The Secret Lives of Babi Segi’s Wives by Lola Shoneyin - 2011

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives by LOLA SHONEYIN - 2011

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives gives us an inside look at a poylagmy in modern Nigeria.  Baba Segi has four wives, all living in one household.  For a long time there were three wives, each with multiple children.  The oldest manages the household.  The husband shares his affections evenly with the women on a schedule.  He can only be described as a brutal lover.  He prides himself on siring children with each of the wives.  Then one day he decides to marry a much younger woman, unlike the others she is a college graduate.  The other women are outraged.  They conspire to make the Life of the new wife miserable in the hope she will leave.

The chapters rotate in point of view from each of the four women.  We learn about their background prior to marriage and the dyamics of the Family group.  Slowly secrets are revealed.  Two years go by and the new wife does not get pregnant.  Baba Segi is very upset, saying a barren wife is like a rotten piece of fruit.  Of course as all the other wives easily got pregnant, he blames her.  The other women are privately happy over this but offer her advise based on old notions.

An incredible secret eventually comes out about the husband and the children.  One that thretens the entire family.

The characters are well developed, each wife has her own personality.  They are bonded only by their dependence on the keeping of a dangerous secret and their hatred of the new wife.

I enjoyed this book.  It is a fast read.  There is explicit sexual content.  It is a cinematic look at life in contemporary Nigeria.

This is LOLA SHONEYIN’s first novel.  I look Forward to following her work.

Netflix is set to produce a series based on the book and for sure I will binge watch.

About Lola Shoneyin - from her publisher 

Lola Shoneyin's work includes three books of poems, So All the Time I Was Sitting on an Egg (1997), Song of a Riverbird (2002), For the Love of Flight (2010), and two children's books: Mayowa and the Masquerade and Iyaji, the Housegirl. 

Her debut novel, The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011 and went on to win the PEN Oakland 2011 Josephine Miles Literary Award and the 2011 ANA/NDDC Ken Saro-Wiwa Prose Prize. Her children's book, Mayowa and the Masquerades won the 2011 ANA/ Atiku Abubakar Prize for Children's literature. 

Shoneyin is the founder of the Book Buzz Foundation, Nigeria. She is also the director of Ake Arts & Book Festival which takes place in the third week of November in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria.

She lives in Lagos, Nigeria with four children, four dogs and one husband.

 

Welcome to Lagos: A Novel by Chibundu Onuzo - 2016 - 298 Pages

Welcome to Lagos: A Novel by Chibundu Onuzo - 2018 - 298 pages

As Welcome to Lagos opens Chike Ameobi, a Nigerian Army officer, is ordered to have his platoon kill civilians.  He knows he cannot carry out this order so he deserts.  He knows he will be a hunted fugitive so, with his second officer Yemi, he feels he can escape discovery in the teeming capital Lagos.  Other young people looking for a new way of life form a new platoon under the leadership of Chike.  Among them are Fineboy, a former member of a rebel army who hopes to become a DJ in Lagos. There are two women in group.  One’s father is presumed killed by rebels.  Ona is escaping a wealthy abusive husband.

The plot turns on their complex involvement with a minister of education now on run for stealing ten million dollars.

The star of the novel is Lagos.  Lagos is presented as a place of extreme coruption, where no one can be trusted.  We see people living in extreme luxury with millions in squalor, living as squaters.

This is very much a novel about lingering impact of colonial rules combined with the corrupting influence of oil riches.  The rich send their children to London for education. We do spend a lot of time among Nigerians in London.  

There is an exciting plot and we are given a very real feel for the poor side of Lagos.

I am glad I read Welcome to Lagos.  I acquired this as a Kindle of $1.95.  It is now back up to $11.95.

I am not comfortable suggesting a purchase of this book for $11.95 to those who I don’t know. If it goes back on sale, I see it as worth the risk.

