By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
The don makes it a point of duty to always come home to Nigeria from his duty post as Director, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada.
Professor Nduka Otiono has been around in Nigeria, and delivered a keynote speech at Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University, Igbariam, Anambra State.
I had the good fortune to travel to Otiono’s hometown of Ogwashi-Ukwu, Delta State for the opening of his new exquisite house in the company of the poet, James Ngwu Eze, currently long-listed for the coveted NLNG-sponsored Nigeria Prize for Literature.
Spending the night in Otiono’s home afforded one the opportunity to undertake a review of his literary offering.
Nduka Otiono is not any critic’s idea of a reclusive writer.
There are many writers all over the world who have well-earned reputations as hermits but Otiono belongs to a diametrically opposed vintage entirely.
He is a scribe of the open society who makes his views count in the affairs of the world.
If we say that literature can best be understood through the sociological underpinnings that inform the writing, Otiono represents a sure-fire standard-bearer.
His literary works stand for his engagement with his communities.
Born in 1964 in the Northern Nigerian city of Kano, it was while studying in the Nigerian Southwest, at the University of Ibadan, that Otiono’s artistic gifts began to manifest and flower.
He forged abiding companionships with other fledgling poets and promising writers in the premier university.
While working as a journalist in Nigeria’s bustling former capital city of Lagos in the 1980s and 90s, Otiono established a presence that was at once revelatory and assured.
He was a go-to person in writing concerns and networks intervolving all shades of characters in the writers’ workshop sessions of the epoch.
His home was a kind of Mecca for the wannabe writers who carried on like there were no other cares in the world than talking about writing poetry and short stories and the novel.
During one of the artistic gyrations in Otiono’s home one of the maverick writers insisted on pouring alcoholic libation to the African ancestors on the newly bought red rug decorating the floor of the house!
Otiono heartily accommodated all sorts, and this is manifest in the stories he writes.
This way, the writer is the embodiment of his writings.
It was little wonder to some of us who were following his rigour at work that Otiono’s first published book in 1995, the collection of short stories, The Night Hides with a Knife, won the ANA/Spectrum Prize for fiction.
Otiono gave distinguished service as the General Secretary of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) before taking up the distinguished FIA Chia Fellowship for his Ph.D studies in the University of Alberta, Canada.
The Night Hides with a Knife, which was reprinted to mark the 25th anniversary, contains ten stories, namely: “A Will to Survive”, the title story “The Night Hides With A Knife”, “Crossfire”, “Jubilant Flames”, “Wings of Rebellion (Song of Liberation)”, “Escapade”, “Fatal Birth”, “Just Above a Drunk”, “Just Before the Desert Storm”, and “One Day in the Life of an Applicant”.
Professor Dan Izevbaye’s foreword to The Night Hides with a Knife offers a sound grounding to underscore the ends to which the oral is put in Otiono’s scribal enterprise, as lionized literary don writes: “Storytelling is probably the most accessible and most popular of African traditional as well as modern literary forms. In its most basic form, the traditional oral tale is driven by an idealistic vision and a strong moral impulse, which enables the teller to refine and assimilate different historical and social experiences into a pattern of enduring and repeatable incidents.
Writing can and does often reduce the tale into its bare pattern; the vigour of the traditional tale tends to be lost in print, for it is the oral medium that stimulates the dramatic energy of traditional storytelling. Although traditional storytelling will always survive in forms like the anecdote and the yarn, the true storytelling form of our age is the non-oral short story. This new form reflects a dual cultural inheritance, the African and the European, and these are often present as elements of the fantastic and the realistic, respectively.
The realistic short story is largely the product of a new kind of society with its urban base and its European imports: the printing press is the main instrument of its communication; its offices and factories are the key to its economic life and its employment opportunities; the bar and the brothel are the places of entertainment and escape from the psychological pressures of city life. Otiono is aware of these dynamics of social change.”
The aesthetic rendition of Otiono’s stories showcases a clear modern-day bonding with the old masters of African storytelling as per lionized novelists like Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, Ghana’s Ayi Kwei Armah and Cote d’Ivoire’s Ahmadou Kourouma.
There is a rootedness in the street lore realism of Otiono that interconnects with the communal fare of Achebe, the piquant eloquence of Armah, and the startling wit of Kourouma.
The Chinua Achebe mystique has a way of resonating in the works of latter-day African writers, and in the case of Otiono there are insightful bonds with the old master.
Incidentally, Otiono graduated from the University of Ibadan where Achebe was a pioneer student in 1948 when it was called University College, Ibadan.
The oral roots of Otiono’s storytelling can be garnered from any personal encounter with the personable writer whose grandmother celebrated him for having the broadcasting voice of the pristine gramophone.
There’s no escaping the fact that Achebe worked as a broadcaster whilst constructing his early great books.
In the emanation of the African story from generation to generation, it can be said that Achebe over time passed the baton to many other African writers such as Otiono.
One can read Achebe’s books as though they are written in his natal language of Igbo while Otiono renders his accounts with the arresting verisimilitude of urban lore.
The narratives of both writers are laden with deceptive simplicity that enlarges into commendable psychological sophistication belying the somewhat homely words on the page. The cross-generational dialogue generates compelling storytelling across the ages like the many layers of the onion.
The story as utterance is akin to the consecration of the communion of the community.
The apparent failure of the promises of independence led many African writers to publish pessimistic novels, plays and poems across the continent.
The Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah is one writer who is quite profound in dealing with the disenchantment especially in his first novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born.
Otiono’s stories offer multiform expository vistas when shared with a close reading of Armah.
Otiono’s bonding with the old masters resonates when one reads Ahmadou Kourouma’s novel Waiting for the Wild Beaststo Vote.
Born in 1927 in Cote d’Ivoire, Kourouma is the celebrated author of four novels, and his Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is a riveting tale told by the sora, that is, a storyteller named Bingo who plays the king’s fool.
Bingo spends a handful of nights, to wit, six vigils, to narrate the life and times of Koyaga, president-dictator of the Republique du Golfe.
The bonding of Otiono with the old masters of African fiction is the way to go toward reinventing the protean African story.
