Many books and poems have been written about roads, which include: The Road Not Taken (Robert Frost), The Place of Dead Roads (William S. Burroughs), Gentleman of the Road (Michael Chabon), The Road (Cormac McCarthy), The Road (Wole Soyinka), On the Road (Jack Kerouac), The Famished Road (Ben Okri), and The Ghost Road by Pat Barker. Of all these roads, the one that comes closest to Chigozie Obioma’s novel, in terms of thematic root, is Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel that details the gruelling journey of a father and his young son over several months across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed industrial civilisation and nearly all life. While the closest in terms of literary movement is Ben Okri’s The Famished Road. Now, any ardent follower of trends in Nigerian literature would posit that it seems magical realism and the tales of spirits are gradually becoming a staple of modern African Literature, something in the past that belonged to the Latin and Spanish world and was hailed as something only the masters of the art of writing could manage. Nigeria was never in that light – but thanks to global recognitions of Ben Okri, now Chigozie Obioma, and the host of new Nigerian writers, the literary landscape has changed. But, of course, anyone could argue that Amos Tutuola even preceded Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But I’m certainly not sure if anyone is ready for that argument.
So here in Chigozie Obioma’s novel, we are introduced to the protagonist (Kunle) in 1967, who sits at a desk writing. He is trying to extricate himself from the web of guilt that had stayed with him for a decade. Kunle is a law student at the University of Lagos, but he is so insular that he does not know about the war spreading like a plague in his country. This deep personal guilt walks arm in arm with his sheer devastation. Then Obioma lets us know that several realities run concurrently in the novel as we are introduced to a seer who unable to stop his wife from dying even though he foresaw it, tries to erase his own guilt by seeking after her fate in the afterlife through a ritual that allows him to also see the life of the protagonist (Kunle) who also is fighting his own guilt which revolves around his relationship with his younger brother Tunde who has travelled to Eastern Nigeria during the Nigerian-Biafran war. At this point, we can see what Chigozie Obioma’s trying to do, showing us what guilt can offer to a soul yearning for just anything, just any rope to take him out of an existential oubliette that does nothing but make promises it will never keep. At this point, I am reminded of Eddie in Arthur Miller’s A View From The Bridge, who it seemed could not run from his own fate. A man doomed to destruction by his own guilty desires. But here, there is a contrast. Whilst Eddie Cabone was running headlong into an existential alley harbouring his tragic demise, Kunle here is being pursued by his own fate. We see him go after his brother, trying to eradicate the guilt that had stayed with him for years. What guilt, actually? When Kunle was nine, he sent his brother, Tunde, out of the house so he could spend time with his sweetheart, Nkechi. Devising a clever plan, he throws a football into the street for Tunde to fetch, which results in a car accident that cripples Tunde. The injury severely damages Kunle’s relationship with Nkechi, but brings her close to Tunde, and makes Kunle withdraw into his own self so that ‘he has no friends and has avoided—as if by some inner protestation—anything that could bring him close to anyone.’ Being pronounced an Abami Eda, ‘one who will die and return to life’ by the seer, Kunle lives his life at the edge of imminent destruction. So as he hits the road to find his brother amidst the war, he finds himself in the heat of the tension rising from ethnic bias and sheer national disunity. But Kunle himself is Half-igbo and half-Yoruba, as his mother hails from the Igbo ethnic group. However, it is assumed that Kunle decides to fight for the seceding Biafran nation out of sheer objectivity. He keeps making attempts at finding his brother, which brings him into a greater understanding of the brutal political forces of the time. It is a terrible education. Kunle’s life in Lagos is lucid to us: he studies, he suffers his private anguishes, but by sheer virtue of demographics, as he is thrust into hell, witnessing the pogrom. There is no rest. Battle after battle, death upon death. This is a different kind of novel set in that time period. Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, and whatever novels in that Biafran war pantheon, focus on interpersonal relationships during the war. But this one gives us something close to firsthand experience. You witness the bloodshed as if you are there. You witness the anguish and, unless you are non-human, wish it would stop when you blink your eye. Here too, we are shown that the non-Igbo tribes who happen to be in the east are also being forced to face the consequences of the war as minority ethnic groups. You can see yourself feeling for them, how unfair it can be to be involved in something you practically wish you weren’t involved in. Or perhaps, like they say, ‘there is safety in numbers ‘, and the Igbos could count on those outsiders becoming insiders when it all matters. All one can think of as the novel progresses is about fate and the potency of a prophecy. One thinks of the seer. Everything that happens, he sees through Ifa’s bowl. Atop a lonely hill, over eight hours a night, he sits watching all the horrors Kunle embarks on. The seer’s sections come after every two to four chapters of Kunle’s, and they mostly go on for less than two pages. The sections help with time management: when the seer looks away from the vision, we can get past weeks and months in Kunle’s timeline. But it’s a difficult structure to maintain. And I do not know if every reader who’s read it feels the same way. And just for a fleeting moment, Obioma shows us that love, too, can be found in chaos when Kunle falls in love with a female soldier. A fleeting happiness for a man destined by a prophecy to die sooner than later. The book brings back images of history that many would beg to forget. And the road here, as Obioma has made us understand, can be metaphorical. The mystic, elegant, flowing prose conveys the journey of a spiritual man through the struggles of personal identity and serious ethnic division, and shows there are many roads one could tread in this journey we conveniently call “Life”.
Set in Nigeria in the late 1960s, The Road to the Country is a riveting story of a bookish student who, battling with long-held guilt, goes to war to shed the guilt like a carapace. It is a story of a man trying hard to redeem himself at whatever cost. A story of a man who must come to the crossroads with his bedevilling circumstance, and come to terms with his own fate. The book reads like an epistolary piece to all who yearn for redemption as they battle life challenges or fight their own demons. For those of us who believe in spiritualism, it is a very compelling, relatable and heartbreaking tale to a fair degree. No stone is left unturned as Chigozie Obioma strips the fabric of Kunle’s existence bit by bit till all that is left is a vulnerable man looking for answers in places he was not invited to.
While there are highs for the novel, there are also lows. As regards the highs, creating the seer I perceive most have been an arduous task for Obioma, who must ensure that the purpose for his existence is achieved in the novel. And he executes this with a certain kind of finesse associated with only seasoned writers. Then he pours in a beautiful thought when he ensures that when the seer yells words over the fragile bridge of the bowl, Kunle can hear them – can hear even the soft flapping of birds and the barks of foxes. That, I tell you, is beautiful. But here are the lows: some things just don’t pan out well. Take, for instance, Kunle being called Kunis by the soldiers at the battlefield, only for Nkechi, who wasn’t on the warfront, to meet Kunle later and still call him Kunis. What is Obioma telling us? That anybody who bears the name Kunle is called by the sobriquet “Kunis”? This, a seasoned reader can tell, is a mistake. Again, the overuse of Nigerian reworkings of standard English and our mode of speaking did a lot of disservice in most cases. But the highs supercede the lows, which is a great plus.
Obioma’s novel is a tale of brotherhood, guilt and love, and the immeasurable bandwidth of courage required to wade through one of the devastating storms in the history of Africa. While ideas may be divisive, this novel could transport Obioma on the road to another Booker nomination.
Marvel Chukwudi Pephel is a Nigerian writer who writes poems, short stories and other things besides. He was invited to the Sixth Chinua Achebe Literary Festival. He is the author of I, Robert’s Robot and Other Stories.