Prefacing a book or the chapters within with proverbs and quotes could be a way
of paying homage or unifying its themes. The Fishermen is not littered with them
but the references to great works (Things Fall Apart, Moby Dick) and quotes from
Yeats and Igbo and Ashanti proverbs soon come to seem as literary book ends, as
though the writer has decided to save readers and the critics the trouble of
appraisal by situating his work in a revered canon.
The Fishermen is narrated by Ben and it is chiefly about his older brothers Ikenna,
Boja and Obembe. He is the youngest of the lot, now in his thirties recalling
events that tore his family apart when he was eight. The main inciting incident is
a curse from a neighbourhood madman on Ikenna the eldest that he will one day
be killed by one of his siblings but the reader will have to wait until a third into
the novel to discover this. What comes before are some very assured writing in
the opening pages about the family’s background in Akure, Ondo state and the
brothers’ foray into fishing which they took up when their disciplinarian of a
father leaves for work in Yola, Adamawa state in the farthermost north.
An Igbo family from the east of Nigeria living in Akure in the West with a father
who works in the farthermost north of the country are broad geographical
positioning even for a Nigerian novel. But the subject here is localised to the
family, a closed world but not insular enough to be claustrophobic. A fateful
meeting with MKO Abiola on his 1993 presidential campaign and their father’spromise of resettling his boys abroad gives it a wider outlook and signposts the
period in which it is set.
Writers inadvertently present the terms on which they’re to be judged. The plot
merchant loses credit for narrative loopholes in the same way he or she deserves
praise for sublime machinations. Obioma is a wordsmith and his writing achieves
sonorous beauty when his word choices, lasting images and cadences align. This
also makes it easy to flag up the sloppy parts. A neighbour’s noisy lorry is
described as “unnecessary noise” when surely the writer means “disturbance”
since to the owner it is necessary given that he has the need for his vehicle
however rickety. When Abulu the madman dances in public he is said to do so to
“inaudible music” when it simply means that it is imaginary: “bonfires and
burning cars” are mentioned in the same sentence when the latter is an example
of the former: combat uniforms of soldiers are referred to as “regalia” when the
word in a military context is more likely a ceremonial dress. In the last case,
auditory stimulation is prioritised over direct meaning.
Time and again, carefully built up sentences, paragraphs and momentum are
squandered in favour of anecdotal back stories. This is sometimes done to further
illuminate or create context but only succeeds in deflecting the reader’s
concentration especially when it happens at crucial points in the story. For
instance, Ben recollects a fight between Ikenna and Boja from which the latter
suffered life threatening injuries. After he is rushed to the hospital by his mother
and a neighbour, Ben does not dwell on what he had just witnessed. Instead, “I
sat in my bed, shaken by what I had seen, but it was the memory Ikenna hadconjured up that disturbed me”. No Ben, you have just had a bad experience and
maybe you should work through it.
Then when Ben discovers Ikenna’s lifeless body on the kitchen floor with a knife
sticking out of it, rather than grieve, he spends a chunky paragraph taking an
inventory of kitchen ware. Later on at Ikenna’s funeral, the corpse right before
him, Ben takes the time out to recall a time when his late brother had one of his
testes kicked out of its scrotal sac while playing football. His thoughts return to
the funeral for another page or two only to make way for another tale about how
the family cheered Ikenna during an inter-house sprint in secondary school. This
happens again at another family member’s funeral (two thirds into the novel and
mentioning it would be giving away a significant part of the plot) and the subject
this time is cats.
I’m not suggesting a universal standard for bereavement. But if the rather
unusual approach to grief is not a characteristic tic then why is it there? If at all
this is true in real life the writer should know that it deflates the emotion when
he has done a good job of building it up. Perhaps it is meant to simulate a slow
grasp of trauma, the mind of a child still too nascent for the weight of death. It’s
either that or Ben has an undiagnosed case of Attention Deficit Disorder which the
author would like to keep under wraps.
Resorting to the scatological is often a desperate attempt to earn cheap jokes.
This is not the aim in The Fishermen though the many references to Abulu
“urinating in the river”, “thick foliations of hair…encircling his penis” and his
“faecal smell…a result of his going for long without cleaning his anus after
excretion” and so on could be unsavoury depending on the taste levels of thereader. The most disturbing is a scene where Abulu has sexual intercourse with a
woman’s corpse in public. It beggars belief that Abulu is allowed to do so,
uninterrupted, until he works himself into an orgasm. If this is so, then at what
cost? Putting off a reader whose patience the writer has already stretched? If in
isolation they are harmless, the cumulative effect is nausea which is hardly the
reaction the writer would like to inspire in his reader.
The repeated digressions are counter dramatic for they grind each narrative
thrust to a halt. So what we get here is not just the pretensions of a slow burner
but the pressing impression that Obioma has gone through arduous preparation
for a meal only to keep forgetting to ignite the stove.