/ 20 August 2008

Drawn out and dull

As I read Unbridled (Jacana) by Jude Dibia, winner of last year’s Ken Saro-Wiwa Prize, impatiently waiting for it to end, I wondered at the quality of the books it beat to this prize. It is the story of a woman, Ngozi, also called Erika, who leaves the poverty and abuse of her native Nigeria to go and live in Britain after meeting James, a prospective husband, on the internet.

It’s a hackneyed tale that begins with the arrival of Ngozi in England where she meets James. He is the precise opposite of everything he said he was. He is broke, he is abusive and he can’t be bothered to shower. He shatters Ngozi’s image of living in England and co-habiting with a white man.

When she is with James’s friends she feels like chattel. She can’t be the first woman to feel this way: “There I was on this man’s arm and everyone was talking around me as I if I wasn’t there.” In fact the harsh could interpret this book as the literary equivalent of Ngozi’s horrible experiences in England and Nigeria at the hands of men.

It starts with an ecstatic: “I have finally found my voice.” I strained my ears to hear Ngozi’s authentic voice, seemingly drowned by a whining macho literary patriarchy that claims to speak for womanhood. The story feels, in a raw and rather enraging way, like a male attempt at telling the story of a woman. The difficulties with this novel are located in the attempt to assume the narrative voice of a woman.

I am not saying it can’t be done, Kazuo Ishiguro successfully did it in Never Let Me Go. But I am still trying to work out whether a female writer would write sparse prose, staid as a press release, about an incident as traumatic as the day one decides to “detest all men”. Ngozi goes to her brother to tell him that their father is abusing her. “It is not a woman’s place to complain about her father,” he hushes her. “That was it. I didn’t sleep that night. I was so disturbed. It was that night that I lost all respect for my brother and all men. It dawned on me that Nnamdi was like his father; he was a man.” One imagines a person deciding against patronising a particular bar in favour of the next one with more or less these same sentiments.

The book’s other fault is its enervating sense of provinciality. Being provincial, of course, is not censure. After all, any state of affairs that is protracted enough in the long run will tend to exude provinciality. Other writers have documented provinciality before and written books that mark the books in a certain time and locale. But the provinciality of this book is of a different kind. It is prosaic, drab and much is made of her living in a tenement flat for months on end — an experience, that, in the hands of a dextrous writer, would surely move the reader. In the end, her redemption feels forced, foisted upon the narrative to pander, perhaps, to the whims of the standard plot that suffering is followed by relief and redemption. We know life is not like that.

Disappointed by my reading experience, I trawled the net to find out about the writer. I saw an interview in which he talks about himself in the third person. Discussing his book, then not yet out, Dibia told a reporter: “I think more than everybody, I am looking forward to the next Jude Dibia novel. It feels great to finally finish writing it.”

Slain Ogoni environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa has come to be a metaphor for the poisoned politics of Nigeria where he was one of the sacrificial lambs to appease the petroleum gods polluting the Niger Delta. We tend to forget it actually was writing that made his name. But works like these do nothing to champion his literary and political legacy.