Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen: Beyond the Fishermen, Let’s Play Spot the Mad Men?

For those who just want to enjoy a good, engrossing book and have no time for isms and literary reviews, Obioma's The Fishermen is a very interesting book. It is suspense-filled and has the capacity to truly surprise you. Sometimes you see it coming, sometimes you don't. Go read it. For the rest of you who are interested in long story, read my review :) :

During the weekend, I read Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen. The reading was punctuated by an unending commentary that may be summed up thus: “You should read this book.” I cannot believe this book is this good. I will try to talk about the book while not giving spoilers. It is a book that thrives on the suspense so skilfully woven that leaves the reader quivering on the brink of many emotions. It will make you laugh. At some points, I could not help but gasp. It is the story of Mr Agwu, his wife and six children: Ikenna, Boja, Obembe, Ben, David and Nkem. What I find most beautiful is the intense animal metaphors through which Obioma builds plot and characters.

I enjoyed the book immensely. If I were to have a say, I would say while the book is titled “The Fishermen”, do not be deceived. There are fishermen in the books but the mad men stole the show. The book has madness springing up where you do not expect it.

It calls to mind Chinua Achebe’s “The Madman.” When a well-to-do man on the verge of picking a title runs into the village naked on the heels of the mad man who has stolen his clothes, we cannot help but feel his anger at the mad man, however, we must concede that he had his minute of madness during which he forgot that he was naked.

In Obioma’s The Fishermen, Abulu, the madman speaks and turns the Agwu family upside down. It is a madness that will fall to the ground and tumble around for years. In the end, one would ponder if they were mad for dancing to the tune of the mad man in the first place.

What I find most interesting however is the way Obioma succeeds in engaging the bigger issues of postcolonial Africa and leads one to find the madness of a postcolonial society. What is more, Achebe’s Okonkwo becomes the motivation for Obembe’s actions, to dire consequences.

In the end, Obioma’s The Fishermen by intricately depicting madness and its course invites us to contemplate our own collective madness and be compelled to be ashamed of our nakedness. It catches a postcolonial nation lingering at the edge of the market naked. If we, as a whole, hearken to Obioma’s voice, perhaps it is time for us to leave the mad man to get off with the clothes he has stolen, it is time to  return home and be sane.

Simply put, it has been a long while I read a book that did not beg the question “And so?” Read Obioma’s The Fishermen  if you want to know what boys are up to when they are not raping or bullying girls. It is- pardon me this singular cliché- a breath of fresh air.

Why You Should NOT Mind Your Business (For Harper Lee)

I assume you were probably brought up to mind your business. If you have forgotten or you think the advice is out of date, a quick search on YouTube will show you what happened to the elephant that stuck its nose where it did not belong. You should see that video.

But, no, it is not to mind your business I want to talk about. I want to talk about not minding your business.

Harper Lee, best known for writing To Kill a Mockingbird died today. I am not a card-carrying member of the post-mortem club who think, on an artist or artiste’s death, he becomes the greatest person ever. Death does not make you good or bad... No, in my world, You do not get cookies for dying. Neither do you get a reprieve for dying.

That said, that book is my book. If I were to give a list of ten books to a Martian, it has a secure place on the list. When I remember the book, however, what touches me most and never fails to touch my sentimental bone is the trial of Boo Radley. Yes, Atticus Finch was the courageous lawyer who took a lost case on himself, putting his neck on the line. I write to talk about not minding your business and Harper Lee, yes... so, bring on Atticus but somehow, Dill steals the show for me. Dill, the little white boy that burst into tears had to be led away from the trial.

You must excuse me for dropping names. I think Alice Walker feels the same way I do when she says in The Color Purple, that to truly see the truth about a people, we must observe the children. If a single child is crying, it is highly important. She says we should ask: “Why is the child crying?”

Dill’s tears were not over his business. It was over the stench of his society which the adults had adjusted to.

I have always been asked why I bother with some of these things I go up and down disagreeing with. What is my own with male circumcision? Or with being interested in reading up all I can on the Holocaust? Or being the one bothered about FGM... For most people I have come across, no be today..

And so I seem to be one of those people who got the memo late that the world is crooked and no one can fix it. Yet, I cannot look away. Even when do not know how it is my concern, I just can’t turn my head and look at the other side. So I pick –isms here and there, carrying my mental placard when I know in my heart that what I seek in the world is not captured in any one –ism. I stay behind anyone who can shed tears and not leave trash for Lawma.

I doff my heart for the Harper Lees, who like Laaroye of the Yoruba pantheon, shed tears even more than the bereaved, for the Dills, the seeing ones in world where to be seasoned is to grow hardened and be able to look on at injustice without recoiling inside. For the men who are feminists, for the women for whom gender equity is not only feminism, for everyone who can cringe and sympathise with a cause that is not his.

How do you know it is not your business anyway, in a world where private companies go public and privatisation happens within the blink of an eye? How does one keep tab on what is one’s business or not?

Look what happened to the man who (thought he) minded his own business:

A man was in his house. He heard them shouting “Carry it”, “Nooo, don’t put it there”, “Why Should You Put it there?” He turned left, covered his ears with the pillow and slept even more soundly, cursing barbarians for not minding their business. “Carry it this way”, “Carry it that way”; our man slept on...

When the party was over, he found the thing at his backyard.

