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This stark story of
primitive violence has to it the quality of elemental fable. It is told
in prose that is hewn often with a precise chisel. Yet, I couldn’t help
feeling short-changed by the writer as I read the story for the third
(?) straight time. Olufemi Terry’s construction of a landscape of urban
dystopia, peopled only by underage boys, cannot be taken for granted.

It must be
accounted for, however thinly or vaguely. No doubt, emplotment and
motivation in the story are superbly handled, and the scenes of brutal
fighting linger in the memory, like graceful movements in stylized
dancing. But there is a basic lack. How can we read this story and be
comfortable with urchins who are schooled in Tolkien and in the history
and manners of Laconia and its capital Sparta?

It is not enough to
say that Salad taught them all of these things. Who taught Salad? And I
was aghast at this sentence from thirteen-year-old Raul, the narrator
and self-confessed street urchin: “I know that what I did wasn’t
technically illegal, but I feel an apology is needed.”

This is from a
dialogue. Raul is not here addressing the reader. He is talking to
another street urchin like himself, in the language of a barrister! The
landscape in which the boys dwindle their violent existence is deformed
and bleak through and through, but their language now and again crests
on a literary, indeed erudite, height.

I mean, just listen
to the urchin, Lapy, deliver this line: ‘Psychologically, that would
have demoralized Markham too much.’ If he can say ‘psychologically’,
then he might just as well say ‘anthropologically’ or even declare
thus: “By the principles of aerodynamics, I think you have an excellent
rapier in that Mormegil of yours.”

My theory is that
this problem of incoherence, for incoherence it is, has been created by
an author who has refused to furnish any kind of larger social backdrop
for his construction of a terrain of urban terror. There is an
‘outside’ to the world of the dump, an outside where people clutch
their purses in fear when they see an urchin, an outside that “wants to
pity but can’t”. Not only is this outside briefly brought in only to be
banished forthwith from the frame of the story, but the world inside
the dump is hermetically sealed off from social variety-no men, no
women, no girls, and there is no explanation or excuse for this. The
concept of boys, more or less isolated, living out a fable of brooding
or stark evil, has been material for great literature before. For
instance, this short story calls up to mind William Golding’s ‘Lord of
the Flies’. I daresay it is obvious to any of us that Olufemi Terry’s
‘Stickfighting Days’ shares a genre affinity with that masterpiece.

All the same, the
recall comes to me with a feeling of disappointment at what Terry does
not achieve by isolating his boys in a socially wrecked never-never,
and expecting that we will take at face value their being cut off from
the rest of the world. That right is denied these boys because they
allude to our literature, not a literature of their own manufacture.
How did they come to know it so well as to domesticate it in their
never-never of abjection and terror?

This query may seem
extraneous to the all-important question of craft in the short story.
But then, consider the formal language of much of the dialogue,
consider the ‘deep’ learning of these urchins in Tolkien and the
classics, and it becomes clear why I think the story has not been
fully, and I should say fully well, told, until we know something of
the educational background of these slum-dog professors.

What is more, we
can’t be content to hide behind the curtain of print and watch these
boys clobber one another into the dust and slime. We need to be told,
however dismissive the manner of the telling, why we are incapable of
intervening. After all, these boys could not have been wholly
responsible for the original wreckage of their social milieu.

Yes, unmediated
isolation makes for a striking and intense tableau of terror; yet, it
all seems contrived, artificial. For boys do not come into such
atrocious being by themselves, even if it saves us much narrative
labour to assume that we can pluck them out of the corrupt air and dump
them in a place where they cannot be reached by the PTA, by sisters and
girlfriends, by laws, regulations and morality – a place where boys may
safely inflict on one another stark-naked violence.

True, Olufemi Terry
achieves universality by leaving out a plausible larger social backdrop
for the action and existence of these boys, but it is a universality
that encompasses not the world of genuine people, but rather conjures
up a species of chimeras that not even fiction can bring fully alive.
Street urchins in Lagos, whose argot is in Mandarin Chinese, cannot be
taken for granted, nor would we take for granted yobbos in Dundee, who
hold street corner readings from the poetry of Adebayo Faleti.

It is in this sense
that I feel the author short-changes us, though by that very act the
imagination is fired to speculate ad infinitum on how urchins may
acquire an education that gives such literary shape and clothing to
their rituals of naked violence.

So I confess that
‘Stickfighting Days’ provides an example of what a piece of good
literature, however inadequate we deem it, does to the imagination. It
presses one’s imagination to engage it and to retell the story in a way
that makes one begin to see an outline of the larger picture, if not
the larger picture itself. I believe it is through this kind of
exercise that we can compensate ourselves for the fast one that Olufemi
Terry pulls on us in his story.

And it is not the
classic Barthean death of the author I am talking about here. My
concern is with the dearth of the tale. Part of the gist, which my
imagination has supplied as background to the story, is that somehow,
Salad, one of the oldest boys who, by the time we meet him in the
story, is now the only man in the dump, long ago pillaged the library
of a Professor of Literae Humaniores living on the outside. He is thus
able to give a proper finish to his own education and to supply the
other boys with the necessary rhetoric and metaphysic for making sense
of the culture of violence which they live out in that milieu of utter
desolation.

The brutish life is
coming to an end one of these days for all of these boys. But even as
they poison and maim and destroy one another-the sticks that Einstein
famously feared a Fourth World War will be fought with, enjoy pride of
place in their retrenched arsenal-they still have literature to fall
back on.

One of the themes
of this fable, then, is that literature will always have a place in the
world, no matter how terribly things deteriorate. In fact, the fable
tells us that literature provides a frame for how violently we live our
lives; and that we will always find it hard to explain how people get
their stories.

The writer of this story has won himself a prize by serving up fare
that catches fire in the imagination. And I congratulate him, but with
the reservations contained herein.