In the words of Chinua Achebe, “an African writer who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant.” Perhaps in a bid to avoid “being completely irrelevant”, most writers of this generation often address burning social and political issues of the day. Ironically, it is one thing to address topical issues and another to do it well enough to bring out a good literary work that does not fall-short under the weight of its topicality and contemporaneity. This has been the bane in the writing of most Marxist or ideologically-inclined writers. Steeped in these ideologies or pathologically militant against the bourgeois class and what it stands for, the end result is oftentimes an unreadable Marxist or ideological tract bereft of art. Only a few writers have achieved meaningful successes in the treatment of topical issues, where a sweet correlation is struck between form and content as Soji Cole’s Embers.
Set in an IDP camp, Embers revolves around the lives of a group of girls who escaped from the Boko Haram terrorists in Sambisa forest only to find themselves in a worse situation. It is a strong indictment on a dysfunctional society that births a generation whose angst is at its breaking-point, seething embers-like. It calls attention to the rot in IDP camps where rape, abuse of human rights and corruption have become the order of the day.
Structurally, the play is divided into three Acts, titled “Testimony”, “Discovery” and “Smithereens” respectively with an epilogue. In the first Act, the reader is introduced to the characters and their background stories. In the second Act, there is the surprise twist to the plot upon the discovery that some of the IDP inmates are not what they seem, and in the final Act, the play is brought to a shattering climax.
On the thematic level, Embers examines the horrors prevalent atthe theatre of war, whether at Sambisa forest with the Boko Haram or at the IDP camps with soldiers, the corruption in the body politics, feminism, inter-generational restiveness, appearance versus reality, among others. These anomalies in the system are enough to provoke the angst of a younger generation whose dreams and aspirations are daily stultified or stunted. Talatu, the old woman in the play, cannot help but laments in page 82:
“I sense anger everywhere … you have bottled up anger inside of you too … your generation is an angry one. One day there will be a new war. A war in which blood will be spattered on the conscience of the weak and the innocent.”
This angst of the younger generation if not checked, may spiral into a conflagration that may consume the entire society. Cole seems to be saying in this work that unless these debaucheries and horrendous carnage are nipped in the bud, the system may have “to destroy itself to regenerate” (page 20). For this current unacceptable situation cannot long continue; where soldiers who should be better than the Boko Haram boys are turning out to be worse. Such a system is definitely treading the path of self-annihilation. Character Atai expresses so aptly the angst of her generation in page 58 thus:
“The horrors that I saw in five days were more frightful than the fiercest things I saw in Sambisa forest. The soldiers slaughtered any man that passed by the village. They didn’t even wait to ask questions. Some men who escaped the destruction of the Boko boys were returning to Gali to see what can
[sic]be salvaged. They were all killed by the soldiers. Even when I told them that I knew a man they captured, they threatened to kill me.”
It is indeed a society at war with itself when the much-looked-up-to soldiers have turnedvillains, brutally raping helpless women and girls at IDP camps. Memunah narrates this misnomer in page 60:
“… the forest is better! This is where the Boko Haram really operates. Look at those soldiers, every night they go into the tents to rape the girls. The camp officials rape us … Tell me how this place is better than the forest when all we do here is to kill ourselves and live on the carcass”
Unfortunately for Memunah, little does she know that a worse tragedy than her outcry above awaits her. Her friend Idayat gives a chilling narration of her fate in page 80:
”Memunah was locked in a room and raped by the Camp Commandant … One by one the soldiers raped her too … They raped her to death. The newspaper this morning mentioned that she died of cholera. The people who bring us clean water have arrived with more after the news of her death.”
In a largely patriarchal society like north-eastern Nigeria where the play is set, violence against the girl-child and women generally predated the emergence of the Boko Haram insurgency. It is a society where the girl-child is viewed as a second-class citizen, as well captured in Talatu’s story in page 42:
“He was overwhelmed with excitement about the baby. It took me a while to come to the knowledge that whenever he referred to the unborn baby, he used ‘my son.’ He was with me in the delivery room on that day. He insisted he wanted to watch me birth his son. As the baby came out, I saw him turn his back and leave the room. No one needs to tell me that the baby was a girl. When I woke up two hours after and he still wasn’t back, I knew that a chapter in my life had closed.”
The girl-child is daily made to feel inferior to her male counterpart. This, of course, is no less exacerbated by rather reactionary and conformist women like Memunah’s mother: “My mother used to tell me that women are created for men. ‘It’s a man’s world,’ she says all of the time.” This objectification of women is evident by the sexual exploitation they suffer like Talatu by her uncle in page 8:
“I was waiting for life to treat me with sympathy after the death of my mother. My mother’s brother came to take me away to his home and that was where the life of slavery began. He used me. He used my body too. His first son also raped me. I was battered. And at such a young age too.”