No, the story is not mine. I merely drew it from a proverb my father is particularly fond of which is translated literally as: “If you hear the clamour: “carry it, lift it”, if you don’t join them, it will be put in your backyard.”

So, I carry my mental placard and stand behind any –ism and talk that is for the sidelined because the affairs of man are my business. Every time the world has taken a step forward, usually it may be credited to the man who would not mind his business.

N:B: Please, give me the address of the man who said:”The darkest place in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality”; I think he deserves some flowers from me.

The Equally Blameless Foreskin?

Hello, there is a part of your body which enhances sexual pleasure due to the presence of nerve receptors and perhaps, offers lifelong protection kinda. In spite of all its qualities and not, it harbours dirt... we will have to chop it off. No, don’t ask why.

(Conversation that happened in my head: Hello, this is your brain. Do you really want to write this and be known as the young woman who wrote about this?)

Well, I did not have the good sense to listen, so, here goes:

Dick, prick... Words I have learnt to blush saying or hearing all my life. Especially “prick” a word I loathe very much. There is a story in there for another day. I take particular offence to the word “prick” because it reminds me of a lewd sick man (Now, I hate to even use the word “sick” in relation to the man, he contaminates the word) I met as a girl of fourteen. He was the first person to use the word “prick” to me. I hated his insinuations, his tone of voice, his lewdness; to cut it short, my encounter with him signalled a lifelong feud with the blameless word “prick”. Blameless, yes, because it is not about the word “prick”. What is wrong, for example, with a person saying “I pricked my thumb with a needle?”

It is about what it referred to: penis. Yes, I said it. Penis. A word we so love to shy away from saying. Did you know it was not pronounced “pe-nis” but “pi-nis”? As I grow older, I have found myself using the word on occasion and when I do, I sit up mentally and become all serious. Like, I dare you to make a joke of it. Yet, it is not about the word “penis”. If the word “penis” referred to school children marching on a lawn for example, there would have been no hush-hush around it. I have heard parents call it “tomboy”, “wee-wee”... children pick up the ... from their parents. I did. There, you have it, my penis subtext or history.

Before setting out to write this post, I spent a whole car-ride from Ibadan to Osogbo pondering where to begin. Should I begin with an announcement that I am taking on something people would prefer me to leave alone? I remembered my father looking at me as I made a point as a secondary school girl and advising: “Don’t be a leftist.” We always communicate in Yoruba. You can only imagine the seriousness that warranted that English.

Should I begin with a reference to the my status update on Facebook over a year ago on Female Genital Mutilation? We all spoke about it, angrily, passionately. It turned up important posters, one of them, a name I had only ever seen in magazines. People were angry. We were talking about the barbarism of mutilating the “blameless Vulva” as Alice Walker refers to it. We, amazons, picked up our spears and dashed out in fear of the blameless vulva. My sister and I, who can barely agree on women affairs, agreed on it. Female Genital Mutilation is a beast, Hitler, the devil, the this, the that. It was atomic bomb and all. We called it Female Genital Mutilation and addressed it as such but what we were essentially defending, which we did not mention, was the vulva.

Then, recently, I started to think of the foreskin which Sorrells et al (2007) refers to as the most sensitive part of the penis. Was the foreskin equally as blameless as the vulva? I remember my baby brother, boisterous, being taken to the hospital. He was some few weeks old. When he returned, he was subdued. He was not crying but he had the look of someone who had cried till he was emptied out. He returned as a half-empty sack of potato. Yes, children forget pain. I am sure if I asked him now, he probably would not remember the pain on a subconscious level. Yet, some people do not have the privilege of forgetting; one of them, my father, who vividly remembers his circumcision at the age of fourteen and the hellish two weeks that followed.

I started to wonder, why is there so much noise about FGM while everyone is very accepting of male circumcision? How many people know that every year, over hundred boys die from circumcision every year in the US alone? What is more, the deaths are often not attributed to circumcision in the death reports but to other causes like infection, bleeding, etc. And yet, experts, when pressed, attest to the point that circumcision has no intrinsic benefit. My question is not “why do we have to circumcise our boys?” My question is “Why do we have to cut off the foreskin of our boys, while ignoring their shrieks? What purpose does it serve?

Dan Bolinger’s stance, which seems pretty sensible to me, is that circumcision, which could be harmful and dangerous, should not be carried out on minors or babies. I agree with Bolinger that such decision should not be made for a person. Why is the foreskin the business of the society?

You would ask me if I would circumcise my son(s) if I had them. Well, to be honest, the answer is that I do not know. I think being able to stand and be honestly confused is the beauty of my journey as an individual. I had a lecturer when I was an undergraduate that would ask, “Are you confused? It is good to be confused. It shows that you are thinking.” In secondary school, I remember ending debates with a flourish, “I hope I have been able to convince you and not to confuse you that moinmoin is better than akara.”

Here, however, I do not wish to have convinced you. Heck, I am not convinced myself. I wish to confuse you. Our humanity lies in our ability to be confused... to be able to stop in our tracks and ask, but why did we choose this path?

N:B: In case you didn’t know, there is a process known as “Foreskin Restoration” and a movement, “Intactivism,” simply put, let the equally blameless “foreskin” be. I have heard the case for “Intactivism”, I have not heard the case for chop it off...

I'm all ears...