The characters in Emmanuel Iduma’s “A Stranger’s Pose” (2018, Cassava Republic
Press) drift in and out of the reader’s focus like apparitions. They are in fact
apparitions, less than they are characters and more than they are actual persons.
It is a long list, the most famous of which is Malick Sidibe, the great Senegalese
photographer. Majority are only considered for moments and a few recur over the
200 pages of the book.
Throughout his travels, Iduma examines the people he meets on his travels with
wariness; a quality that may come from the prose and not the writer’s own
personality, though where one departs from the other, is not always clear. The
entire book is one long meditation in the unforceful way the reader is forced to
trace the slowed and deliberate pace of the sentencing and storytelling. A
ponderous and thoughtful work by a much older writer has the authority of a
hardworn life, even if only confined to literary pursuits. Such writing from a
writer in his 30s is laudable for its refinement but is without the calming wisdom
of age.
There are exceptions as on page 125 which starts out with the pithy phrase: “the
world is a small place for vagrants!” after which Iduma tells of a man’s precarious
journeys through Libya and Germany for no more than half a page.The perfectly
pithy and memorable phrase is installed with an exclamation mark which insists
on its authority, rather than rely on its authenticity.The careful prose appears to have been sieved of damn near any chaff. And so,
any lapses on the writer’s part, and nitpicking on the reader’s part, would seem
to be appropriately petty. On page 50, when recalling a teenage friendship
rekindled in adulthood, Iduma concludes that “the older we get, the greater the
disparity in our experience, like paths branching away from a junction”. A
“branch” is both a noun and a verb, and “branching” is a present participle
describing progressive division,which is already heavily suggested by the word
“path”. It is also a rare departure from elegance by the writer.
Time is a slippery thing in “A Stranger’s Pose”. The episodic stories are not
chronological and within a span of a day, the precise hours and minutes are
dispensed with or used at convenience. So the reader carries on through pages
without an anchor. This, combined with the dreamy prose, would force the reader
to either trust completely in Iduma’s accounts, or go rogue.
In one chapter, the reader could be reading of “one afternoon” in Ivory Coast,
and of an event in Mauritania, in the next. Requiring more scrutiny is Iduma’s
gaze on the people and cultures he comes across. He does so, knowing that he’s
going to write about them and for this reason, upon contact, they’re fastened to
his narrative mechanism. They are felt, sized and weighed at will. Depending on
the emotional reader, this could be confusing.
On returning to Dakar (no time is given), Iduma notices his shoes had been worn
by someone other than himself and were now “whitewashed and ashen”. He then
recalls a shoe-related event from “several years prior” in Addis Ababa where the
author forms a tentative relationship with a young boy. He buys a pair of shoes forthe kid on the day he was to leave, a “gift of convenience” even when there was
no way for him to “ascertain if the shoes were needed, or worn”.
Far from asking to be spoon-feed, what is the reader to take from such a passage?
They are good grists but do they make for good gists? The problem might be the
clunky architecture which does not make for progression that could lead to
satisfaction.
Of the 200 pages of the book, over 40 are reserved for photographs. Across the
lot, the author is often wearing a daraa – a white, loose-fitting garment for men –
but increasingly, in the last third of the book, they are photos of the people he
meets on his journeys through countries that include Mali, Senegal and
Mauritania. Iduma does not posit radical, new ideas on photography as an art
form though on page 26, he offers a way of theorizing the practice which he says
“combines precision with an element of indeterminacy”. This is impressive
enough but 6o pages later, the author recounts a conversation between a
photographer and a writer who reacts to the former’s description of photo-taking
as an “indecisive moment” that cannot be “calculated, predicted or thought
about”.
Is author-photographer’s own take unsourced from the interrogated
photographer? Are these competing theories? And who is the authority? The author
whose photographs we examine before us or the those of older gentleman?
Much of the power of “A Stranger’s Pose” comes from the interplay of good prose
and artfully, artless photographs. The words in black ink over beige paper, and
next to austere black and white photographs has the cumulative effect, notdissimilar to that of a serious, academic publication. Time and again, what takes
one’s breath away is the truly, graceful writing.