“Chibundu Onuzo was born in Nigeria in 1991, the youngest of four children of parents who are doctors, and grew up there in Lagos.She moved to England when she was 14 to study at an all-girls' school in Winchester, Hampshire, for her GCSEs and at the age of 17 began writing her first novel, which was signed two years later by Faber and Faber and was published when she was 21.She was the youngest female writer ever taken on by the publisher.[Reviewing her second book, Welcome to Lagos (2016)

Onuzo received a first-class bachelor's degree in history from King's College London (2012)and went on to earn a master's degree in public policy from University College London.As of 2017, she is studying for a PhD at King's College London.” Wikepedia 

 

Sunita - A Short Story by Chibundu Onuzo - from New Daughters of Africa- 2019

 Sunita - A Short Story by Chibundu Onuzo - from New Daughters of Africa- 2019

Among the insidious lingering aspects of colonialism are the scars left in the descendents of people once ruled by those who denigrated the normal skin tone, hair texture and traditional modes of dress of their ancestors.  Here in the Phillippines there are frequent TV commercials aimed at young women advertising products claiming  to “whiten your skin”.  All of The female media personalities and women in TV commercials have skin tones significantly lighter than typical.

“Sunita” by Chibundu Onuzo in just a few pages shows us a young woman struggling to overcome this colonizing of the mind.  In the process we learn about women of color from Africa are viewed in posh London.  Her family is from Nigeria and rich.  They sent her to London in the care of an aunt.  She attented an almost all white girls schools.  She bought a weave for her hair.  She  tried out an Afro.

As she approaches graduation she is assigned a mentor, another woman of color, to prepare her for job interviews.  Her mentor works for a company that helps businesses fill their diversity  quotas.  Dolapo wants to get a job in investment banking,

“Dọlapọ loved the afro now hidden under her weave, loved its untameable, uncombable sprawl, loved the extra inches it added to her height, loved the mushroom silhouette of her head in photos, loved hair that grew up instead of down, gravity-defying, extra-terrestrial hair. “That’s fine if you want to work in advertising or publishing, or media, or fashion, or maybe even engineering, but certainly not banking,” Daisy said. “My friends like it.” “White friends or black?” “Does it really matter?” “White or black?” “Mostly white.” “They think its funky, edgy and cool, don’t

they?” “What’s wrong with that.” “Never elegant, chic, glamorous; these are the adjectives we use for women in banking. These are the adjectives for success. As a black woman, let me be honest, when you walked into this room, what I saw was unprofessional, unkempt and unserious.” She had been paired with Daisy by Diversity Unlimited, a recruitment firm that helped companies fill up their ethnic minority quota. Daisy had worked for seven years in an investment bank. Daisy carried a red leather bag with slim, curved handles, discreet, silver, letters spelling out PRADA under the zip. Daisy wore structured dresses, thin black heels, milky pearls, minimal lipstick.”

We see Dolopo is at first torn.  She wants the job that would plesse her parents and insure her future but she wants to be herself, to be proud of her heritage.

I loved these lines so much:

“Dọlapọ’s more modest purchase came in a black cardboard box, edged with gold curlicue. The hair lay lustrous on a bed of crepe, folded into itself like a small, sleek creature, a sable or a mink. Her aunt had gone with her to the salon, leafing through magazines as they wove Dọlapọ’s afro into lines and then stitched the human hair to hers, tight-running stitches that made her eyes water. She skyped her parents in Nigeria once she got home. “Ọpẹ o,” her mother sang, her face large and happy on the screen. “Thank God you’ve finally gotten rid of that bush. Darling, come and see your eldest daughter.” The tablet was passed to Dọlapọ’s father.”

Of course she story takes a turn to a more independent Dolapo.  

This is a wonderful story 

Chibundu Onuzo

Born in Nigeria, she moved to England when she was 14. She began writing her first novel, The Spider King’s Daughter (2012), at the age of 17 and it was published by Faber and Faber when she was 21. The novel won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize. 

It was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and for the Etisalat Prize for Literature. In 2014 she was selected for the Hay Festival’s Africa39 list of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers under 40 with the potential to define future trends in African literature. In 2018 she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its 40 Under 40 initiative. Reviewing her second novel, Welcome to Lagos (2016), Helon Habila wrote in The Guardian: “. . . her ability to bring her characters to life, including the city of Lagos, perhaps the best-painted character of all, is impressive.”  - from New Daughters of Africa.

I liked this story so much I acquired yesterday her novel Welcome to Lagos.  

Mel u

“What to do When Your Child Brings Home a Mami Wata” - a Short Story by Chikodili Emelumdu- One of five finalist for The 2020 Caine Prize for African Literature.

“What to do When Your Child Brings Home a Mami Wata” - a Short Story by Chikodili Emelumdu- One of five finalist for The 2020 Caine Prize for African Literature.

