Playing the Nollywood game in Chibundu Onuzo’s novel The Spider King’s Daughter

Thus, released from the demands of the blinking cursor on my laptop screen, I picked up a book from my to-read pile: Chibundu Onuzo’s 2012 novel The Spider King’s Daughter (London: Faber and Faber).It is one of those books you can’t put down, a skillfully told, albeit unlikely, romance between the daughter of a stupendously […]

Thus, released from the demands of the blinking cursor on my laptop screen, I picked up a book from my to-read pile: Chibundu Onuzo’s 2012 novel The Spider King’s Daughter (London: Faber and Faber).
It is one of those books you can’t put down, a skillfully told, albeit unlikely, romance between the daughter of a stupendously wealthy Lagos businessman and an ice-cream hawker at 12 mile. I settled into the novel with the expectation that my reading pleasure would come in the unfolding suspense towards a predictably charming dénouement.  But this is no ordinary romance. Although it sticks to the trope of the star-crossed love between a rich girl and a poor boy, there is something darker brewing here that lurks beneath the fairytale, twisting it into a cross-genre mix between a romance novel and a crime thriller. The story is told in alternating narratives by the imperious modern-day princess Abikẹ who speaks in italics, and the poor but proud hawker, whose more ordinary vision of the world is reflected in plain roman print. When both voices retell the same event, we find that the truth falls somewhere in between.  They begin their stories with the sweetness and awkwardness of young love. There is plenty of dramatic irony as the lovers do things they think the other will like but instead push each other away. Abikẹ designs a party dress in pink satin to match the pink shirt the hawker wore when he first came to her house, but he thinks it is “the most hideous dress I have ever seen.”  The misunderstandings here quickly move beyond frivolous miscommunications, however, to increasingly stark conflicts of interest. As Abikẹ attempts to rid herself of the cold calculating nature that her battle of wits, the game of “Frustration” with her father, has taught her, the hawker grows increasingly suspicious about her character. She asks him to call her Abby, a private name for just the two of them, which reminds her that she does not have to play her father’s game, but ironically the hawker identifies Abby with the extravagant, ruthless aspects of her personality, which he thinks have taken possession of the Abikẹ he loves. While Abikẹ believes that she has finally found someone who accepts her for herself rather than for her father, the hawker’s initially innocent attraction to her becomes more resentful as he discovers her father’s secrets.  
This is a novel that owes much to Nollywood, and could itself be made into a very good movie. There is the fairytale romance; the excessive mansion; the streetwise hero, who is more than he seems, with his two sidekicks, the provisions store owner Aunty Patience and the amputated beggar Mr. T. There is the ice princess, who expects her lackeys to loyally follow her command but who is nevertheless touched by the proud but poor boy she calls “my hawker.” There is the coldblooded tycoon, and the gun toting Lagos thugs. There are the brief cameo roles in which Nollywood itself appears in the “lurid film posters that were plastered all over Abẹ Bridge,” and a beggar with a story of a fortune-telling Prophet that “could have been ripped from a home video: horror that melted into tragedy that swung into farce with the delivery of a line” and in Abikẹ’s mother, a washed up movie star, who lives in a hazy dream of lost glory. Distant from Abikẹ and estranged from Abikẹ’s father, she schedules her life around re-watching her old films. She is the only one who remembers her own stardom. Although she had married Olumide Johnson flush with the romance of playing the role of the “loving confidante” to one of the richest men in Africa, her husband “did not take to the script.” Abikẹ, her mother, and father all try to direct people according to the screenplays in their heads. But, in the end, only one can win this contest.
Like Nollywood, harsh social critique lurks under the entertaining fantasy, emphasizing the repellent arrogance of a cannibal class who feed on the destitute they have created. The hawker’s name is never used.  He refers to himself as Runner G, the name his fellow hawkers have given him. Abikẹ sees him as a project to take on because she is bored, a sort of Pygmalion, whom she can make into her image. As he suspects, to her he is “my hawker,” an object to be owned and directed, just as the driver Hassan is “my driver.” She orders Hassan to perform duties beyond his job description, directing not just his driving but the trajectory of his life. After the hawker’s first visit to her house, he feels “tricked and manipulated. I wanted my script.”
Yet, while the novel critiques the wealthy, corrupt lives of Lagos elite and opens a window onto the life of the poor, on another level, class assumptions stay the same. There is no real transgression of the boundaries between rich and poor in this romance. The reason the hawker is so attractive to Abikẹ turns out to be because he was once rich himself.  She admires him because of his cultivated speech and noble figure, while she sneers at the driver because of his “vernacular” inflected English. Likewise, although the hawker works the streets, those who become his closest friends are not the girls with their “cheap perfume,” who speak to him in “the broken words they call English” or the good natured hawkers, with their ribald teasing, but the fallen characters who, like him, have a wider exposure to the world.
Onuzo departs from Nollywood, perhaps, in her tighter control of the plot and the emotions that her characters feel. She resists the temptation of sentimentality. We are given glimpses of Abikẹ’s vulnerabilities: a cruel father and an absent mother.  Abikẹ has no real friends. Her two lackeys Cynthia and Oritse fawn over her yet reveal to the hawker that they are only there because of the perks they receive as friends of Olumide Johnson’s favoured daughter. The guards she imperiously orders around warn the hawker “She no good.” Even her 13 half brothers, who have been shuttled off to the less posh wing of the house, hate her. Although Abikẹ has another mother figure in her nurse Aunty Grace, who loves her unconditionally, she cuts off Aunty Grace when she turns 13, thinking she has now outgrown the woman’s unsophisticated ways. Abikẹ lives in a cloud of denial, as she grows more and more like her scheming father—the man with the spider birthmark and the common name. He is hard to identify when the hawker searches for him online, yet he controls a shady empire of criminal enterprises hidden underneath legitimate businesses. Abikẹ’s attraction to the hawker, the boy she thinks is so far outside of her world, is her chance to find grace. For the hawker, however, Abikẹ is a femme fatal luring him into a web that holds the secret to his family’s plunge into poverty.
Despite enjoying this skillfully woven novel a great deal, I found the ending abrupt and dissatisfying. But then, perhaps my frustration at the end came in the story’s transition from fantasy to realism. It does not have a Hollywood ending but instead a Nollywood one. Onuzo’s conclusion, like those so often at the end of Nigerian films, does not tie up neatly and to the audience’s satisfaction, but instead leaves you awake and  brutally aware of the injustices suffered by the poor. So, if you, like me are a fan of Nollywood but have no NEPA to watch movies, try finding the horror, tragedy, romance and farce—entertainment mixed with social critique—in this novel. It is a disciplined tale that builds on the best of the Nollywood tradition. All that is missing is a “To God be the Glory.”