In an interview Chris Ugolo and I had, over four decades ago now, with Chief Wale Ogunyemi, one of the greatest actors and dramatists that ever lived in Nigeria, the late Chief and author of the wave-making play, The Divorce, had in his attempt to state the kind of relationship between a medical doctor and a literary artist, declared: “The medical doctor treats (while) we the dramatists entertain”. While this view may have appeared to be giving separate roles to the doctor and the writer, it has become increasing clear that there are doctors who are writers and that no such separate roles, strictly speaking, really exist: the writer is both a doctor and an entertainer, doctor because he not only therapeutically heals the wounds of an increasingly growing band of followers which constitute his audience and the bulk of his readership, but also entertains them. The healing potential of art screams for attention in a nation such as ours in which things are hardly what they seem to be, a nation in which the more you look the less you see; a nation in which the people’s psyches are constantly being battered by failed infrastructure, failed leadership, failed services, failed promises, failed banks, failed dreams and visions, failed economy – in fact, failed everything. This is a nation that has systematically given us less to cheer and hope for even as the drums continue to beat for a moral paradigm shift in seasons where hunchbacks have become endangered species simply because the warped and twisted imagination of ritualists believes they are secret vaults to prosperity when their hunches are used for sacrifice! In a nation that has no place for dreamers, the writer’s choice has been not just to hold a mirror up to the society, but also to point the way forward in its healing, its re-engineering and its rejuvenation, his vision constantly anchored on an irrevocable mantra: hope

We had the interview with Chief Ogunyemi, as I said before, over four decades ago, and as if  to affirm the position that no thick lines really exist between the medical doctor and the literary artist, Nigeria continues to parade a bevy of beautiful award-winning medical doctor writers: Dr Wale Okediran, novelist and former President of the Association of Nigerian Authors, Dr. Femi Olugbile, Medical Director of the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital and author of  the collection of Short Stories, Lonely Men (Longman, 1987), which won the 1986 Association of Nigerian Authors Prose Fiction Prize, and now, the toast of today, Professor Ewan Alufohai.

Ewan Alufohai, is a Consultant Surgeon, and, in my opinion, one of Nigeria’s best. This is a writer who, as Professor Imobighe says, “besides his surgical knife, lies a surgical pen for dissecting the ills of our contemporary societies and patently providing the precise direction and the available choices open to both the leaders and the led.” (Foreword v). Besides The Moto Boy, he has written a previous novel, Alien to Poverty, and a collection of short stories, His Lordship’s Visitation. In these books, Ewan Alufohai, like a comb strives to rake through the dense foliage of our failures and fears to straighten our values and prune our commonalty. He is a sensitive mirror, refracting our embattled circumstances and showing us the narrow, yet right, path we did not take, are not, and may, perhaps, never have thought of taking, in our quest for self-aggrandizement and blind pursuit of vain glory and lucre.

In The Moto Boy, a novel of twenty-four chapters,Ewan Alufohai largely advances, albeit in a horrifying and scathing manner, the previous themes of failed hopes and blind values. He clinically purviews the dreams and aspirations of a young motor boy who strives to be different from the others who had been before him and to set a new standard for the driving profession in his country. As if to prove that we do not need to first have a name or the wherewithal to bring about positive change of our society, the author deliberately decides to use a lowly hero as solid metaphorical prop. The son of two poor villagers, Jiba has had to abandon his education when his father cannot pay his school fees, and much to the embarrassment and shock of his mother, opts to be a motor boy! Being a motor boy is the last thing Iyajiba would have wished for her son, because she sees it as degrading for her in the polygamous home of competition with other women whose children are in school. But she is soon to yield to him when she sees that he is unrelenting, and finally hands him to his transporter relative, Ademeji, as a motor boy apprentice.