Published in The Shadow Booth: Vol. 2, 2018

You can read all five stories and learn about the importance of The Caine Prize here.Here

A very interesting interview with Chikodili Emelumdu

An interview with a link to three of her earlier stories as well as very interesting bio data provided by the author.


I first began reading and posting on The Caine Prize Stories in June 2011.  I think I was the first blogger of any sort to post on them.  Now book bloggers, country specific  cultural blogs and African focused political blogs take interest in what countries are represented in the nominations in subsequent years.

This is Chikodili Emelumadu’s  second time to have a story in the final five for The Caine Prize.  In 2017 her story “Bush Baby” was among the finalists.

“What to do When Your Child Brings Home a Mami Wata” is a delightful very creative story.  Kind of a mix of Science Fiction, satire on advise to parents works and a genre of short works I am just getting into, weird fiction.  It is also a saltire on government prose.  It is also a kind of mini-course in Ibo riverine folk lore about semi humanoid acoustic creatures.  The purpose of the paper is to tell parents of boys what to do if their son has a Mami Wata”
paramour. Deeper in, the story can be seen as mocking extremism in sexual conservatism.  Evidently the Mami Wata goes almost exclusively for teenage boys.


From the opening paragraphs I knew I was reading something very special:

“Please note: ‘Mami Wata’ (also known in various other regions as ‘Mammy Water’) is used in this context as an umbrella term for both genders of the popular water entity (i.e. Mami and Papi Watas) and does not represent those other mer-creatures without the appearance of absolute humanoid traits. For these other non-humanistic water entities including but not restricted to: permanent mermaids and mermen, crocodile fellows, shark-brides, turtle crones and anomalous jelly blobs of indeterminate orientation, please see our companion volume, ‘So You Want to Kill a Mer- Creature?’ which will guide you through the appropriate juju framework to avoid or deflect repercussions and will elucidate general and specific appeasement rituals. See also, ‘Entities and Non-entities: The Definitive Legal Position on Aquatic Interspecies Marriages, Non-Marriage Couplings and Groupings”

This story reads like something the Jonathan Swift who wrote “A Modest Proposal” would admire and respect.

I cannot imagine anyone not loving this story. You will find this a welcome pleasure in these times, I certainly did.

Shirley Jackson shortlist 2015
Caine Prize shortlist 2017
Curtis Brown First Novel Prize winner 2019
AKO Caine Prize Shortlist 2020
She was born in Nigeria and moved to the UK at an early age then she and her family moved back to Nigeria as she moved home.  As a child her parents made her read English classics and the complete Encyclopedia Brittanica.

For sure I would purchase a collection of her stories. I hope to follow her for a long time.

Mel u

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (2003)

Purple Hibiscus is the debut novel of the highly regarded Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  This is a great novel, a triumph of the art of the story teller.  It is narrated by a fourteen year old Nigerian girl from a very affluent Catholic family with Ibo roots. The family, the girl, her brother and their mother is rigidly controlled by the father.  He came from a family that believed in traditional tribal religious, his great same is that his own father is what he calls "a pagan".  The father is ashamed of his roots, his racial identity, seeing the ways of white petiole as superior to the traditional culture in which he was raised.  Adichie lets us feel the deep selfloathing of the father and we see how it is causative in his abusive treatment of his children and his wife.  The father is the editor of a newspaper that speaks out on government abuse and also owns a number of factories. He is basically a decent man in many ways, generous with his employees and extended family.  His children attend an elite Catholic school and have been raised in complete isolation from the terrible poverty of Nigeria.  The father very much loves his children and his wife but the harm done to his psyche by the legacy of colinialism is very powerful.  He schedules every minute of their day.  

The novel gives us a deep feel for the day to day life of the family.  In Nigerian culture reverence for parents is very important.  The father, however, cannot accept that his own father never converted to Catholicism.  He also has a sister, a professor at a university.  He reluctantly agrees to allow  his children to spend a few days at her house so they can get to know their cousins.  He tells them they can visit their Grandfather but only under his very strict rules. 

There are terribly things that happen in this novel, reflecting the violence and chaos of Nigerian society. The characters are perfectly done, finely realized.  The girl does not fully understand all that goes on around her but we see her understanding grow through her experiences.  

