By Anote Ajeluorou
Kasanga Avenue. Chiralum. This pair forms the vicious world
of grinding poverty that Commonwealth Prize winning novelist Ifeoma Okoye
forces down the consciousness of her readers. And for good reasons, too.
Too often those who
have managed to escape that grotesque world forget too soon. For those who
haven’t even walked that path, it might as well be mere fiction. But Okoye
balances out the equation somewhat in this harrowing novel The Fourth World (The Rising People’s Press, Enugu; 2013) set in a
typical slum in a third world country. The slum is the universal ‘fourth world’
in which Okoye’s imagination ranges.
Even the title is
symbolic of her focus. The third world refers to the poorest countries of the
world located in Africa, South America and parts of Asia. Now, with these
countries, Okoye has located a grimmer fourth world, whose unrelenting poverty
on its inhabitants leaves you reeling in its viciousness. In this Okoye is a
mistress of graphic portrayal of grim reality lived out by a majority of
citizens for whom there is no redemption from the poverty they are mired in by
wrong social-economic systems erected to keep them down forever.
In The Fourth World, Enugu’s Kasanga Avenue
is another name for grinding poverty. It’s the name for urban slums where
life’s prospects are small and opportunities are too slim for its inhabitants,
especially the restless young, who want to escape from it for a better life
elsewhere. It’s the abode for the unskilled, uneducated workers, a place for
those without any means of advancing themselves in the social ladder. It’s the
home of the wretched of the earth.
Chiralum, or Chira
for short, is one of the bright girls living on Kasanga Avenue. Her father,
Akalaka, though poor, believes in her daughter and wants her to go far in life,
farther than his limited horizon allows him. In spite of his abject poverty, as
a precarious labourer for hire, he starves himself and his wife just to see
that Chira gets good education, as the only ticket to the better life his ill
fate cannot fetch him. With the little he has, Akalaka sends his daughter to
the prestigious Federal Girls’ Secondary School, Owerri.
On his hospital sick
bed and unable to buy medicines required to treat him, Akalaka tells his only
daughter the sum total of his hard, fruitless life and his ambition for her,
“My life has been a struggle. I don’t want you to go down the same path, my
daughter… I have five portions of land in Umuba… My plan is to sell outright
one of the remaining three portions to raise money for you to finish at FGSS
next year. What is left I will use to start you off at university”.
Unfortunately,
Akalaka dies within a few hours after making this crucial provision for her
daughter’s future. With the death of Akalaka, Chira is unable to continue her
education. Her uncle denies her access to her father’s lands; she drops out of
school a year before she finishes. If life has been hard before her father’s
death, Chira finds things far worse after. She doesn’t just drop out of school,
she and her mother are unable to fend for themselves. Akalaka’s death drains
her mother of her vitality and she gradually succumbs to hypertension.
Having dropped out
of school, Chira has no other option but to look for a job. But jobs, as in
other places and Enugu, are hard to come by. She tramps the streets endlessly.
Her friend, Ogom, is from an affluent home, whom she met at FGSS. Ogom is the
light-headed type and so Chira helps her out. In return, Chira gets help from
Ogom to supplement her lean purse, as she does not get enough from home.
Not even the
prospect of marrying Maks, a rich man, to rescue Chira and her mother from the
grip of poverty changes anything. Maks is as mean as they come; his chauvinism
is such that denies women any form of personal development. He is uneducated
and so does not see any need for his wife to go to university, as Chira aspires.
But Chira is a of proud female stock, who believes in personal development; she
has her teacher back at FGSS, Miss K to thank for her independence of mind that
Maks seeks to deny her. In spite of her poverty, Chira sticks to her guns.
Unlike her friend, Ogom, she will not marry any man just to escape poverty.
Marriage, according to her, should be made of more than a man’s dubious riches.
Her friend, who
precipitously rushes into marriage to escape school, finds to her horror in the
United States the other side of life; her man, Chikeson is married to an
arranged American wife, who threatens to report Chikeson to the authorities if
he ditches her. Ogom is stranded on arriving Washington but for a fellow woman,
who had her own dark past with her man, and who eventually rehabilitates Ogom.
In spite of her mother’s pressure, Chira
refuses to marry Maks for his overbearing nature. But Chira is a determined
young woman, made even more astute by the poverty that is threatening to
annihilate her and her mother. She finds redemption in Dr. Agali, who believes
in her and offers her a job in a computer place. Chira would have to be taught
first before she can perform her duties. Dr. Agali is Chira’s God-sent.
It’s also through
Dr. Agali that Chira eventually finds a ray of hope for a future she has dreamt
so much about. It comes at the crucial moment of her mother’s death.
Okoye’s The Fourth World is a searing indictment
of the world’s warped socio-economic arrangement that leaves the world’s vast
population in abject want and without any means of improving themselves.
Kasanga Avenue in Enugu is the Ajegunle slum in Lagos and several other such
ghettos and shanties the world over, where the inhabitants are at the mercy of
an unfair economic order that they cannot understand or overcome.
As the author notes,
“The residents of Kasanga Avenue came from different parts of the country. They
were no longer divided by their different languages. They were no longer
divided by their different religions. They were no longer divided by their
different ethnic origins. They had learnt from experience - sad and enduring
experience – that their enemies were not one another; their real enemies are unemployment,
meager earnings, hunger, disease, an unhealthy environment and poor housing.
They had learnt that their survival depended on their solidarity and so they
had fused into one indivisible community”.
Hunger, diseases and
untimely death from natural calamities are some of the daily routines, as
people watch their lives wasting away before their own eyes. Two children of
Chira’s next-door neighbor are knocked down by hit and run vehicle, when they
went hawking banana to supplement their mother’s meager earning; the only son
of another woman is swept away in floodwater. Life is hard, short and brutish
on Kasanga Avenue, as in all such communities.
For Okoye, however,
it’s Chira’s indomitable spirit that calls for celebration. Her ambition to go
farther in life is all-consuming; it’s what matters and the driving purpose of
her life. But her challenges are enormous – hunger dodges her heels like fate.
In all her travails, Dr. Agali and Mirror Head and Jude, the patent medicine
dealer on Kasanga Avenue, are her signposts that a better future is possible.
They embody the hope that she carries in her heart.
One other salient
point in Okoye’s narrative The Fourth
World is the use of proverbs. While legendary Chinua Achebe pioneered the
use of proverbs, as forceful narrative ingredients, Okoye takes the art to
certain level of philosophical aplomb. Akalaka uses proverbs deftly to situate
his luckless life; his daughter, Chira, usually recalls her father’s proverbs,
using the wry humour in them to explain the complex and difficult world of
poverty she finds herself mired.
Okoye’s simple
narrative structure is alluring and makes The
Fourth World accessible to all levels of readers. However, her use of the
past participle ‘had’ is too frequent and sometimes drags down the narrative.
For instance, ‘had’ in this sentence is avoidable: “Chira remembered the
situation that had made her father
quote this proverb to her mother”, but perfect in the part of the next
sentence, “He had been talking about
their landlord…”
This minor
infraction, however, does not affect the down-to-earth narrative Okoye has
given her readers. This novel is highly recommended for all levels of political
leadership, these denizens, who pretend to rule the rest of us so they know the
many bright dreams that their misrule daily abort on the streets!
No comments:
Post a Comment