Literary works are often expected to reflect the societies of their provenance. This expectation is particularly strongly held on to by a lot of African critics and even authors, who more often hinge the relevance of a literary work on the subject that preoccupies it.
Over the years, however, what constitutes issues to be reflected have become rightly more varied and gone beyond writing back to the empire or responding often in angst to the agonizingly undesirable state of post-independence African countries.
Attention, for instance, has shifted to micro-relationships – altruistic or sinister – within the society and the ramifications of such relationships for the individual as well as the society. It is in this light that Kike Ojo’s novel, Fire in the Wind, published by Kraft Books, draws its thematic inspiration – and relevance – as the story of Angela, the protagonist, unfolds.
A complexly woven narrative, which straddles three West-African countries and goes back and forth between the present and the past, Fire in the Wind narrates Angela’s moving struggle against the overwhelming tide of an unfair fate, aided by a partial society. A product of an illicit affair between a married headmaster and an economically disadvantaged, out of school 16-year-old girl in a backwater village in Sierra Leone, Angela is set for an uncertain life, which will be pockmarked by unceasing misfortunes.
Her hard fate appears sealed quickly as she is soon orphaned and later impregnated at 14. Remarkably, Angela, through sheer determination, pulls herself out of the morass of her life’s misfortunes to become a university don in Nigeria.
Her struggles do not end there.
As movingly narrated by the author, Angela’s personal achievements do not matter in a highly prejudicial society. She soon finds out that she has less stakes in her immediate family once the extended family members are much in the frame. That she gives birth to two daughters – not boys – in succession makes her stakes reduce further. By the time she has the presumably marriage-saving boy-child, Angela’s patience for patriarchal shenanigans has worn out beyond repair. And she consequently seeks succour in Ivory Coast.
Her struggles do not end there, too.
She has got to contend with the frightening ghost of her early years in Sierra Leone. The hurts and agonies since repressed and forgotten begin to find expression in terrifying dreams. Not until she confronts and resolves the events – and their consequences – will she be able to find solace she desperately seeks. Importantly, her recourse to faith, which is a much foregrounded theme in the story, is definitive in her longing for resolution, and the novel’s espousal of the ultimate triumph of good over evil.
It is testament to the brilliance and maturity of the authors artistic craft that she largely succeeded in unifying the various elements of setting and plot events that make up the narrative. While the novel is lean pagewise – 217 pages – the events of the story and the settings they play out in are relatively quite significant.
A sloppy or inexperienced writer would possibly have lost track of and be lost in the seemingly rapidly narrated successive events that almost always appear in few pages gap within the story. And to think those events flip back and forth across time and geographical locations… Ojo’s measured narration and attention to the smallest of details were the masterstroke that helped achieved narrative cohesion in the novel.
Significantly, the currency of the novel’s thematic preoccupations – family dysfunction, gender inequalities, xenophobia, tension between traditional norms, including religious orientations, and modern beliefs – are not in doubt, and immediately apparent once one opens its first few pages. These thematic foci are arched to micro-relationships and their significance for the individuals and the society they find themselves.
Tobi Idowu 