Purple Hibiscus is very much a family story, a story about the impact of colonialism, about the transition from a tribal Ibo society to a western society.  There is senseless cruelty, violence and corruption but also great goodness in this wonderful novel.  The narrative is very exciting and it is a foodies primer on Ibo gastronomy.  There are lush images of fruit and purple hibiscuses I greatly enjoyed having placed in my consciousness.  

I am so glad I read this wonderful novel.  I hope I can one day read her two other novels.  

Mel u

Bio Data

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, a New York Times Notable Book, and a People and Black Issues Book Review Best Book of the Year; and the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. Her latest novel Americanah, was published around the world in 2013, and has received numerous accolades, including winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction; and being named one of The New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year.

A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.  From the author's webpage 

Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole (2007, revised 2014, 177 pages)

The prayers of The Reading Life Family go out for the kidnapped Nigerian girls.

I came away from Every Day is for the Thief with two strong convictions.  The first is that Teju Cole is an extremely talented writer and the second is that I am very glad I don't live in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria and the setting for this powerful novel.  I live in a  tropical mega-city with its own well deserved reputation for corruption  but it is like Singapore compared to the urban environment depicted in Every Day is for the Thief.  

The teller of the story left Nigerian for New York City fifteen years ago and is back for a visit.  Everywhere he goes he sees pervasive corruption.  In a place where few people, including police, customs officials and other government workers are paid a wage they can support their families upon, bribery and demands for tips are the only way to get by.  There is effectively no law, no one is in charge.  All of us have gotten E mails advising us that we have won something like the Nigerian National Lottery or have been given  $10,000,000.00 by the Nikon Foundation.  In a great chapter Cole takes us into one of the hundreds of Internet cafes in Lagos where these E Mails originate.  All ask you, if you respond, to send in an advance fee to collect your money.  This is illegal in Nigeria, the problem is if you are arrested, you just tip the policeman.  Those who do this are called Yahoo Yahoo boys as Yahoo chat is one of their big hunting grounds.  Many sit in the cafe for hours, the cost is seventy American cents and hour, less than two PHP.  They all dream of the mark who will send them a huge fee to exercise their option to buy an oil field in Nigeria for next to nothing.  

The narrator  wanders all over the city.  His family in Lagos tells him don't take public transportation but he does it for the experience.  He looks up a boyhood friend now a doctor and a first girl friend.  He visits book stores.  We really feel we are the in Lagos and we begin to wonder what terrible thing can we next witness.  

Cole has taken us deeply into a nightmare world.  

Official bio from webpage of author

TEJU COLE is a writer, art historian, and photographer. He is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

He was born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents, and raised in Nigeria. He currently lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of two books, a novella, Every Day is for the Thief, a New York Times Editors’ Pick, and a novel, Open City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature.

Teju Cole is a contributor to the New York Times, the New Yorker, Qarrtsiluni, the Atlantic, Granta, Aperture, Transition, A Public Space, and several other magazines. He is a contributing editor at the New Inquiry, and is currently at work on a book-length non-fiction narrative of Lagos. His photography has been exhibited in India and the US, and has been published in a number of journals. He has lectured widely, from the Harvard Graduate School of Design to Twitter Headquarters, and he gave the 2014 Kenan Distinguished Lecture in Ethics at Duke University

http://www.tejucole.com/

"Birdsong" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2010, from The New Yorker Twenty Under Forty Collection)

I have previously read and posted on a few short stories by the very highly regarded Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  I hope to read her longer works one day.  I was looking at one of my short story collections this morning, 20 Under 40, Stories From The New Yorker and was happy to discover one of her stories in the collection. 

Set in Lagos "Birdsong" is a very interesting story centering on an unmarried woman, working in an office, the married man she is having an affair with and one of her work friends.  Her work friend tells her she needs to drop the married man and find a man to "settle down with" before it is "too late".  The story lets us see into the mind of the woman, learn about class markers and social issues in Nigeria and we can decide if the man is a user or not.

I am glad I read this very well crafted story.

Mel u

The Caine Prize Short List-2012-"Bombay's Republic" by Rotimi Babatunde

The Caine Prize Short List-2012-"Bombay's Republic" by Rotimi Babatunde

2012

Blogging the Caine Year Three

My post on Caine Prize Stories in 2010 and 2011

The Caine Prize is considered Africa's leading literary award.    Entry is open to anyone from an African country and the form of work is the short short.   The patrons of the prize include three African winners of the Nobel Prize for literature, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and Wole Soyinka.    Chinua Achebe, winner of the International Man Booker prize,  is also a patron.    The award comes with 10,000 British Pounds  and is given out annually at a celebratory event in Oxford.     The short story is seen as a continuation of the tradition of African story telling which is one of the reasons the award focuses on that genre.    The award began in 2000.   

