The poet Ahmed
Maiwada is a talented, hard working writer possessing a vision
seemingly informed by a personal sense of integrity. In his poetry and
prose, Maiwada, boldly experiments with life’s meaning, even as he
stares controversy in the eye. He has just written a debut work of
fiction titled Musdoki, published in Nigeria by an outfit called
Mazariyya Books. Maiwada is the Chairman of Mazariyya Entertainment
Company, which presumably owns the publishing unit.
What is this book about?
I am not quite
sure, even though I read it back-to-back twice. Let’s just say that the
main character Musa Maidoki aka Musdoki, is a good looking
self-conscious lawyer from Northern Nigeria with awkward social graces
who is hounded by a demonic lady bent on setting him on a destructive
path. Also, as the book tells it, Musdoki, living in the South, gets
caught up in the civil unrest following the 1993 annulment of the
Nigerian elections by a Northerner, General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida.
M.K.O. Abiola, a Southerner was widely believed to be the winner of the
elections. Angry Southerners spill into the streets, eager to exact
revenge on Northerners for the sins of Babangida. So alleges the book.
This distorted interpretation of history ensures that this deeply
flawed book is fascinating reading.
Musdoki reads like
a typical debut novel. It seems autobiographical; like Musdoki the main
character, Maiwada is a lawyer and one detects his life’s experiences
between the book’s covers. It is difficult to tell if one is reading a
work of fiction, or the true autobiography of the author. The book has
its charms. Read it, close your eyes and you can visualise Nigerian
males in heat lusting after ladies with names like Christine, ladies
who wish to be re-christened Jolene after country singer Dolly Parton’s
song of the same name. Weird, but charming. This is one quirky, strange
book; Maiwada loves lime and shades of green. It seems like every
colour in the book is lime, or a shade of green: The story inhabits a
strange space filled with malevolent aliens wearing lime and green
coloured dresses. Sorcery is a recurring theme. Sometimes however,
attempts at magical realism manufacture hallucinatory silliness. The
book is an intriguing, if awkward sequence of malarial hallucinations;
Musdoki sees apes, hawks, flying feathers etc in strange places. The
reader is treated to Ben Okri-like scenes with people morphing into
snakes and appearing in bathrooms.
Like Okri’s ‘The
Famished Road’, Maiwada’s novel adequately captures the drama and
dysfunction that is Nigeria. There is atmosphere, lots of it. Maiwada
negotiates the Nigerian cities with eyes of wonder and magnificent
detail. The book draws on a lot of colourful characters to portray
equally colourful scenes: Nigerian bus drivers collect urine to use as
hydraulic fluid for their buses; there is a dog named Junta and there
is a tortoise named Tortoise; the reader learns a lot; for example,
fadamas are flood plains, low-lying land; and there is a truly
gripping, scary section in the book where a girl tries to drown Musdoki
in the sea.
Shabby production
From a technical
standpoint, however, Musdoki is a shabby production, a disjointed
sequence of events featuring awkward dialogue with an inchoate plot.
Maiwada’s talent for prose-poetry is not enough to save the book. This
is a book featuring loosely and poorly structured narrative, hopping
along on several themes, many allergic to each other. Musdoki, the main
character is described as handsome and he knows it. He is also
self-absorbed and narcissistic, wearing an air of megalomania. He has
these awkward, stilted mannerisms. A deity-complex seems to follow him
everywhere he goes and he loiters around, drenched in a smug air of
self importance. muttering baffling psychobabble that fuels his
self-absorption. The dialogue flows with the speed of molasses, moving
along like a constipated boa constrictor. Most times the dialogue is
merely baffling and one wonders where it is leading.
Musdoki is a sad
commentary on the awful state of the publishing industry in Nigeria. It
is really disheartening how a publishing company can take the product
of a promising writer like Maiwada and simply staple together his raw
manuscript with little attempt at polish and refinement. There is
abundant evidence that not a single sentence was edited by someone with
editing skills. The book showcases the usual issues plaguing books
published in Nigeria and they collectively spell mediocrity, to put it
mildly. ‘Musdoki’ suffers from an abundance of poor attention to
detail, sloppy research, grammatical errors, awful prose,
inappropriately used words and an atrocious grasp of Pidgin English.
Even the spine loudly misspells the book’s title. The publishers have
done all the wrong things that it is possible to do to a book. It is a
shame because one could visualize a totally different outcome for the
book in the hands of a competent publishing company.
Stereotypes and caricatures
One gets the
feeling that the main purpose of Musdoki, once one gets past its
editorial issues, is to goad Nigerians of Southern extraction into a
foaming rage. It features unfortunate stereotypes of Southerners as
caricatures. On the other hand, Northerners are clothed in the dignity
of moral rectitude and are portrayed as victims in that troubled space
called Nigeria. Where Southerners communicate in halting English like
half-humans, Northerners happily engage others using standard English.
