
Set in contemporary Nigeria, Okonkwo’s debut short story collection A Kind of Madness explores madness in its many forms. Thematically centered on family, friendships, and love, these stories delve into the heart of the human condition: desire, hunger, shame, ambition, and the lengths a person is willing to go to in order to survive. There’s the mother whose obsession with social mobility threatens to derail her daughter’s promising future. A young boy whose secret hopes of a new, exciting life, lead to bitter disappointment, a child – silent witness to her mother’s mental illness, who trails behind on a futile quest for a cure.
Written in beautifully evocative prose, Okonkwo takes readers down some dark paths – surprising us with humour in the most unexpected of places. Heartbreak and joy, grief and hope, acceptance and denial, each story sheds a particular light on myriad of strands that together make us human.
The collection opens with Nwunye Belgium. Young Udoka is all set to marry Enyinna, a trader who is ‘doing okay.’ But when Udoka’s mother, Agatha, learns of the eligible ‘Belgium doctor’, she sees it for what it is: a sign from God. Agatha spins her daughter an enticing tale of a more promising future with the Belgium doctor. As for the promises made to Enyinna and the incumbent shame in breaking them? Well, ‘leave shame to its owners’, says Agatha. Despite her secret misgivings, Udoka allows her mother to persuade her into transferring her affections. The imminent prosperity that this match will bring, the higher social status it will accord them, has mother and daughter flaunting their good luck – this rankles the community: they disapprove of Agatha’s tactics in procuring the engagement. When the opportunity arises, they take pleasure in getting their own back. Agatha certainly succeeds in altering the course of her daughter’s future, and by association her own – though not in the way either of them expected.
Debri, the shortest story in the collection, follows D’Boy, a professional pickpocket who gets by on street smarts and nimble fingers. Abandoned by his mother to a father who treats him like the debri of the title, D’Boy learns the rules of life fast, primarily: nothing is free – not even the food organisations infrequently parcel out. D’Boy sees these handouts for what they are: publicity stunts. For as long as it takes to clear a trestle table of food, D’Boy and those like him: poor, hungry, with no recourse to the opportunities that would allow them to rise out of their poverty, will be acknowledged. In return, all the children need do is fall into dutiful lines, and once fed pose for pictures, ‘mouths shiny with gratitude and oil from jollof rice.’ This is a familiar transaction, agreed upon by both parties as being mutually acceptable. D’Boy has no illusions about the system he is trapped in: there will never be enough, not for children like him, nor their adult counterparts – who are ‘creeping around with sacks’ to collect ‘uneaten packs of food’ from the children because ‘only children were getting fed this time.’ This is their social-economic reality: the numbers will never add up, their hunger is one that will never be sated. So, eyeing the rapidly dwindling pile of food boxes, calculating the ratio of food to hungry mouths (it will be long gone before D’Boy reaches the front of the line) D’Boy takes his agency where he can. D’Boy’s hitherto carefully controlled emotion is set loose in an all consuming howl, one that reaches out to us beyond the final words of Debri: a howl that says: this is Hunger, and this is Survival.
In Long Hair, new girl Jennifer causes a stir in the Girls’ Boarding school. The problem, as our unnamed narrator informs us, is Jennifer’s hair: it ‘needed an explanation’. Unlike the rest of the girls in the school clamouring to be Jennifer’s friends, our narrator stands aloof, she couldn’t care less for Jennifer’s prettiness, she’s not interested in whether Jennifer’s ‘fair skin’ is from a ‘mixed’ heritage. Yes, the narrator would like to ‘reach out and touch’ Jennifer’s ‘relaxer straightened…silky…hair’ – but it is only a passing curiosity, the narrator’s own hair used to be much longer before her mother cut it, not wanting it to be a distraction from study.
Jennifer, we learn, is obviously the ‘proud type’, a ‘show-off’, walking round ‘like it was her father’s compound’. By contrast, our narrator’s lack of airs, her righteous modesty – you won’t catch her swanning around flaunting herself as if she were better than everyone else, sets her apart from the crowd. It doesn’t bother our narrator that even the one girl, Dumebi, who still talks to her after the gossip scandal, which wasn’t even the narrator’s fault, now cares more for Jennifer’s company than hers. It’s in this tension between the narrator’s obsessive observation of everything-Jennifer and her simultaneous denial of interest in her, the casual asides, that the humour lies.
When Senior Vision, the resident fortune-teller whose dreams predict the future tells the girls that ‘Mami Wota sitting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean with all her pretty girl servants […] had sent one of her girls as an agent […] to make trouble,’ events take a troubled turn. Senior Vision’s ‘sweet mouth’ and gift for storytelling that beguiles the girls, whipping them into a frenzy of fear and distrust: Who is she – Mami Wota’s agent? Nobody is above suspicion. Whilst the girls’ huddle under their blankets in fear, our narrator sees an opportunity to good to miss – she takes it. Once she has set things in motion, our narrator sits back to enjoy the drama unfold until it reaches its dramatic climax.
In Chicken, a chilling encounter with a local police officer sends fissures crackling through a family. Analeptic jumps in time unravel the collective and individual familial relationships setting wife/husband, mother/daughter, husband/son, brother/sister at odds.
The chicken of the title is ‘Otuanya’, a one-eyed bird destined for the ‘pepper soup pot’, a fact the mother, Uzoma, impresses upon Nedu, her seven-year-old son. Nevertheless, Nedu insists on conducting a naming ceremony in the desperate hope that ‘if you gave a thing a name, you couldn’t turn around and eat it as food.’ Otuanya’s presence in the home comes to signify more than the promise of delicious pepper bowl soup. As we shift from one family member’s point of view to another, Otuanya is in turns: a redemptive offering, a scornful rebuttal, a social media opportunity involving a comedic chicken chase, and last, a distraction from night terrors. At the centre of it all stands the black uniformed police officer, his ‘dull AK-47…a rash of rust creeping across the barrel like an infection’, the casual, easy, threat of violence in his ‘You have phone and mouth, I have gun and bullet.’
Like with Chekwube, of Milk, Blood, Oil, readers will find themselves entranced by these stories where ‘ink pours and pools on to the page’. We’re drawn into intimate spaces of madness where desire, longing, and survival in a capricious, often unforgiving, world pit characters against each other. In this collection, traditions, myths, and beliefs vie with the modern world. Okonkwo strikes a delicate balance between darkness and light, juxtaposing humour with tragedy in this stunning, original, debut collection.
By Usma Malik