Jiba’s encounters, the speed with which he learns his trade while an apprentice and the revulsion with which he holds the uncanny and reckless irresponsibility of lorry drivers buoyed and incensed by their beliefs in sordid rituals and charms as protection and immunity against road accidents, are critical strands which shapen the story and are instructive to the reader. Jiba distinguishes himself as a motor boy, cutting no corners in his training to be a lorry driver, and in fact goes to the Motor Licensing Office not to bribe the examiners who would be coming to examine him for a Driver’s Licence and certificate, as was the practice, but in fact to request that the examiners examine him thoroughly so that he would be appropriately tested and ready for the world. Jiba, from this encounter, proves to be one who seeks to be an asset to the driving profession and not a liability to other road users. It is, therefore, not surprising that when he passes his test in flying colours, he is further to prove, to the amazement of all his peers, that you do not need to use charms as a driver to avoid accidents. Rather, certain principles must be obeyed: respect for the high way code, regular maintenance of your vehicle and proper focus as a driver. On the part of government, primary attention must be given to road maintenance, because most accidents are caused by bad roads, even when the driver on his part obeys all traffic regulations and maintains his vehicle.

That Jiba becomes a standard bearer for the driving profession and the toast of all is not surprising, because at the very early stage, he knew what he  wanted and where he was headed. He looked the strange one, because he refused to do what others did and instead wanted to be different. That he vehemently refuses to be lured into using the so-called ‘protective charms’ after his ‘freedom’ as a motor boy in a world in which the belief is strong that with those charms one would have an accident-free career is bolstered by his early experience of an accident involving Kabiru who was an ardent user of charms. Why didn’t the charms stop Kabiru from having the accident? And so Jiba risks the anger and wrath of his close relatives in insisting that he did not need charms. We are glad that Ewan Alufohai’s novel leads us to the eventual triumph, not disgrace, of Jiba and celebrates his victory over the forces of superstition and retrogression. The national award that Jiba receives at the end of the novel is a salutary affirmation of the relevance of his campaigns for road safety in Nigeria.

It needs be stated that The Moto Boy, an easy-to-read novel, narrated from the third person point of view, is the author’s modest contribution to the campaign for bringing about safety to our roads. The author is concerned that far too many lives are being lost through the carelessness of drivers, particularly those who believe in the use of charms and think that nothing will ever happen to them, even if their vehicles do not deserve to be on the road. As Alufohai himself says: “The interest in road traffic accidents is especially a big issue in medical practice, and for the surgeon, the interest is more heightened as he invariably deals with victims of road traffic accident hence any contribution to minimize the calamity is worthwhile.” (Preface ix). It is noteworthy that Alufohai clearly deconstructs his interest and pain by dedicating The Moto Boy to the legendary Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, who was maimed in a road traffic accident and is living the rest of his life on a wheel chair, and to the memory of the wife of his “dear friend, colleague and classmate, (Mrs. Anne Isekwe) who was mortally injured in another accident while giving a helping hand to victims of road traffic accident.” (Dedication iii).

In all The Moto Boy is a worthwhile read and a mighty contribution to the plethora of  battles for sanity on our roads. I believe very strongly that you would be making your own contribution to ensure that this battle is won by picking up for yourself, your friend and family, The Moto Boy.

Title of Book:                                    The Moto Boy

Author:                                              Ewan Alufohai

Publisher:                                          Safmos Publishers, Ibadan

Date of Publication                           2009

Pages:                                                 217

I will be quick to let you know that ‘Zogie Iyeomoan, by way of self-introduction, describes himself in this elegant collection of poems as “an unrepentant lover of African literature and history”. He also makes quite a few poetic “confessions” and “claims”, but more on these shortly.I have no reason to doubt his claim to being “an unrepentant lover of African literature”, having before now encountered his poetry on social media and seen the passion with which he goes on creating, on a near daily basis, poem after poem that can conceivably be described as of high quality.

If I have been struck by the kinetic energy that suffuses his ‘social media’ poems, the dexterity with which he unreels the tapestry of his poetic imagination, I have also not failed to wish that these poems and his many others lying in quietude in memory cards and flash drives are “transmogrified” into some “permanence” in the nature of a book. Now in this homogenous form, it could either be transmitted into other forms – electronic/digital, etc. – or left as it is.

If I have been taken in by the sensitivity with which he articulates his perspectives and the depth of his love for words, I have also been impressed by his relishing of a broad-based collocational geography in amplifying and contextualizing his messages. All these, put together, have given his poetry an unforgetability – a certain kind of haunting presence – which at last this volume not only validates but consolidates – to my great joy, and relief!

