Literature: Descent into the Noises and Fury of Lagos, with Tola Rotimi Abraham
Audio 03:37
Originally from Lagos, writer Tola Rotimi Abraham lives in the United States.
Black Sunday is his first novel which was published this fall in French translation, published by Autrement.
© Carole Cassier
By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
7 mins
Passed by the creative writing program of the University of Iowa in the United States, the Nigerian Tola Rotimi Abraham delivers to us with her first novel,
Black Sunday,
a surprisingly accomplished work of fiction.
A promising start.
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“We were training for my audition. I was hoping to become the presenter of a comedy show. […] I didn't know anyone on the radio, Chill FM. On the day of the interview […], I was horrified to discover that there were at least thirty of us auditioning for the same position. The waiting room was packed with girls. […] One of them sat down next to me. She reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a packet of Orbit chewing gum. She held it out to me. I smiled gratefully. […]
- It's not open.
- I wasn't really suggesting it to you. You were just supposed to say no thanks, she laughed back.
She tore up the cellophane, took two chewing gum and put it back in her pocket. "
So says Ariyike, the heroine of
Black Sunday,
one of the new novels to reach us from Nigeria.
Its action takes place in the ruthless universe of
Lagos
, a large Nigerian metropolis.
Its cruelties, its injustices large and small, its inequalities are reproduced with a formidable economy of means, in the pages of this opus.
Black Sunday
is a novel about social wounds, abuses and failed redemption. It is also striking with its choral form, made up of a series of short stories linked together by the unity of place (Lagos) and the unity of destinies. At the heart of the book, four children from a middle class family fallen into precariousness, learning to survive. Through the some 329 pages of the novel, we follow their trajectories, both common and separate.
Black Sunday
is the first novel from the pen of Nigerian Tola Rotimi Abraham, a talented first-time novelist.
She is part of the new generation of Nigerian writers who emerged from the 1990s and whose best known are called
Chimamanda Adichie
or
Teju Cole
.
Inscribed in the rich Nigerian romantic tradition embodied by Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka, Nobel Prize for Literature 1986, this rising generation is taking English-speaking African fiction to new heights of narrative imagination.
She draws her inspiration from the contradictions and promises of contemporary society.
The "
Farafina workshop"
Born in Lagos, Tola Rotimi Abraham grew up in the Nigerian metropolis, in the shadow of its skyscrapers and its noisy and chaotic vitality. She now lives in the United States, where after completing a course in
creative writing
, she devotes herself fully to writing.
According to the author, making a literary career was not an option encouraged in her milieu, that of the Nigerian middle class. In the eyes of his family, writing is the fifth wheel of the coach. “
It's because we failed our studies that we become a writer,
” he was told during his adolescence. Under family pressure, the young woman had to study law. She even practiced as a lawyer in her country before being able to move to America to fulfill her lifelong dream.
“
For me, the turning point was when I took part in a writing workshop in Nigeria, the“ Farafina workshop ”directed by Chimamanda Adichie
, recalls the first novelist
.
The workshop lasted a whole weekend.
The exercise consisted of producing a text and presenting it to the other participants.
The presentation was followed by discussions on literary creation.
I had no idea what to write well, but in the end I presented the story of a young girl with transfiguration powers.
The audience loved it, they laughed a lot.
For the first time in my life, I felt like I was going in the direction of what I really wanted to do with my life.
The concupiscence of men
“
The mother is gold, the father is a mirror
”. Abraham's novel opens with this Yoruba proverb, placed in the foreground. Poetry and legends are indeed very present in
Black Sunday
. Peter, the youngest of the siblings, whose book tells the odyssey, hopes to save himself through his love for poetry. As for the old grandmother who took in the children after the parents had fled, she tries to make them forget their "
ibanuje
" ("sadness" in Yoruba), by telling them tales and legends drawn from traditional folklore. .
But the essence of the novel is elsewhere.
It is in the feeling of abandonment and the traumas of childhood that the protagonists learn to live with, trying to overcome as best they can the trials and humiliations.
“We are in Lagos, not in El Dorado.
There are no fairy tales here,
”recalls the narrator.
Tola Rotimi Abraham built her novel in a choral fashion by alternating the voices of the four children: the two twin sisters Bibike and Ariyike and the two younger brothers, Peter and Andrew.
Life is tough for the quartet, abandoned by their parents and growing up in disrepair and poverty.
The limited means of the grandmother to whom they were entrusted are not enough to ensure them the minimum subsistence.
Life is particularly cruel for the two sisters.
Evolving in a patriarchal society, the twins suffer the full brunt of the domination and lust of men, but they refuse to be submissive victims.
Their resilience in the face of sexual abuse, but also in the face of the all-powerful Evangelical Church and its pastors as sweet as they are manipulative, is undoubtedly the real subject of this novel.
Driven by a powerful instinct for survival, the women of Tola Rotimi Abraham never admit defeat.
They laugh at their misfortunes.
It's, as one character notes, “
the kind of laughter you have when the situation isn't funny, but you're cheerful and resilient and want to show it
”.
More than a successful novel
Ruthlessly,
Black Sunday
paints the uncompromising portrait of a society plagued by money, the desire for power and sexual greed. Behind the darkness there is the light of writing which reveals hypocrisies and illuminates the depths of sore souls.
Passed through the famous creative writing program at the University of Iowa, Tola Rotimi Abraham rose to prominence by publishing short stories and essays, before venturing with
Black Sunday
into long fiction.
“In Iowa, I learned
in a novel workshop,”
she recalls, “
that a successful novel relies on long-winded narrative dynamics and lasting dramatic tension. It is also necessary that the chapters of the book have their own coherence and rhythm, while being part of the overall dynamic that carries the plot.
"
Miss Abraham's art is all in subtleties, without exuberance. In her novel, making her own the lessons she learned at university, she meets the voices of the dominated and the dominating, at the origin of the narrative tension that carries her story to the final liberating explosion. She is also nourished by her readings by Toni Morrison, the Haitian Edwige Danticat and especially her eldest Chimamanda Adichie. There are resonances of the latter's first novel in her fiction. “
Yes, there are similarities
, recognizes the first novelist.
As in the
purple Hibiscus
Adichie, we find in my book extremely religious parents and the theme of traumas that go back to childhood.
Having myself been a victim of abuse within the framework of religion, I recognize myself in my characters.
In particular, what the female protagonists of my story live is not very far from the experience that I myself have had.
"
Tola Rotimi Abraham's strength lies in having been able to transmit the authenticity of Nigerian life.
Both testimony and fiction, brought to light by the originality of its writing,
Black Sunday
is more than a successful novel.
It is the promise of a major work to come.
Black Sunday
, by Tola Rotimi Abraham.
Translated by Karine Lalechère.
Éditions Autrement, 327 pages, 21.90 euros.
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