Once a famous Nigerian playwright got a call from a woman who was in love with him.
He knew the woman. She had been a paramour of his. Or he of hers. Or maybe their relationship had been on equal footing, I don’t know. But whatever happened was years in the past by the time he got the call. And in the call, the woman said she wanted him back.
“I am married now,” he told her. “Surely you know that.”
“Who told you you are married?” the woman asked, her voice settling into the low center-of-gravity, pre-battle, mode that Nigerians know how to articulate best.
“Who told me? I attended the ceremony. I remember exchanging vows.”
“I will tear her asunder, teach her the meaning of ‘six feet under,’ then we’ll see who’s married. Who told you she is your wife?”
More than a decade has passed since I heard that story, so I hardly need to admit that I’m using a bit of writerly license in telling it to you now, in pretending to quote while really only paraphrasing, in order to get to the fabulous line, “Who told you she is your wife?” a line that came verbatim, right from the horse’s mouth…
Er, the ‘horse’ in question being the playwright, not the woman who called.
Why is the line fabulous? First, because it is so odd, and oddness is manna to a fiction writer; second, because it very deeply fits the place. If I ever write another ‘Nigeria’ novel, “Who told you she is your wife?” will be its opening line, perhaps even its title.
I lived in Nigeria for three years back in the 1980s. Me, my wife, my then-young children… And I published two novels set there, the first, called Indigo, came out in the early 1990s,
I said in an essay some weeks ago that Indigo is the novel of which I am least proud, and though I didn’t say why in that essay, it had do to with the cultural and linguistic mistakes in the book, mistakes I did not then recognize.
I lived in Nigeria, yes, but in a way I didn’t live there… Not like I lived in Korea and Japan in earlier decades of my life. For in those countries, no matter my level of expertise, I lived within the Korean and Japanese languages and cultures, while in Nigeria I hardly learned a word of Yoruba or Igbo or Hausa, and our home was inside the gates of an American compound. I ventured out often, to be sure, but venturing out is not living in a place. So Indigo is an outsider’s view of the country.…
Here is how Indigo begins:
Before leaving his flat to walk down the stairs and across the athletic field to his office in
the school, Dr. Jerry Neal looked through the peephole in his door. Though there was
rarely anyone else on the stairs at this hour, the action was habitual. He liked to take his
morning walk alone, without the obligation to chat. He also liked to be the first one at
school, to walk through the hazy air without the sounds of other people’s voices buzzing in
his ears.
The school’s chief custodian, a Nigerian man with his shirt off and his trousers unbuttoned,
was washing himself at the side of the courtyard and called out brightly when the principal came into view. “Good morning, sir!”
Okay, there’s nothing particularly wrong with that beginning, right? It is visual and there is a certain sense of character. But it is ever and forever outside looking in. Later in the novel, when I tried to make certain other characters speak west-African pidgin, I royally screwed it up, but its main fault is its foreign view of things… and that may be a bit of the kind of ‘cultural appropriation’ that I have tried to avoid during the entirety of my writing life.
Suffice it to say, it took twenty years of brooding about Indigo before I tried to correct things by publishing a second Nigerian novel, The Book of Important Moments, in 2013.
That novel is about the rape of a young Nigerian woman and, more deeply, about her rapist, an albino Nigerian man. My idea was to have the man commit an unforgivable act at the onset, then I would spend the rest of the novel trying to make my readers forgive him for it. But my deeper idea, of course, was to represent the country by becoming the country… a thing I had not done in Indigo.
Good idea? Bad idea? My agent was so much of the latter opinion that we parted ways over it.
Anyway, here is that book’s opening:
What street this is I think I know…
Its name’s not on the signpost, though.
No one will see me stopping here
to watch this girl walk home from school.
My loyal driver must think it queer,
to stop between the creek and the road,
this darkest evening of the year.
Ah, he thinks, but that’s entirely false. There isn’t much difference in the time of nightfall,
one season to another, so close to the equator. He wonders if the poet, Robert Frost, in his sleigh in his American woods, waited for the daughter of the man who owned them, just as he now waits for Ruth, whom he’s courted so carefully these last eleven months. Since she reads poetry he does, too, in the book she left in his car, but he doesn’t like it very much.
What happens next is the rape in the backseat of the car, with the man’s horrified driver looking on. After that, and after the driver runs off with his hair on fire, we follow these two characters, the rapist and his victim, as they head off into their lives.
Both Indigo and The Book of Important Moments are complex novels, worthy, I hope, of a deeper look than I have foisted upon you here.
But given only those openings to go on, which do you prefer? Which would you continue reading if you could choose only one?
I know what the answer is for me… I wouldn’t choose either, but would stick with “Who told you she is your wife?” not only because it is so beautifully strange, but also because that book’s not yet been written.
And when a book’s not written, the possibility of writing something great is not yet dead.
That will be a great first line, Richard.
ّI would read both of them.
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