Flames of the Forest, then, is an effort that reveals the flaming innards of a young Nigerian writer’s passion for the beaded word and a more than passionate affirmation of his love for literature, especially the poetry genre. It showcases his joy, pain, surprise, disappointment, frustration with his country, his continent, its past, present and future. It is a roller-coaster of emotions and that this intense presence is urged on by the solidity of the panoramic sweep of the 76 poems is remarkable indeed.

In one of the poems, Yeomoan declares: “I’m not a renowned poet/just an apprentice”. Going further, he states: “If I be a poet/let my words give life”. Much as these “confessional”, profoundly self-effacing lines may suggest that in his youth and innocence the poet may not even be sure of who he is, a close reading of this collection reveals that itis certainly not a journey of innocence. It is, in fact, the foraging of a vibrant, multi-talented writer in the panoply of experience seeking to forge a defiant, personal poetic mode; the relentless, undefeated and undefeating effort to create forest fires.

Flames of the Forest, in my estimation,is a powerful collection that demands the attention of all who seek not only beauty in poetry, but also the poetry of beauty. But beyond this, is the undiluted truth it unleashes, damning the consequences.

In his preface to the collection, Visions and Recollections, the author notes as follows: “I have allowed all shades of ideas and facts to jostle for a place in the variegated tapestry of my mind” (xi). He then appeals: “… I hope that readers would equally be sympathetic to accept and allow the potpourri room to flourish.” (xi).

I must confess that this rather self-effacing and subtle appeal to the reader’s understanding far from being an apologia clearly underscores the profundity and immutability of the poetic innocence which informs the thematic concerns of the volume. No doubt, the close relationship between a poet and his internal and external landscapes often accounts for the deep panoramic sweep and shifting kaleidoscopes we find. For A.R. Yesufu this holds quite true, and forcefully too, because here is a poet who is imbued with a very alert consciousness and is therefore quite sensitive to his universe and the landscapes which shape it, on the one hand, and the inner world which cognize, validate and accentuate his unique artistic vision, on the other. Although he accepts the Keatsean axiom of the poet being the “most unpoetical of anything in existence” and, therefore takes consolation in the “catholic consciousness” of being a receptacle for “both internal and external impressions”, it is noteworthy that the clearly defining characteristic of Yesufu’s poetic tour de force lies in the deftness with which he navigates and mediates this duality.

I am of the opinion that the poet asking for the reader’s understanding is, perhaps, overindulging. The Nigerian literary landscape is littered with all sorts of writers, some of whom ornately assert themselves as ‘poets’. But rather than claiming to be a poet, with all the potential he is imbued with, Yesufu chooses to describe himself instead as ‘poetic’, and this even with some hesitance! Just as our own Wole Soyinka asserted some time ago, albeit in a different context, that a tiger will do better to pounce rather than just making proclamations about its tigritude, Yesufu has chosen to write without ascribing any tag to himself. His reason is remarkable: he doubts if there is “such a character who is born a poet” (vii). I disagree with him here. Some poets are born, and his Visions and Recollections affirms he is one of them! If you cannot talk about the song without the sound, can the ‘poetic’, which arises as a by-product of a profound artistic imagination, be divorced from the one who creates it?

I hold it as a demonstrable fact that A.R. Yesufu’s Visions and Recollections, though an annunciation. is an affirmation of the writer’s passion for poetry and also marks a definitive trajectory of a private poet with a unique and fecund imaginative, cosmopolitan and public consciousness. Operating from a wide thematic canvass and a broad-based and extraordinary lexico-semantic range, it is a collection that enthralls and excites in the variegated tapestry of its spread and in its stylistic rejuvenation. Thus, I make bold to surmise that what the reluctance to be called a poet may have achieved is not to diminish the quality of Yesufu’s versification but, sadly enough, to attenuate his prolificacy. Nevertheless, we are exceedingly glad that though he is no longer here with us in the flesh, he has left us with visionary and recollective nuggets which time and space shall never tarnish and the triumph of which death can never sound a knell.

Visions and Recollections is a collection of fifty poems some of which were created on the spur of the moment, “in spontaneity”, as the poet says and under “more stringent deliberation”, (vii) i.e. with emotions being “recollected in tranquility” at a later date, to borrow those memorable words of Coleridge. The collection spans three decades and in it, the poet confesses to allowing, as we noted earlier, “all shades of ideas and facts to jostle for a place” in his mind. It is, therefore, not surprising that the poet works within a stylistic spectrum, some poems not easily rendering their meaning and requiring the adroitness and perceptibility of a locksmith, and others teasing the hermetic masquerade in their seductive and alluring simplicity.