I began blogging on the Caine Prize short listed stories in 2010.   As far as I know I was the only person to do this.  In 2011 a number of bloggers posted on the stories which resulted in some very good posts and conversations.   In 2011 much of the comments were about whether or not the stories were a form of what was called "African Poverty Porn".   In 2010 there were several good stories and the winner, "Stick Fighting Days" by Olufemi Terry was just wonderful.   In 2011 I thought the stories declined in quality a lot and I was disappointed in the winner.   

I will be posting, as will a number of others, on a story a week for the next five weeks.

If "Bombay's Republic" by Rotimi Babatunde is any indication, we are in for some totally great stories this year.   I really loved this story.   There is also, for most of use for sure including me, a lot to be learned about    colonial Nigeria in the WWII era.   As the story opens, young Nigerian men are being told that Hitler's army is right on the border of their country and if they invade they have terrible plans for the people of Nigeria.   Many enroll in the British army as all of their lives they have been indoctrinated to believe that the white man was superior and they were honored to be in their army.   Those who would not join were forced in to the army.   They all thought the war would only last for a couple of weeks.   

Babatunde does a great job of taking us through basic training and. the 40 day plus trip from Nigeria to the jungles of Burma where the Nigerian units were sent into the most dangerous of missions.   At first our central character admires the English officers but he soon sees their feet of clay.   The Nigerian units conduct themselves with great distinction.   The Japanese seem to have a special fear of them.    In fact when  ever the unit comes upon dead bodies of Nigerian soldiers, they find the Japanese have cut them up into many pieces as they think the Nigerians come back to life if they do not. Babutunde did a wonderful job of letting us see what it was like to fight in the Burmese jungle.   Just the bugs were enough to kill a lot of people on both sides.   He saw terrible things and he did them also.      One day he learns the war ended a week ago when the Americans dropped a very big bomb on the Japanese. 

Not that many of the Nigerian soldiers made it home and everybody had a lot of questions for our central character.   The war changed him in lots of subtle and large ways.   He no longer looked up to the whites or feared them, he had contempt for African policemen and such who enforced the rules of the colony.

The story develops wonderfully when he gets back home to Lagos.   I really do not want to give away more of this plot because it is so much fun, so smart and really flat our hilarious.   In the closing pages of  "Bombay's Republic"  Babatunde takes into a different mode of narrative that totally fits with the plot of the story, a marvelous combination of form and content.  

"Bombay"s Republic" is a great story, if  there are better stories to come than this  the we are in for a wonderful Caine Year.   The story has a lot to teach us about colonialism and government authority in general.   It seemed as it closed almost like an Orwellian precautionary fable.   His prose style is perfect.  I learned a lot about WWII as it impacted African colonies of England from this story.  

You can find all of the short listed stories at the Caine Prize web page, as well as more background information on the award.

Official Biography

Rotimi Babatunde

Rotimi Babatunde’s fiction and poems have been published in Africa, Europe and America in journals which include Die Aussenseite des Elementes and Fiction on the Web and in anthologies including Little Drops, Daybreak on the Land and A Volcano of Voices. He is a winner of the Meridian Tragic Love Story Competition organised by the BBC World Service and was awarded the Cyprian Ekwensi Prize for Short Stories by the Abuja Writers Forum (AWF). His plays have been staged and presented by institutions which include Halcyon Theatre, Chicago; Riksteatern (the Swedish National Touring Theatre), Stockholm; the Royal Court Theatre, the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) and Churchill Theatre Bromley, all in London; and broadcast on the BBC World Service. He has been awarded literary fellowships by the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation in New York, by Fondazione Pistoletto’s Unidee Program and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre in Italy, and by Ledig House and the MacDowell Colony in the United States. Rotimi Babatunde lives in Ibadan, Nigeria.

Here are the Blog posts up so far on "Bombay's Republic

Method to the Madness
The Oncoming Hope
Bookshy  
Stephen Derwent Partington
Backslash Scott
Zunguzungu

Feel free to join us!

