A first time novelist reinterpreting a well admired classic is a risky endeavour. The
cynical expectation is that said work is going to fall short of the original even
before any evidence is tendered. The question becomes just how much audacity
is brought to bear on the work. Even if the reimagined tale manages to eclipse
the original in scope and ambition (or word count), the mere fact that the
tributary can easily be traced to its source lake relegates the novel to feeder
status. The writer will do well to quickly concede points on originality and
concentrate on putting on a bravura performance. And what a performance this is
by Barret.
He has chosen to butt heads with Kafka. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa’s
awoke one morning to find himself transformed into a bug. In Blackass, Furo
Wariboko awoke to find himself transformed into a white man. This happens on a
Monday, the fabled first day of creation, and hours before an important job
interview. Barret wisely moves far away from the world of Gregor Samsa in an
admirable fashion. Gregor is confined to his room for the entirety of his ordeal.
But Barret’s Furo, on discovering his new state, sneaks out of his home and
spends a large part of the book avoiding his family – even his mother’s
impassioned pleas when he picks up her call.
Before he changed, Gregor was the bread winner in his family. Afterwards, he
remains remarkably considerate even when faced with, first confusion, then
hostility from his parents. Furo, in his own way, decides to save his family the
experience by denying them total knowledge of it all.Morality aside, there are practical reasons for this. Confining an entire novel
about a black man who woke up white to one room and not depend on huge
blocks of back stories would require quite a lot of inventiveness to propel the
narrative forward. It would also be a missed opportunity. In making Furo wander
the streets of Lagos, all manner of commentary and observations are drawn – the
privileges and drawbacks of being white in the most populous black nation, the
frustrations of unemployment which encourages ingenuity but breeds opportunism
and the impression of a country in its first heady decades of political stability and
renewed quest for self-determination.
The Metamorphosis is deeply humanist. This is partly by design for Kafka
concentrates on the physical and emotional states of Gregor’s parents, his sister
and three guests. Kafka largely excludes the world outside and no external
factors are imported into the story distinct enough to root it in any one era (at
least not to my mind). Barret, on the other hand, draws a wider canvas
accommodating societal ills that stretch back generations to colonial rule and
echoes into centuries of slavery.
A third way into the book, Furo meets a man with neck-length, dreadlock hair, in
a shopping mall called The Palms. The man introduces himself as Igoni and then
offers to buy Furo a cup of coffee while the two engage in a cursory chat about
their respective professions. Furo learns that Igoni is a writer of “fiction, stories,
that sort of thing”. Furo asks Igoni, incredibly for someone he has just met, if he
could put up at his place. Igoni declines saying he is hard at work on a project.
Igoni pays for the coffee bids him farewell.Seeing the authors name in the text has a dislocating effect. I first had to accept
that it was not a printing error and knowing it wasn’t did not lower my defences.
Meta-fiction does not possess the humility of an alternate reality which creates
its own sets of rules and abides by them as though it is the most normal thing in
the world. What it does is shackle the real with the imagined and presents it as
the finished product. Like a mortise and tenon joint, the primary aim is to
achieve a tight fit though aesthetics is not unconsidered.
This section is titled “@_igoni” and a typical sentence is “And so I, @_igoni, spent
bundles of time on Twitter”. Igoni narrates his fascination with “a white man with
a strong Nigerian accent” believing he has found material for a story. He Googles
Furo and finds links to Facebook and Twitter. He has deleted his account with the
former due to online abuse (he is considering sex change) but finds Furo’s sister
on the latter. He follows her and her tweets, which alternate between hashtags
for her missing brother and off-hand declarations of mundanity, are all
reproduced on page in the manner it is done online.
The rambunctioness of Twitter is well drawn. So is the startling proximity it
affords its users. Igoni’s narration has the plain but not rigid speak of journalistic
entries. Whether this was intended or not is hard to say but it augurs with the
style of such writing. That said, it lacks narrative drive which is the life blood of
fiction. Some might find these sections of meta-play unintrusive. For me it was an
inconvenience I was prepared to put up with, until the section ends, and Furo’s
story, from his point of view, is resumed.
An absurdist tale is benignly dictatorial because it insists on its modus operandi
but does not lend itself to sustained scrutiny. The reader is supposed to takethings as they are which gives the author uncurtailed freedom to invent wildly. It
also comes with an in-built repellent system for any accusations of improbability.
To have no rules seems to be the rule. Unlike magic realism where, for instance,
a boy shedding goat’s milk instead of tears is to be taken as normal, absurdism
insists, and even depends, on the functions of realism to operate while
simultaneously rejecting its constraints.
Barret has a fierce command of language. His supreme attention to detail and
clever word choices sparkle on page after page all through the book as in this
description of Lagos “…Furo gazed over murky waters lapping against the marina
behind his bench. On the far shore floated a metropolis of cargo ships and derrick
rigs. Canoes and old tug-boats crawled across the waterway, their paddles digging
and outboard motors chugging. Scavenging egrets soared and squabbled over the
sluggish waves of Five Cowrie Creek: that dumpsite for market refuse and road-
kill carcasses; that open into the sewer into which the homeless and shameless
emptied their bowels in public view.”
The long quote is needed to give a good idea of just how alert the writing is and
what a joy is it to read, especially when there appears to be a good reason for it
like the descriptions of scenes, characters and emotional states. But when such
firepower is used to describe dead space – the washing of plates, the closing of
doors etc – it begins to read like, not wasted, but misdirected effort.
Midway through the book, Furo and a friend pay a friend of hers a visit and for an
entire page’s worth of words the only real important action that occurs is that the
pair arrive at their destination, exit the car and enter the house. All of this is
rendered with the same seriousness used to unravel crucial plot points but thenwhy bring a bazooka to fisticuffs? Perhaps I’m being the ungrateful guest who,
when served a feast, eats his way through the table only to complain to the host
about how easily the napkins break.