The book is reams of bigotry and ethnocentrism casually dropped into
the middle of a baffling tale. It features an analysis of the events
after the unfortunate annulment of the Nigerian elections on June 12,
1993. The analysis is rife with misstatements. According to the
narrative, Southerners, especially the Yoruba, enraged that the
elections have been annulled by a Northern president, go hunting for
Northerners to kill in revenge. There is an orgy of ethnic cleansing
and Musdoki survives a near lynching: “Lagos was shut down by the riots
in the streets following the annulment of the 1993 Presidential
Election in Nigeria… I learnt that offices and banks had been shut
down; that there were bonfires… that the Hausas were being murdered in
the streets by the Yoruba who would stop a moving vehicle and demand
for its occupants’ identities and then hack down any of its Hausa
occupants (p86).” What are we supposed to make of this? I would say
that ‘Musdoki is a work of fiction bearing weighty untruths. This is
magical realism taken to an unnecessarily provocative level. As an
aside, the book makes the case eloquently that Nigeria is a strange
country of mimic-people invested in uncritical imitation of whites and
western values. Who in the world has hot dogs and hot coffee for
breakfast?
Bigotry
As poorly produced
as the book is, it is an important one, because it allows the reader a
peep into the seething soul of a Northerner. At some point in the
book’s journey, Musdoki is in a car filled with Northerners, fleeing
the South and an alleged pogrom. This is Maiwada at his best, or some
would say, at his worst. The reader is taken by Musdoki’s trip home to
the North away from the vengeful Yorubas. It is harrowing and moving
indeed, except that this is fiction. It did not happen. The dialogue in
that car houses some of the worst bigotry against Southern ethnicities
that I have ever heard or read in my lifetime. In any case, someone
with a good grasp of the events of 1993 should educate me: What exactly
did M.K.O. Abiola the presumptive winner of the elections say against
the North after the annulment that was meant to incite Southerners into
war?
This book is an
inelegant expression of lingering resentment by Northerners against
Southerners, a book that is almost dismissive, perhaps a rousing
defense and justification, of the pogrom of the sixties against the
Igbo, one that is curiously silent on the genocide that was the
Nigerian civil war. It also seems devoted to glorifying T.Y. Danjuma’s
counter coup, that bloody response to Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu’s 1966
one (p100). Hear one of the characters taunt the Yoruba. “They are
indeed white hyenas. Otherwise, why have they deserted their towns and
villages for their dogs and goats? See for yourself! How can white
hyenas ever have the liver to declare a war, like Ojukwu did? (p99).”
‘Musdoki’ is a bipolar organism moving swiftly between narcissistic
self-absorbent musings to a sweepingly false vista of Nigeria’s
history, relentlessly blurring the border between truth and fantasy. It
comes across as a partisan attempt to rewrite a most unfortunate
portion of Nigeria’s history.
Misogyny
Musdoki is also an
important peep into the state of gender relations in today’s Nigeria.
If this book is accurate, the relationships are mostly unwholesome and
steeped in disrespectful engagement. Strong shades of misogyny colour
relationships; and women get the awful end of the stick. It is a
disturbing look at how Nigerian men view women and how women
(submissive and docile for the most part) respond to the abuse. This
attitude is pervasive and it doesn’t seem to matter if the women are
educated and accomplished. Indeed it appears to be the case that those
attributes would appear to aggravate the misogyny.
Musdoki is what
happens when living witnesses remain mute and a nation refuses to
confront its past. Time is dulling the pain of injustice. It is the
nature of injustice that Biafra seems so far away. Dozens of books have
been written about this mad episode in our nation’s growth, most of
them by Southerners, the latest being ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’. Adichie’s
book is a work of stellar industry and near genius considering that the
author was born well after the end of the war. There are perhaps some
facts and conclusions in that book that need to be addressed and
confronted. This should be done with respect for historical accuracy
and compassion for the hundreds of thousands of lives that were lost in
that unjust war.
It is true that in terms of the written word, with respect to the
Nigerian civil war, the commentary has been dominated by Southern
thinkers. There have been few Northern writers weighing in with their
perspective. Despite the myriad flaws of Musdoki, it is an important
book in that it shows that a fiery rage burns still in the hearts and
minds of Northerners. There is no excuse for what happened during the
pogrom and the Nigerian civil war. Today, the major characters of that
era are still with us, sporting fancy titles and stealing the nation
blind. They loom large on the landscape seemingly proud of the mess
that they have created out of our nation space. It is said that
Danjuma’s counter-coup was the North’s deadly response to what they saw
as an Igbo coup led by Nzeogwu. We are living with the consequences of
those dastardly actions today. Let it not be said that the writer Ahmed
Maiwada is following the same dastardly dysfunctional tradition.
