Navigating crossroads in Iquo Dianaabasi’s ‘Efo Riro’

Title: Efo Riro Author: Iquo DianaAbasi Pages: 177 Publisher: Parresia Reviewer: Nathaniel Bivan This book’s title easily draws you in if you have tasted the Nigerian delicacy called ‘Efo Riro.’ You begin to wonder if the stories are all set around this delicious soup. But it’s just the titular story, and yes, Efo Riro has […]

• Title: Efo Riro
• Author: Iquo DianaAbasi
• Pages: 177
• Publisher: Parresia
• Reviewer: Nathaniel Bivan

This book’s title easily draws you in if you have tasted the Nigerian delicacy called ‘Efo Riro.’ You begin to wonder if the stories are all set around this delicious soup. But it’s just the titular story, and yes, Efo Riro has a place here, but it’s the magnet that makes a driver forget he’s in Nigeria when he visits Chop and Quench Buka.

While you’re all cracked up and meditating about the foolishness of this driver, Iquo DianaAbasi yanks you away from that hilarious piece and takes you to other varieties, still ‘tasty’ but certainly not funny or edible. The others in this collection of 19 stories can be sad or tragic, dark and even creepy.

Take ‘That Place That Night’, for example. It takes you on a ‘tasteless’ ride with a girl head-over-heels in love with the wrong guy. You have a sense of something really creepy and evil in the offing from the onset and this nagging and disturbing feeling is validated when you discover the central character, who’s also the narrator, is in the fulcrum of a really dangerous situation. What is this situation? She has aborted, for what? Like the zillionth time, and still counting. Who does this for love? What kind of love? What kind of madness? You’re totally consumed with rage and digging into this story that’s told with a dry mouth and ceasing breath that angers you and there’s hardly a bigger word to describe how you feel than rage. But rage is just the beginning, the starting point, and you have just begun this journey.

Below is a discussion between the doctor and this lovestruck girl:

P27. ‘It is risky evacuating a twenty-two-week old foetus, especially for a womb that has been evacuated three times in the last eight months. Besides,’ he adjusted the pen with which he did a steady tap-tap-tap on the table, ‘it’s a miracle you conceived so fast after the last one, given that one of your fallopian tubes is blocked.’

So you begin to wonder if this really happens in real life. If a girl can put her life on the line in such a foolish manner, again and again and again.

When you climb a mountain, what you need next is a long, uninterrupted rest at the very top. But DianaAbasi doesn’t let you catch your breath, she wants you to keep reading, so she throws in tale after tale that grips you until you’re spent. One problem though, sometimes her stories have this sense of being too short or having abrupt endings. Then again, this makes it easy for one to glide through, and yet again, this may be the author’s way of leaving a lot of unfinished business hanging and subject to various interpretations. Still, some stories, take ‘Dreams and Daggers,’ for instance, could be a bit confusing and you wonder at the end what it’s really about or whether there was a resolution. It begins with a couple and the hint of reoccurring crises in their home. But this is all really in the past, and while you’re looking forward to the resolution of this crises the author points to yet another – our narrator is refusing to let go of the past. This sets one on edge, after all, it’s a fantastic twist that was never expected, and twists, like it or not, cook the sweetest stories.

One thing is clear about ‘Efo Riro,’ besides being entertaining, it draws attention to a variety of social issues relevant to the Nigerian and African society. DianaAbasi’s writing exhudes confidence, and this not just because she wrote an entire story in Pidgin English, the taste of ‘Efo Riro’ is simply in the eating.