The volume opens with a captivating poem entitled ‘The Year’s End (1997)’ in which the poet showcases his ability to deploy figurative expressions to capture his vision of a dying year. He states: “The year trudges towards the last bend/ On the road to its transient decease/ Heavily loaded/ Knock-kneed/ Back bent by knapsacks of memories” (1.) His capacity to describe objects and phenomena in a captivating manner also shows in ‘The Full Moon’ when he writes: “Now she’s ripe/ The moon is ripe/ Well-rounded by Fecund Time/ Like a plump pumpkin” (3).

I find the poet’s description of Benin City in the poem, ‘Benin City – a Bird’s View’ (43) one of the most picturesque in the collection as he writes: “Benin City/ Ubinu, Igodomigodo/ Edo n’evbo Oba/ Ochre-red city of blood/ moat-engirdled bosom/ Confluence of ancient and modern/ Where the musty and the glossy/ Like two master wrestlers/ Are locked in a perennial duel” (43). He waxes most philosophical in the poem, ‘The Riddle of the Road’, where he states: “The road is life spread out before the wayfarer/ Its spring-sprout is a breath/ And its winter whimper a breathless ebb/ Life is a road to an end that’s endless/ Crucial choices are roads taken and not taken” (45). He goes further to assert: “The road is a tragic cord/ Tethering the womb to the tomb” (45).

No doubt, Visions and Recollections is a beautiful poetry collection by a poet of great insight, a man of few words, a teacher and mentor, an erudite scholar who was as humble as he was noble, an outstanding talent, a voracious and consummate reader … As the blurb writer graphically captures him, he is “a poet of changeable moods” and in Visions and Recollections, he is “simultaneously the benign satirist, the philosopher, the dreamer and the love poet with an exceptional capacity to evoke both visual and auditory responses. His lyricism moves from the real to the unreal impressions, which assume concretion through vivid and exact expression of details.”

I recommend this volume to all who not only seek the naked and immutable beauty of truth, but the quintessential and exalting truth of beauty.

Title of Book: Visions and Recollections
Author: Abdul R. Yesufu
Publisher: Deaconry Press Limited
Date of Publication 2016
Pages: 95
Price: Not Stated

24.07.18.

Charles Omoifo’s Please Remember Me is a book of poetry dedicated to the “memory of those who died so that a Nation can grow” (dedication page). This dedication at once points to the direction of the author’s concerns: the sacrifice for nationhood.

The author does not specifically mention this nation (in his dedication, at least), but we are not fooled. He is talking about our own dear country, Nigeria; its losses, its labyrinthine struggle; the murky waters in which its rulers swim as they hold blood-stained hands over those they are supposed to lead; the vision of its youths who are continually repressed and suppressed; the rape of the polity and, above all, the possibility of hope. The tonalities are redolent and strident. As Professor Sam Ukala who writes the foreword for this volume states, the volume is “…absolutely uncompromising as it holds up a mirror to us all, showing to which side of history we shall belong”.

Omoifo’s portraiture refracts a nation state which Ukala again describes as “the front line of a running battle between freedom of speech and the brutal denial of it.” As he goes on to observe “Those who stay on the side of freedom of speech and protest ineptitude and injustice easily get killed by ‘the cruelty’ of the ‘country’s Establishment’, ably represented by trigger-happy law enforcers”. (But Omoifo does not hurl his ideas at us like empty slogans; rather he devises vital stylistic props to project his unique artistic vision).

Please Remember Me derives its title from ‘Colonial Legacy’, the last poem in the collection in which Ayemere the son of Ubiaza, declares an intention to return to the campus after the holidays, working in the farm. As we glean in the poet-persona’s narration, the sentence constitutes the last words rendered by the young man whose dreams held the key to a bright future:

                      We worked till the sun was high; we rested
                      In the farm hut. His eyes were with me
                      But his inner eye was far away. Then he said,
                      Brother, I am going to Campus day after
                      Tomorrow. Whatever happens, please remember me. (187)

Ayemere’s words are loaded, born out of a certain foreboding and fear that he would lose his life, and that he would not return. He loses his life and does not return, as the brutality of the Establishment is unleashed on the metaphorical Campus and death tolls its worrisome and dreadful bell.