The best literary work written on the fight in Burma is for sure The Harp of Burma by Micheo Takeyama, a story of the war from the point of view of a Japanese soldier who tries to reconcile it with his Buddhist faith

Mel u

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1959, 209 pages, 268 KB)

 Before today I have posted on two short works by Chinua Achebe.   One was on one of his short stories, "Marriage is a Private Affair"   and once on an essay he wrote about Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness in which I compared his view that The Heart of Darkness is a deeply racist work to the very contrasting opinion of Edward Said.   


Chinua Achebe is the "dean" of contemporary African literature.   Born in Nigeria into a Christian Ibo family in 1930, his book Things Fall Apart (1958) is the most read ever book by an author born in Africa and is a classic of post colonial literature.   I am very glad I can now move this book out of the TBR category.


Things Fall Apart is Achebe's first novel.   It is set in Nigeria and opens just before the colonial take over of the area begins.   It is a very interesting and unsentimental look at life among the people of the region.   It does not glorify life in pre-colonial Nigeria but portrays it as a place just like any other place on earth at the time, full of the weakness of humans and the suffering brought on my natural and man made tragedies.  


The central character, a man we meet in his late teens or so, Okonkwo is a self made man, his father does not really help him as all as he should have.   Through a foolish mistake, he ends up losing everything he has and is driven, along with his wives, into exile.   In lots of ways Okonkwo is a very cruel man and there are real cruelties among the customs of the people of the time, such as the leaving of new born twins to die as it is felt they are somehow evil.    He is very abusive toward his wives as appears to be the normal mode of behavior.   


Achebe does not introduce European colonists into the work until it is nearly 75 percent completed.    We first learn of them through the reaction of residents to others who have been converted to Christianity.   




Things Fall Apart is an interesting well written  book.  I think perhaps it is read as much for its cultural importance as for any intrinsic merit it might have.   I am glad I read it. 


Mel u

"Marriage is a Private Affair" by Chinua Achebe

"Marriage is a Private Affair" by Chinua Achebe (1956, 8 pages)

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week Year Two, March 12 to March 22.   All you need do is post on one short story by an Irish author and send me a comment or and e mail and I will include it in the master post at the end of the challenge

When I saw that Amy of Amy Reads was hosting a reading event on October 1 in honor of Nigerian Independence Day I wanted to participate.   I have posted on a number of short stories by Nigerian writers in conjunction with reviews I have done on stories short listed for the Caine Prize.

Chinua Achebe is the "dean" of contemporary African literature.   Born in Nigeria into a Christian Ibo family in 1930, his book Things Fall Apart (1958) is the most read ever book by an author born in Africa and is a classic of post colonial literature.   I have posted on him before when I did a second post on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in which I compared his and Edward Said's attitude toward whether or not Heart of Darkness was, as Achebe claimed and Said denies, a deeply racist work.

"Marriage is a Private Affair" opens when a woman living in Lagos asks her fiance if he has written his father to tell him of their impending marriage.   The woman thinks his father will be very happy over the news.  The man knows his father will not want him to marry a woman who is not an Ibo and it is also the custom for the parents to arrange marriages for their children.   He has not told his wife yet but he has gotten a letter from his father saying he has found a perfect wife for him.

The woman feels that surely the father will not be so prejudiced as to reject her just because she is not from his tribe.   The man goes to visit his father to ask him for forgiveness for marrying the woman he loves.   The father repudiates the son and the marriage saying he is making a horrible mistake.  The man marries anyway and the woman is a wonderful wife.   The son asks the father to accept her over and over and the father totally rebukes him and at one point tells the son he is dead as far as he is concerned.   Eight years go by.   Everyone sees the woman is a great wife.    She keeps a perfect house and is the wonderful mother to two sons.

One day the father receives a letter from his daughter in law.   At first he wants to tear it up but something compels him to read it.   In it the daughter in law pleads with him to allow his grandsons to meet him and asks him to play a part in their lives.   The old man fights with all his will to reject this idea.   Then the man's heart is filled with shame and remorse for what he has done.    He goes to sleep that night dreaming of the soon to come day when he will regain not just his son but a wonderful daughter and two grandsons who will idolize him.

"Marriage is a Private Affair"  is an emotional story.   The prose is simple and hauntingly beautiful.   I felt in sympathy with all three of the main characters, even the stubborn father.  

Mel u