When A Man Falls From The Sky – An Afro-Centric Review

Title: What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky Author: Leslie Nneka Arimah Publisher: Farafina Pages: 194 Year: 2017. Reviewer: Mike Ekunno   One must either be foolhardy or a jerk to seek to review a book already given plaudits by The New York Times and The Guardian. I am neither of these […]

Title: What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky

Author: Leslie Nneka Arimah

Publisher: Farafina

Pages: 194

Year: 2017.

Reviewer: Mike Ekunno

 

One must either be foolhardy or a jerk to seek to review a book already given plaudits by The New York Times and The Guardian. I am neither of these fully. This exercise only comes to assert our right to also anoint or disrobe What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky on autochthonous terms. We, the cultural owners of the work, cannot surrender our right to summon the casting vote on an international production the ingredients of which we furnished. And so as elders, we refuse to self-censor into muteness on the back of that well-worn excuse that the previous speakers have spoken our mind. If we are mute, we cannot accuse the West of erasure. Muteness has nothing to be erased.

Leslie Nneka Arimah’s debut collection stands on the scant shoulders of Nigeria’s nascent speculative fiction family. Nnedi Okoroafor is the standard bearer of that brood which includes Chinelo Onwualu and her team at Omenani.  Arimah’s 13-piece ensemble breathtakingly ranges the literal and speculative spheres like the community vagrant. Before her on the magic realism front had been Helen Oyeyemi with Icarus Girl and Famished Road  by Ben Okri. But these are novels. The Nigerian scene has, before Arimah, not hosted such rich variety in the short form of the genre.

The thirteen stories are a kaleidoscope of tales, writing styles, genres and characters and there is no dull moment. Literary fiction is paraded in stories like “Wild”, “Light”, “Windfalls”, “Glory”, and “Redemption” while the rest are different shades of fantasy. The eponymous story is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi while “Who Will Greet You At Home,” “Second Chances”, “What is a Volcano” are slipstream fantasies. The latter has an allegorical edge to it. The literary fiction stories parade themes and sub-themes around what has been called the immigrant experience. However, the author does not so much dwell on how the immigrant navigates her America as she does with the lingering connections to home in Nigeria. Thus in “Wild”, an errant Ada is sent home to her auntie and her family in Lagos on vacation to be Nigerian enough. But her cousin, Chinyere, daughter of a famed disciplinarian mother already has a love child in her mother’s house. In “Glory”, the protagonist has her Nigeria-based parents worrying for her ability to hook a husband.

Whether you read the stories serially or selectively, what first strikes you with What It Means  When a Man Falls from the Sky is the apparent rambling style of the narrative. You break off and bookmark the page to have lunch. When you return, you ask yourself: “What was the current story about, anyway?” This maybe because most of our fiction tells conventional stories rooted in reality with some social commentary thrown in. Leslie Nneka Arimah in this debut, upends, even shatters the literary mould of our short fiction collections in these parts with this out-of-kilter collection. With a style that is inchoate like the fictional equivalent of Dambudzo Marechera, Arimah’s offering also rivals the dainty prose of the late Zimbabwean. If you are reading for ‘message’, the book is not for you. But if you wish to push the envelope as a reader and allow your imagination enjoy a creative flight of fancy, you are welcome.

If you thought the search for high purpose in fiction is the peculiar bane of less sophisticated readership and critics, you’d be surprised and amused by New York Times’ caption for its review: A Debut Collection Looks to Nigeria’s Past, Present and Possibly Fantastical Future. Apparently, only the cure for AIDS is missing from this omnibus. Do critics ever reckon that writers of fiction don’t necessarily write to save the world? The book’s publisher is neither guiltless of this obsession to affix fiction with some high purpose. The blurb talks of how the “collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends . . .” Who needs a relationship psychologist with Arimah’s book there.

If there’s any salient thread that courses through the collection, it must be the world of the heroine as human in her own right. The feminine, if not feminist, agenda of the collection is palpable. The stories that make the collection are replete with heroines often as independent mothers or just women doing their own things. And what’s wrong with that? Nothing. If there’s any agenda writing here it is veiled and does not stick in your face. It can even be asked as a counterpoint whether  men and women who privilege heroes are pushing patriarchy thereby. To be fair, Arimah’s sheroes all pull their weights as far as plausibility goes. It is Ezinma and Bibi in “The Future Looks Good”; Ada in “Wild”; Uche and her late mom’s spirit in “Second Chances”; another daughter-mom tag team in “Windfalls”; Ogechi and her animated dolls in “Who Will Greet You At Home”; a widowed Buchi and her two daughters in “Buchi’s Girls”; Nneoma and her weird mathematicians in the eponymous story and Nancy and Mayowa in “Redemption”. Even the speculative pieces have female protagonists.

The book is to be enjoyed on many different levels one of which is its fidelity with the common touch. This is reflected in its delightful Nigerianisms. In “Glory”, Thomas, a newly arrived Nigerian immigrant quips during a chat with his more American prospect, Glory: “No, it’s just . . . you wouldn’t understand.”

“I’m not stupid, Glory said. “So fuck you.”

In “Redemption”, the narrator goes: “Mrs Ajayi, my mother needs the pot she borrowed you six months ago.”  

There are also digs to Biafra – the memory thereof and the reincarnation. Again one should not make too much of these references because for all you know, the writer may just be having fun.

Arimah writes her fantasies with a girlie tenderness that harks back to growing up years when kid sisters personified their dolls and got so attached to them to the point of animation. This is visible in “Who Will Greet You At Home”. What the high minds of criticism have attributed to childlessness, I see as the girlish obsession with dolls serenaded in fantasy. Arimah’s fantasies weave in and out of both worlds of reality and speculation with such ease you’d have to be alert to realise when she is for real and when she is jiving. In “Who Will Greet You At Home”, she writes: “In her room she laid the baby on an old pillow in an orphaned drawer. In the morning, it would come to life, and in a year it would be a strong and pretty thing.” 

The book is also remarkable for the number of previous publication credits garnered by its members. Six of the stories had been published in literary magazines before being collected in the book. This is obviously a way-to-go moment as such credits show the meritorious acceptance of the individual pieces and ultimately validate the author’s muscle within the coven of litmag editors and publishers. Before Arimah, only Molara Wood’s Indigo paraded such cache of acknowledgements in the Nigerian market. The book comes without an author bio. Whether this is an oversight or intended is not clear. At her Abuja reading in January, the author was noticing the omission for the first time.   

Mike Ekunno is an award-winning writer, literary critic and book editor.