It is certainly the desire to celebrate then, that propels the kinetic energy behind the tapestry of Omoifo’s narration. But Please Remember Me is more than just a tribute. It is a profound acclamation of the zest, beauty, variety, vivacity, virility and undying potency of African oral culture. The volume displays the author’s irrevocable attraction to the lores of his people, the Esan people, and he weaves this attraction into a mosaic of patterns that brings back memories. As we get continually sucked into an alien techno-culture and the power of DVDs makes us spin, Please Remember Me urges us to remember the very things that weaned us; that we grew up in; that defined our existence; that gave us values; that made us both human and humane. In other words, it urges us to remember the village square and the moonlit nights, not the artificial gardens and meretricious street lights that now rule our lives. It is an urge, a call, a strident call to a past of glory.

That Omoifo is able to reflect, to a considerable extent, the dramatic possibilities of oral culture even in the medium of cold print is at once a clear indication of his alertness as a poet on the one hand, and his skillfulness as a raconteur on the other. Moving from an oral/aural medium to a written and, if you like, ‘deaf’ medium remains one of the stiffest challenges facing the African writer till date. But while some of them have tried to get around it by transliteration, others have tried to retain the immediacy of speech in cold print and maintaining the dramatic effects of the oral medium in the written medium. Omoifo goes beyond just creating an interface style; he uses the English language as a standard, but he sustains the rhetorical qualities that define African speech. The following extract from ‘Ikhio Dance’, the eighth poem (or do we say, ‘Narration’) in the collection speaks volumes:

        When mother was going to the market                                            Oliza
        Marcelina said, leave the load for me                                                 Oliza
        Then mother took load light, saying meet me up                               Oliza
        But Marcelina settled the load on a child’s head                                 Oliza
        Has her head become too delicate to carry load?                               Oliza
                                                                    (30)

That he means this poem, like other poems in the volume, to be performed rather than recited is very obvious, and he therefore sees speech as not an end, but a means to reinforcing the dramatic possibilities of his poems. He subsumes the poems to be mere script, mere potential action, while the actual performance remains the very essence.

Please Remember Me certainly rings with the clarity of a gong. The 47 poems it parades, despite their variegated nature, are all united in the affirmation of the poet’s rare gifts; they proclaim a poet who not only sees, but also hears. While some of the poems may be said to give their themes away so easily, because of their high suggestiveness, others are crisp and proverbial, relying on the poet’s vast and enviable array of allusions and references. To say that Omoifo’s lexico-semantic geography is broad is an understatement knowing full well that, apart from the references he makes to his oral (unwritten) culture, he is a well trained agriculturalist. The plethora of agricultural jargon that pervades the texts encapsulates the depth Omoifo owes to his professional calling.

In all, Please Remember Me is a mighty great contribution to African poetry and an affirmation of the resilience of the human spirit.

Book Sub-title: Narration on the Murder of Ayemere Azemheobor

Publisher: Idehuan Classic Books, Nigeria

Date of Publication 1999

Pages: 187

Price: Not Stated

Because of the close relationship it shares with life, literature has often been seen by critics and those who value it as life itself. Here, life is not just the mirror into which literature looks and which it refracts, but the one which constitutes all of its essence.

The essence of literature as the wellspring of our survival as a people also points in the direction of the complexion of the present and the future, even as it is the memory of the world. Lying within the lexico-semantic geography of memory is the fact that literature never forgets. In the hands of a visionary creator and a skilled craftsman, it is a good reminder. It is in the mould of literature as a reminder that I would like to cast Felix N. Ogoanah’s The Return of Ameze, a novel which, in my humble opinion, has the potential of stamping its authority on the Nigerian literary landscape sooner than later. This is not only because of the quality of the novel’s topicality, but also the sheer virtuoso and pathos with which events in the novel are woven. I should note at this point that while many artists have often sacrificed art in pursuit of topicality, a great many have adroitly executed compelling craftsmanship in their handling of events in their society. They have deployed considerable stylistic tour de force and shown a penchant for harmonizing the what with the how. Ogoanah belongs to this latter group. I must say that I am overwhelmed not only by the quality of the novel’s call for restraint in our pursuit of lucre, but also by the manner it fragments linearity to project a vision that is at once suspenseful and gripping.

