A New Nigerian Novel Reviewed
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A New Nigerian Novel Reviewed
By Chris Lehmann,
deputy editor of Book World, whose e-mail address is
[email protected]
Washington Post
Tuesday, February 3, 2004; Page C04
GRACELAND
By Chris Abani
Farrar Straus Giroux. 321 pp. $24
Coming of age in any society is no picnic, but Elvis Oke, the protagonist of Chris Abani's energetic and moving new novel, has it
especially rough. He and his widowed father live in a dilapidated apartment n Maroko, a desperately poor ghetto neighborhood of Lagos, Nigeria.
Father and son repaired to the coastal capital city from their home
town of Afikpo after the boy's mother died of cancer in 1979. By 1983, when the novel's action occurs, Elvis's father, Sunday, a respected school administrator and a onetime candidate for local political office in the family's original home, has become a jobless, bitter alcoholic, shacking up with a shopkeeper and glumly bickering with the disobedient, 16-year-old Elvis when he's not loudly bemoaning his fate in a local watering hole.
The restless Elvis, meanwhile, harbors dreams of being a dancer but tries none too successfully to drum up cash by going out to
Lagos's resorts and impersonating his namesake, curling his lip and
thrusting his hips at bored white tourists sunning on the beach as he delivers off-key renditions of "Hound Dog." "What d'ya think he's doing?" the sunbathers muse to each other before giving the boy some pocket change to leave them
alone. His fellow Lagos residents are equally perplexed when they see him decked out in white pancake makeup and askew pompadour wig: "Who do dis to you?" one matronly bus rider asks, before wandering away with a snigger.
The short answer to that question would be Maroko, a jury-rigged set of buildings and improvised byways that all too closely
mirrors the "solid impermanence" that marks Elvis's domestic
arrangements: "Half of the town was built of a confused mix of clapboard, wood, cement and zinc sheets, raised above a swamp by means of stilts and wooden walkways. The other half, built on solid ground reclaimed from the sea, seemed to be clawing its way
out of the primordial swamp, attempting to become something else." When it rains, most of the habitations in Maroko -- Elvis's
included -- flood instantly and become makeshift homes to rats flushed out by the storm.
Even Elvis comes to realize his novel brand of busking isn't yielding much of a living, and ever keen to avoid his father's upbraidings, he starts hanging out with an old school chum, Redemption, a
versatile entrepreneur in Lagos's underground economy. Redemption lands Elvis a gig as a dancer for hire in a disco patronized by posh young heiresses and diplomats' daughters.
The two boys gradually move up the ladder of criminal enterprise, beginning with an assignment from a military warlord known
simply as "the Colonel" to package cocaine for smuggling into the United States.
But when Redemption recruits Elvis to join him on an errand into the country's interior as escorts to a big transfer of some never-specified assets, Elvis starts to get cold feet -- in part because he has also fallen in with another enigmatic figure, an indigent and politically minded playwright and performer known as the King of the Beggars. This oddly charismatic figure serves as a surrogate father and artistic mentor to Elvis; he also knows
Redemption's colorful past and warns Elvis that he is not to be trusted.
Our protagonist is, in short, at the sort of maturity-making crossroads that coming-of-age novels are made of -- and to underline this point, Abani alternates the present-tense narrative of Elvis's Maroko misadventures with flashbacks to his earlier life in Afikpo, when his beloved mother was still alive, and a network of extended kin (most notably his maternal aunt and grandmother and his young cousin Efua) all gave him the sense of a place in the world that he now so conspicuously lacks. Indeed, Abani further stresses this disjunction (a bit too heavy-handedly) by starting each chapter with recipes-cum-home-remedies from his mother's journal -- which Elvis carries with him everywhere and pores over obsessively -- as well as with descriptions of father-son tribal rituals involving the presentation of the kola nut.
Despite such creaky devices, Abani remains a fluid, closely observant writer who doesn't let this counterpoint narrative get
swamped by facile nostalgia for a simpler village life. Indeed, as the book's flashback narration gradually catches up to the present, we learn that Afikpo was far from a study in pastoral innocence, with both Elvis and Efua suffering the predations of an altogether more sinister relative, and another of Elvis's cousins meeting a far worse end in the close-knit adult world of the village.
News of this latter episode in particular proves paradoxically
liberating to Elvis, even if in the short run it triggers an ll-considered decision to join Redemption's escort detail. By the
novel's harrowing conclusion, Elvis faces the tall adult mandate of
complete self-reinvention, albeit with some strong intimations that he will remain a son both of his homeland and his father.
"GraceLand" teems with incident, from the seedy crime dens of Maroko to the family melodramas of the Oke clan. But throughout the novel's action, Abani -- an accomplished poet who published his own first novel at Elvis's tender age of 16 -- keeps the reader's gaze fixed firmly on the detailed and contradictory cast of everyday Nigerian life. He shows how decades of authoritarian political rule breed indifference, and indeed weary fatalism, in the face of corruption and political terror, even while symbols of resistance such as the King of the Beggars become cultural heroes. He
delineates the complicated ways in which his characters become steeped in village traditions and American popular culture.
Weaned, for example, on Western movies, Elvis refers to any film protagonist simply as "Actor" (aka John Wayne) and any Actor's nemesis simply as "Bad Guy" -- until, that is, one of Elvis's friends explains, apropos of Clint Eastwood, that Bad Guys are now Actors, too, and that there is "no more John Wayne."