Like Talatu, Idayat’s trust in men wanes when she was raped by her teacher in primary school (page 46). Cole feels that in a dysfunctional society such as North-eastern Nigeria in the play, the greatest victims during crises, like his older compatriot Ahmed Yerima in his Little Drops…, centred on the Niger Delta militancy, are women and little children. It is a world on the path of self-destruction. A world where peace-keepers turn rapists, where camp officials and government functionaries pilfer the relief materials meant for the IDP inmates, where the military has abdicated “the rules of engagement” (page 73) in favour of indiscriminate killings of both civilians and terrorists, where what you see is not what it seems. The reader cannot help but be jolted by the playwright’s skillful deployment of the timeless theme of appearance versus reality when Idayat, Memunah and the beggars are not what they seem. Idayat’s confession in page 92 is the last straw in the pessimism and despair that pervade the entire work:
“There are so many things that you don’t understand. Some of us came into the camp for a mission disguised as displaced people. We are actually emissaries working with Boko Haram. Memunah was part of us. There are still others in this camp yet unknown to us. Even some soldiers in the camp are part of us. I told you about Qudus. My first love. I found him in the forest of Sambisa. He taught me new things.”
In the hands of Cole, language is a sumptuous delight with striking expressions such as “This day chanced upon me too quickly! I came for a gathering of hope but all I met was a potlatch of curse” (page 94), “The first sound a new-born baby hears is the shriek of pain!” (page 95) and “The world needs not [sic] subpoena my soul any long” (page 95). However, no matter how confident a writer feels about his superlative handling of language, editing should never be discountenanced. Sadly, there are a few typographical and grammatical errors that dot the pages of the play such as “the world treat women the same” (page 3), “struggled so hard to” (page 20), “at the throes of death” (page 44), “good in Arithmetic” (page 46), “A sparse league of flies accompany” (page 50), “priced cows” (page 55), “sounds of drumming and singing is heard” (page 80), “A sound of reverie” (page 82), “I take you for your words” (page 86), “with caustic dissention” (page 91), “the poor steals from each other” (page 91), “many blankets of problem” (page 94), “leftover” (pages 28, 84), “worshipers” (page 65), “crossroad” (page 90). British and American spellings of words are used interchangeably, such as “center” (page 13), but “centre” (page 23), “the Defense Academy” (page 25), “scandalised” (page 52), “practice democracy” (pages 26, 68), “reconnoiter” (page 34), “odour” (page 56), “demeanour” (pages 62, 79), “pretense” (page 66), “meters” (page 65), “succor” (page 81), “smoldering embers” (page 95), “molted my skin” (page 97), ), “realize” (pages 26, 30, 49) but “realised” (pages 41, 64, 67). There is also a nonchalant use of single and double quotation marks without consistency as well as punctuations marks (especially full stop marks after and before closing brackets). No doubt, Embers makes a good reading play within the confines and comfort of the reader’s room. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of its stageablility, which is the end-product of any stage-piece. Theatre audiences will struggle to have their attention sustained, no thanks to the rather verbose dialogue and slow pace of action until page 61 when the camp officers arrest Memunah for bringing Boko Haram boys to the camp, disguised as beggars. Almost all the characters philosophise from Talatu to Atai down to the soldiers, forcing their often tiring philosophies down the throat of the reader. This is a defect in dramaturgy and thus makes it difficult for the reader to distinguish between the speech patterns of one character from the other as he goes through a groaning passage of an endless recital of the characters’ angst against their society. Most importantly, one wonders at the extent a writer can stretch his cynical and pessimistic view of life in his work that will not label him a misanthrope. Admittedly, no writer is under any obligation to proffer solutions to the ills that buffet his society; it suffices if he presents them poignantly in the experiences of his characters and leaves the rest for public policy-makers and politicians saddled with day-to-day running of his society. What is, however, objectionable is when the writer shirks in his griot-likeresponsibility to give hope in times of gloom or sound a note of warning in a season of drunken revelry. This is where Cole’s unredeeming pessimism verging on despair, premised on the cock-eyed philosophy that a dysfunctional system must self-destruct before regeneration, is fundamentally flawed. His doomsday prophecy for his society going by the play’s dark ending where both “the guilty and the innocent” (page 93) all perish is an error and an abdication of his sacred responsibility as a writer to point at pinpricks of light when the skies are overcast with ominous clouds. The total annihilation of both the good and the evil can never be a panacea for regeneration for any society but a veiled defeatism. It is a resignation to the triumph of evil over good to postulate that life in Sambisa forest with the Boko Haram boys is preferable to life at the IDP camps as though there is nothing good about camp soldiers; they are all bad and indulge in sexual orgies and dehumanisation of the inmates. It is this kind of Armageddon pessimism and despair that prompted Achebe to admonish Ayi Kwei Armah for the latter’s shitty portrayal of post-Independence Ghana in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. For it is unwise pandering to the West, a kind of obsequious, bowl-in-hand currying for acceptance, for a writer to portray his country to the world as one long night of barbarism, savagery and cannibalism.
Be that as it may, Cole’s Embers is a significant, even though flawed, contribution to the literature of Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria. In the chronicling of daily lives, a writer should beware of despair, which is a negation of his responsibility to his society. Achebe’s timely advice cannot be more apposite when he said that: “I don’t think the world needs to be told stories of despair; there is enough despair as it is without anyone adding to it. If we have any role at all, I think it’s the role of optimism, not blind or stupid optimism, but the kind which is meaningful, one that is rather close to that notion of the world which is not perfect, but which can be improved.”
Isaac Attah Ogezi is a legal practitioner, playwright and short story writer based in Nasarawa State.