Ogoanah’s The Return of Ameze is a novel which deals with the disturbing issue of women trafficking to Europe for prostitution purposes. But much more than anything else, it focuses on the horrific and intense psychological and moral subjection that women are put through in the process. It is the need to project this psychological and moral subjection that informs the shifting kaleidoscope of his narrative vision. He creates a young woman by name Ameze who has big dreams of a wonderful future like every young person out there and vows to remain a virgin until she is married. Against a backcloth of poverty, disease and squalor, Ameze lives her dreams, falls in love with a young graduate called Frank who vows he would marry no other person but her. But because dreams, like roses, do die under the elephant grass, people and events conspire against her and she is soon forced against her wish to go to Europe, precisely Italy, to become the breadwinner of her family, made up of her ailing father, her mother and her two sisters. Told by the heavy society woman, sponsor and trafficker, Madam Vee, that her daughter is going to do decent work in Italy to lift the family out of poverty, Ameze’s father, Okoro, is too blind to read between the lines. But even if he reads through, he is too consumed by the fact that other people’s children had gone abroad and taken their families out of poverty to allow Ameze marry the man she loves. Madam Vee takes on every responsibility of sponsoring Ameze to Italy because she is convinced that Ameze’s beauty is worth putting huge stakes on.

When Ameze arrives in Italy, she finds out that she had not been brought to do the decent work that had been promised her and other girls, but to prostitute. Unlike other girls, she refuses to cooperate with the men Madam Vee brings to her for sex. She goes through a tortuous process when she is gang raped by three men under the watchful eyes of a camera and under Madam Vee’s heavy sedation. The picture Ogoanah paints of this episode is telling and full of pathos:

Ameze woke up, violated, blood every where, as she groaned in pain. She couldn’t understand what had happened to her. As she cried for pain, it seemed she bled for all the maidens in her clan. She thought about her sisters. She tried to call on the gods she knew, but they were too far away to answer. She was alone in the world, as she watched her dreams drift away. The experience was more than losing her hymen. All she stood for was gone – her entire family had been violated! The dignity and the noble ideal she lived for and wanted to pass on to posterity had been violated, desecrated in a foreign land. She felt unclean.

‘They have taken it!’ She cried. ‘Nothing is left. I’m not different from the girl in the street!’ (243)

Ameze’s self-pity is worsened when she realizes that she can neither go back to her inviolate state nor could she have the means to return to her country. It is these reasons and the fact that she still needs to salvage her family from intense poverty that eventually break her will and make her surrender. The next few years see Ameze in the sex trade, remitting thousands of dollars home to her parents. Her father builds a mansion, sends to the best school in the city, her two sisters who had hitherto stopped schooling because he couldn’t pay their school fees. He also buys a fleet of cars, takes a chieftaincy title and joins a secret cult. In no distant time, he had become one of the most prominent men in the state, dining with, and befriending, the high and mighty. His voice is heard in high places and his opinion is sought on issues that matter. No one remembers that he had been a poor carpenter who could hardly afford three square meals a day, let alone take care of his health and send his children to school.

But while her family situation in Nigeria improves by the day, Ameze’s deteriorates, because of the physical nature of her job. In no distant time, she has caught the dreaded virus that has no cure, and she is brought to her father’s house to die, a tragic victim. The contrasts Ogoanah paints of Ameze’s going and her return are quite stark and basic. When she was leaving the shores of Nigeria, she had been hale and hearty, strong, talented and beautiful – a woman of every man’s dream. When she returns, her body is like whittled sticks, and she is a few hours away from her death.

But beyond the physical return of Ameze is a return of deeper spiritual significance. This return comes about a few moments after she physically gives up the ghost. Ameze acquires new strength with which she subjects those who had caused her early death to the worst torture imaginable. This torture is both psychological and physical for the victims, and we see Ogoanah unleashing the instrument of poetic justice.

