Book Title: An Orchestra Of Minorities
Publication Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-41239-1
Publisher: Little, Brown
Reviewer: Ibraheem Uthman
It is indisputable that love plays a huge and inevitable role in our various cultures; we hear about it in songs, films, and novels, both jokingly and seriously. It is a continual topic of growing up and a vital theme for the youth. Since the time of the ancient greeks, philosophers have debated the nature of love, resulting in ideas ranging from a materialism view of love as merely a physical phenomenon, to a psychological view of love as a psychological phenomenon— views of love as a deeply spiritual affair, that at its ultimate level, allows us to contact divinity— to animalistic or genetic urges that determine our actions.
The book, a modern love story that examines what a person might do for love, and whether fate can render those efforts void, was published in 2019 by little brown. In this mystical tragicomedy by man booker prize finalist Chigozie Obioma, a Nigerian chicken farmer is the victim of a scam. The story of this chicken farmer’s love for the pharmacist-in-training Ndali Obialor begins not with a first date, but with a near-tragic incident when Chinonso saves her from jumping from a bridge. Months later, their chance meeting sparks a desperate romance, which is thwarted by Ndali’s well-educated family, who began to question the destitute farmer as her future husband. Chinonso is despondent until a passing Jamike offers him a precarious path to acceptance— travel to Cyprus for further education, then return as a man of stature, the kind of man Ndali deserves to marry. Obioma resurrects homer’s odyssey in his depiction of his protagonist’s journey to Cyprus, as well as the scene that greets the naive Chinonso when he arrives. “mere survival is the most amazing feat of all,” according to the heroes of both stories. but, unlike Odysseus, Chinonso is tricked by his fellow man “under Poseidon’s blows, gale winds, and tons of sea.” Although he never enters the limbo as a result of the experience, he writes in a letter to Ndali that he “went to hell” in Cyprus. Chinonso’s trials are represented by Obioma, with an eye to the everyday horrors that many African migrant face in reality.
Speech is exalted as a campus of might, charitable or not, in an orchestra of minorities. The novel begins with an incantatory from Chinonso’s chi, or guardian spirit, who tells the story and addresses the farmer as his “host”. As Chinonso’s journey unfolds, the being keeps an eye on him and intervenes with the celestial magistrate on his defence when the farmer flouts. Through the chi’s mantras, which also serve to construct the novel, obioma creates a terrain of igbo spirits based on local spiritual practices. the persistent interlacing of ancestral sayings/knowledge and tittles with each chapter as it unfolds is very noticeable. as an example:
“egbunu, the old fathers say that a mouse cannot run into an empty mousetrap in broad daylight unless it has been drawn to the trap by something it could not refuse. egbunu, would a fish see an empty metal hook sticking out beneath water and cleave to it? how would it unless it is enticed by something on the hook? isn’t this similar to how a man is enticed into a situation he would not have liked to be in?”
Although Chinonso is motivated by love, neither his classed compatriots nor the majority of the Europeans he met are willing to extend empathy to him. Several of the hurdles emanate from the protagonist’s evident Africanness, as Europeans ridicule his hair, deny him work, and make fun of his inability to speak Turkish. According to the author, Chinonso is “a wayfarer in a foreign land” in Cyprus, where he was mocked, mistreated, and even imprisoned for a vile act he did not commit. Obioma recounts the farmer’s humiliations in great depth, seeming to relish in the geometry of his protagonist’s misery at times. At one point, he writes about chinonso, saying: “all the world becomes dead to a man like him in such a time as this, and therefore all the pleasant memories, all the images that would have pleased him, mean nothing in this moment. Even if they had been gathered in his mind in their multitudes, they would merely accumulate in abysmal futility, like a stack of gold in the mouth of a dead man.”
Chinonso’s medieval tale has been effectively constructed on traditional expertise, even as the central character moves toward western religious doctrine. Obioma’s mapping of christianity and ideas of Jesus christ (written as “Jisos Kraist”) to Whitman is a notable imagery that suggests the era on which the narrative is based.
An Orchestra of Minorities, named after chinonso’s late father’s nickname for singing birds, is mostly concerned with men’s actions and cerebral outcries. Women are frequently used as either incentive or blowback in this strategy. This is also remarkably tonal, although tragically. Nonetheless, obioma writes with such rigour that an orchestra of minorities feels both current and insightful.
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Ibraheem Uthman is a poet , studying Cyber Security at the Federal University Of Technology minna. He’s the author of the book; Mind Of a Bard. He is a member of the Hill-Top Creative Art Foundation. He is writing from Minna, Niger State, Nigeria.
