Featured Reviews

Chigozie Obioma – The Road to the Country [Feature Review]

Road to the CountryAmbitious, Altering and Admirable 

A Feature Review of

The Road to the Country: A Novel
Chigozie Obioma

Hardcover: Hogarth, 2024
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Reviewed by Maryanne Hannan

When Nigerian author and two-time Booker Prize finalist Chigozie Obioma publishes a third novel, all eyes are on it. Will he walk down the aisle with the recently published The Road to the Country? Is the third time a charm? While he may not appreciate such speculation, it behooves a reviewer to read carefully and go beyond easy assumptions before making any judgments. Of course, this is always the mandate for reviewers, but The Road to the Country is unusually ambitious and, therefore, challenging to read. 

Much of the narrative in this latest novel takes place in the Civil War between Nigeria and the Igbo people in southeastern Biafran which mainly occurred between 1967 and 1969. The Biafran secessionists had barely any weapons or military training, leaving their troops vulnerable at every turn, and the Nigerian federal government deliberately blocked food and medical supplies from entering Biafra, resulting in civilian deaths numbering in the millions. This brutal war is mainly remembered outside of Nigeria for the images of starving Biafran children, but the deep wounds to the Nigerian people have not yet healed. 

Obioma has done his research. In passage after passage, my reaction was that someone must have witnessed this; such horror could not be imagined otherwise. First, there is the intense emotional and physical suffering of the combatants. Blood courses down bodies “like the mealy saliva of a stricken beast.” Limbs are scattered on the ground; bodies are headless. The living sit next to the wounded and the dead, “propped up in seated positions against the side of the lorry.” Then there is the filth and degradation of the living: “All the men here—they cry constantly, leave snot smeared on their faces, wet and shit themselves. Many men shit right next to others in the trench under bombardment.” Finally, Obioma catalogs the enormous collateral damage to the civilian population, the glimpse of a child so thin, “wasted to the bones, with a stomach so round and distended” her skin was beginning to rip. The language is always controlled, always precise, and the details are so harrowing that the novel can be read on the level of profoundly moving historical fiction. 

In fact, The Road to the Country is as effective a war novel as any I have ever read. If readers leave it at that, a great war novel, I suspect Obioma would be disappointed. Understanding how the two strands of the novel come together and support each other is the challenge at the heart of the novel. 

There is a first-person frame story, with radically different assumptions. Time is fluid, seen from this perspective. No longer is it the late 1960s, but the reader realizes the novel is actually set in 1947 during an extended Ifá vision by the Seer, Igbala Oludamisi. Mourning the death of his wife and driven to understand what happened to her in the afterlife, the Seer successfully divines a “galactic miracle:” he witnesses the birth of “the rarest of mankind, an abami eda: one who will die and return to life.” This is the unborn Kunle Aromire who comes of age as an unwitting, unwilling participant in the Biafran-Nigerian war. The Seer hovers over the entire story as it unfolds, coming in and out of the narrative. 

Kunle is vaguely aware of the Seer’s witnessing his life, at crucial junctures. As a child, he overhears that his parents scorned the Seer when he came to report his vision and the future Nigerian hostilities. A boy from church corroborates the story and likens the Seer’s divining through the stars to the Magis’ search for Jesus. Kunle visits the Seer who has long been waiting to see him. The Seer realizes “it has not yet happened.” If this sounds complicated, it is. 

Could the “unborn man” change what the Seer saw? Or is he predestined to play it out, exactly as seen? As the novel takes off, Kunle is a University student, nearly unaware of life beyond his studies and obsessed by guilt over a childhood accident which crippled his younger brother. A neighborhood girl is the catalyst for both the accident and the estrangement with his brother that follows. Kunle sees an opportunity to redeem himself when that brother is caught behind enemy lines when the war begins. He determines to atone for his childhood transgression by rescuing his brother, but is himself caught in enemy territory and forced into military service. To save his own life and his fellow soldiers, he learns to wage battle as a true partisan, but he is the ultimate accidental participant, complicated by a mixed heritage. His mother is Igbo, the side for which he battles, under threat of immediate execution if his loyalty wavers. His father and home are Yoruba, the side which is de facto the enemy. 

Kunle integrates as life around him disintegrates. Through love and loyalty for his new companions, many of whom Obioma brilliantly characterizes, Kunle restores the brotherly kinship that was lost in his early life and even enters a romantic relationship. If these two strands of the novel come together, they do so in remarkable afterlife scenes. 

Kunle is mortally wounded and wandering in the afterlife, the realm of the dead, that which the Seer had foreseen and hoped to witness: “Yet he (Kunle) feels whole, alive in some mystic way. He becomes conscious of some change… This realization alarms him: he is dead.” He sees “a carnival: of testimonies, of the relieving of the burden of the old life, of the reckoning of the dead, of the archiving of memorable moments.” He meets companions he has lost in war, and soldiers from a war occurring elsewhere, “a place called ‘Vietnam.’” As Kunle’s mother had told him, “some of the truest of these stories cannot be told by the living. Only the dead can tell them.” But after his wild sojourn in this realm, he decides to return, pulled by the desire to see his beloved Agnes and companions and fulfill his promise to rescue his brother, all the unfinished business of his earthly life. In this way, he carries out the Seer’s vision: he is indeed “the rarest of mankind, an abami eda: one who will die and return to life.”

Obioma combines elements of Western mythology, certainly Christianity, and African religion and culture, Igbo and Yoruban, to break open the reader’s imagination. Is Kunle a Christ figure? How Dantesque or Vergilian is his trip to the realm of the dead? Does the Seer manage what Orpheus could not? Is Kunle a Pentecostal figure who understands the Igbo language most clearly in the afterlife? The entire novel is based on an Ifá vision, part of Yoruban divination. These syncretic components, along with the intensely realistic and well-researched details of most of the novel, can be overwhelming. Many readers comment primarily on the latter, almost as if it predominates, but the book must be read as a whole. The elements, for which Obioma uses the term “mystical realism,” rather than “magical realism,” set the bass note, the tonal underpinnings of the novel. This “novel” novel presented sometimes unwanted challenges to me, but the more I delved into its passages and tried to understand the whole, the more I admired it.  

Maryanne Hannan

Maryanne Hannan has an M.A. in English and in Classics, Latin Literature, both from University at Albany, State University of New York. She taught Latin for many years and was Associate Editor at Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry for its inaugural issue in 2017. She lives in upstate New York and is the author of Rocking like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st Century Psalm Responsorials (Wipf and Stock, 2019). More information at www.mhannan.com.


 
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