Bolstered by the suspicion that Ameze’s death must have been caused by someone, Okoro goes to consult a witch doctor named Ogizo,who advises him to look at his mirror when he gets home, that whoever he sees there is Ameze’s killer. Ogoanah narrates as follows:

Five minutes, ten, thirty… nobody was there apart from his own image. He stood, waiting and trembling. He wasn’t sure who would appear. ‘Whoever it is must die. I hope… I hope it is not any of my daughters’, he thought and prayed. ‘What about Maria? Well, I don’t know’. He had been in the room for nearly an hour. ‘Ogizo never lied. What is happening? Where is the killer. Ameze’s heartless killer?’ He began to yell. ‘Whoever you are that killed Ameze, my daughter, show yourself now in the mirror and let me see!’ There was no response apart from the echo of his voice. After waiting for over one hour, he thought he saw an image behind his own; the dark shadow of a woman. He cleaned his eyes with the back of his palm and stared harder. The image did whatever he did. (293 –294)

While this scene may be laughable, it is serious and ironical enough, for Okoro soon finds that he and no one else sent Ameze to her early grave by the pressure he and his family had put on her. When he prepares to leave the room, having seen no one else in the mirror but himself, he confronts the hand-pointing figure of Ameze at the door, and no incantation can ward it off! This figure would haunt the entire family for hours and doors and windows would, on their own accord, begin to open and close, forcing the family to take the decision that the house that had been built on Ameze’s blood and sweat is haunted. They are forced to relocate somewhere. Did Ameze have her revenge? Largely, she does, because the author tells us that even Madam Vee goes mad in the end, tortured by her and the murdered Uncle Nikky, the owner of the NGO, which had been vigorously campaigning against female trafficking.

The Return of Ameze is more than just a statement; it is also a warning to those who trample on innocence and violate virtue; a warning to heartless human traffickers who, in the pursuit of material gains, court violence and wreck the dignity of African womanhood; a warning to those who see nothing good in humane values and must plunder the very essence upon which we stand as a people and a nation. In its seething condemnation of the dishonest and irrational ways in which people seek material wealth and power and die after the things of the West, Ogoanah flagellates those who must make others slaves for them to be free. His attack spares no one: the traffickers and those who benefit from trafficking directly or indirectly; the perpetrators of the Machiavellian principle of the end justifies the means even when the end is not in sight; those who have thrown morality and conscience overboard in their personal greed; agents of government who, rather than attack the problem of female trafficking headlong, develop logorrhoea and engage in empty rhetoric that is full of sound and fury, yet signifies nothing. It is pleasing indeed that rather than prophesy the tragic end of all evildoers, Ogoanah shows that end coming to pass. We see much of this in the two incidents earlier referred to: the forceful relocation of the Okoro family and Madam Vee’s madness. We are impressed by his appreciation of the capacity of the wronged to seek vengeance, whether dead or alive.

Ogoanah’s narrative style in The Return of Ameze is quite intricate, though it is easy to assume that the omniscient perspective gives him sufficient room to indulge the reader. As suggested earlier, the author weaves his tale like a spider weaves his web, creating labyrinthine patterns, which often gleam like a mirror in the sun. But the narrative is deliberately fragmented, with episodes from the past brought in at intervals even while the narrative thrusts itself forward and the reader is left breathless. Much of the suspense the novel achieves is derived from this stylistic feature. Just as a nation’s history is in her geography and her geography is in her history, Ogoanah’s story’s beginning is its ending and he largely positively exploits the psychology of the reader for the full stylistic benefits of the novel.

It is also remarkable that Ogoanah deploys what comes very close to an interface style in his manipulation of the language of his characters. Although coming from a different linguistic background from the characters who speak in the novel, he has achieved considerable approximation in their linguistic nuances. The annotations he offers of certain words from his characters’ linguistic repertoire are quite helpful to the reader encountering the cultural background of the novel for the very first time.

Altogether, The Return of Ameze is a simple tale told mightily. It is a disturbing and haunting tale indeed, which, like the reality that gave it birth, is most deserving of our attention. It is my hope that those who read this novel would not only see something personal to take away with them, but would also have the larger conviction that with a paradigm shift, the nightmare of female trafficking which has for almost two decades been the lot of this nation would one day die a silent death.

Title of Book: The Return of Ameze

Author: Felix N. Ogoanah

Publisher: Evans Brothers (Nigeria Publishers) Limited

Date of Publication 2007

Pages: 301

Price: Not Stated