And in Elvis himself, Abani has vividly captured a character's
struggle to come into a manhood that no longer exists in any of the worlds he is trying to grow into: caught in a trap, you might even say.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
deputy editor of Book World, whose e-mail address is
[email protected]
Washington Post
Tuesday, February 3, 2004; Page C04
GRACELAND
By Chris Abani
Farrar Straus Giroux. 321 pp. $24
Coming of age in any society is no picnic, but Elvis Oke, the protagonist of Chris Abani's energetic and moving new novel, has it
especially rough. He and his widowed father live in a dilapidated apartment n Maroko, a desperately poor ghetto neighborhood of Lagos, Nigeria.
Father and son repaired to the coastal capital city from their home
town of Afikpo after the boy's mother died of cancer in 1979. By 1983, when the novel's action occurs, Elvis's father, Sunday, a respected school administrator and a onetime candidate for local political office in the family's original home, has become a jobless, bitter alcoholic, shacking up with a shopkeeper and glumly bickering with the disobedient, 16-year-old Elvis when he's not loudly bemoaning his fate in a local watering hole.
The restless Elvis, meanwhile, harbors dreams of being a dancer but tries none too successfully to drum up cash by going out to
Lagos's resorts and impersonating his namesake, curling his lip and
thrusting his hips at bored white tourists sunning on the beach as he delivers off-key renditions of "Hound Dog." "What d'ya think he's doing?" the sunbathers muse to each other before giving the boy some pocket change to leave them
alone. His fellow Lagos residents are equally perplexed when they see him decked out in white pancake makeup and askew pompadour wig: "Who do dis to you?" one matronly bus rider asks, before wandering away with a snigger.
The short answer to that question would be Maroko, a jury-rigged set of buildings and improvised byways that all too closely
mirrors the "solid impermanence" that marks Elvis's domestic
arrangements: "Half of the town was built of a confused mix of clapboard, wood, cement and zinc sheets, raised above a swamp by means of stilts and wooden walkways. The other half, built on solid ground reclaimed from the sea, seemed to be clawing its way
out of the primordial swamp, attempting to become something else." When it rains, most of the habitations in Maroko -- Elvis's
included -- flood instantly and become makeshift homes to rats flushed out by the storm.
Even Elvis comes to realize his novel brand of busking isn't yielding much of a living, and ever keen to avoid his father's upbraidings, he starts hanging out with an old school chum, Redemption, a
versatile entrepreneur in Lagos's underground economy. Redemption lands Elvis a gig as a dancer for hire in a disco patronized by posh young heiresses and diplomats' daughters.
The two boys gradually move up the ladder of criminal enterprise, beginning with an assignment from a military warlord known
simply as "the Colonel" to package cocaine for smuggling into the United States.
But when Redemption recruits Elvis to join him on an errand into the country's interior as escorts to a big transfer of some never-specified assets, Elvis starts to get cold feet -- in part because he has also fallen in with another enigmatic figure, an indigent and politically minded playwright and performer known as the King of the Beggars. This oddly charismatic figure serves as a surrogate father and artistic mentor to Elvis; he also knows
Redemption's colorful past and warns Elvis that he is not to be trusted.
Our protagonist is, in short, at the sort of maturity-making crossroads that coming-of-age novels are made of -- and to underline this point, Abani alternates the present-tense narrative of Elvis's Maroko misadventures with flashbacks to his earlier life in Afikpo, when his beloved mother was still alive, and a network of extended kin (most notably his maternal aunt and grandmother and his young cousin Efua) all gave him the sense of a place in the world that he now so conspicuously lacks. Indeed, Abani further stresses this disjunction (a bit too heavy-handedly) by starting each chapter with recipes-cum-home-remedies from his mother's journal -- which Elvis carries with him everywhere and pores over obsessively -- as well as with descriptions of father-son tribal rituals involving the presentation of the kola nut.
Despite such creaky devices, Abani remains a fluid, closely observant writer who doesn't let this counterpoint narrative get
swamped by facile nostalgia for a simpler village life. Indeed, as the book's flashback narration gradually catches up to the present, we learn that Afikpo was far from a study in pastoral innocence, with both Elvis and Efua suffering the predations of an altogether more sinister relative, and another of Elvis's cousins meeting a far worse end in the close-knit adult world of the village.
News of this latter episode in particular proves paradoxically
liberating to Elvis, even if in the short run it triggers an ll-considered decision to join Redemption's escort detail. By the
novel's harrowing conclusion, Elvis faces the tall adult mandate of
complete self-reinvention, albeit with some strong intimations that he will remain a son both of his homeland and his father.
"GraceLand" teems with incident, from the seedy crime dens of Maroko to the family melodramas of the Oke clan. But throughout the novel's action, Abani -- an accomplished poet who published his own first novel at Elvis's tender age of 16 -- keeps the reader's gaze fixed firmly on the detailed and contradictory cast of everyday Nigerian life. He shows how decades of authoritarian political rule breed indifference, and indeed weary fatalism, in the face of corruption and political terror, even while symbols of resistance such as the King of the Beggars become cultural heroes. He
delineates the complicated ways in which his characters become steeped in village traditions and American popular culture.
Weaned, for example, on Western movies, Elvis refers to any film protagonist simply as "Actor" (aka John Wayne) and any Actor's nemesis simply as "Bad Guy" -- until, that is, one of Elvis's friends explains, apropos of Clint Eastwood, that Bad Guys are now Actors, too, and that there is "no more John Wayne."
And in Elvis himself, Abani has vividly captured a character's
struggle to come into a manhood that no longer exists in any of the worlds he is trying to grow into: caught in a trap, you might even say.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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