The Brooklyn Rail

Chigozie Obioma long ago quit his Biafran homeland⎯that is, south-central Nigeria, along the Gulf of Guinea⎯but his fiction has never emigrated. All three of his novels trace the spreading toxic seepage of the Niger delta, now largely polluted by Big Oil and others. A dip in a dirty stream triggers the internecine wrangle of his 2015 debut, The Fishermen, fiercely illuminating the greater sickness of their nation. An Orchestra of Minorities (2019) travels more widely, visiting the Mediterranean, but the odyssey exposes similar corruption. The voyager is something of a rube—a Biafran, duped by more citified countrymen; Lagos, in his one glimpse, doesn’t just leave him flummoxed but begins his tumble into interior shantytowns, where he must risk his integrity to get back home. Still, he longs for home, badly as it’s let him down, and neither novel lacks for the warmth of the intimate. Obioma develops his players with an open heart, one that also allows imaginative space for the region’s gods and mythos. Orchestra is narrated by the protagonist’s chi, roughly the Igbo soul, and its story unfolds as a conversation among supernatural beings, with names like “Ijango-Ijango.”

In short, while Obioma’s work has been composed in places like Michigan and Nebraska (and he’s now taken a position near New York), its heartbeat will be found in regions of Northwestern Africa, and not in an international boomtown like Lagos. That his first two novels made the shortlist for the Booker Prize strikes me as the latest proof that storytelling is rarely so powerful as when it takes us back, one way or another, to the campfire.

An Igbo campfire, in both those novels and the new The Road to the Country. Obioma knows Nigeria’s dominant culture, the Yoruba culture, but he was born and raised among the Igbo. These peoples occupy a quadrant of the country known as Biafra, and if Americans know it at all, they know the Biafran War. A civil war contemporary with the worst of Vietnam, and if anything uglier, the images that linger out of it are the starving children, their bellies swollen with the protein deficiency kwashiorkor. The sickness provides perhaps the most heartrending episode in Country, though it comes during a rare quiet moment. The soldier protagonist, Kunle, has escaped the fighting on a three-day pass, and in a makeshift hospital he meets an amateur nurse, lacking any decent medication, who describes her last-ditch efforts with the kids: “Auntie must not let the children stop singing, so they don’t sleep before ration arrive⎯you know, the protein? So she ask them to sing, sing, sing … with the last energy inside their body … but still, in the night … she sees their eyes half-open, red….”

The dead children are Igbo, “collateral damage” of a blockade by the Nigeria⎯that is, the Yoruba nation. Ancient tribal hatreds, in this case, underlay the usual rationale for conflict, the power and economics, and a novel about the war must plunge into brackish irrationality. Obioma proves a scrupulous translator of war’s “dark, indiscernible language,” unflinching about a violence far beyond anything in his previous books:

On the edge of the grass, a Biafran man lies … in a dying fit, spitting blood. Another man, his eye hanging outside its socket, a blob of rich, bloody matter and uncoupled nerves, is screaming….

Small wonder that, at war’s end, the Biafrans coin a new greeting: “Happy survival!” Yet the dead and the dying are by no means the only inhabitants of this Country. Kunle is a reluctant warrior, his mother Yoruba, and he first crossed into the breakaway state in an attempt to rescue his brother. Family ties stretch across the battlefield, raising tensions that have little to do with gunfire. Few things move Kunle so profoundly as a smudged and wrinkled letter from his father, delivered by the Red Cross. In time, too, he becomes involved with another guerilla, the former nurse Agnes, whose family has been slaughtered. She and Kunle embrace amid the carnage⎯“doing it inside hellfire”⎯and actually conceive a baby, a glimmer of fragile humanity. Not for nothing does the text reveal that the Igbo name “obioma” can mean “kind-hearted.”

Similarly, the pervasive grind of war doesn’t drown out the old gods. The Road to the Country features the recurring visions of a mystic, a “Seer” who opens the novel with an invocation of Igbo magic. Thereafter the text alternates between brief passages of his prophetic fit, on a spring night in 1947, and longer chapters of the war that will erupt in another twenty years. Like those all-too-real passages, the sage’s visions center on Kunle. At the time of the séance, the protagonist is still a spirit, unborn, yet also cosmically anointed, “an abami eda: one who will die and return to life.” This too comes to pass, in a fine, Dantean episode at the novel’s center, and many of Kunle’s chapters begin with some variant of the mystic’s perspective, “one watching from above.” The narrative juggling makes for quite a performance, and more than that it holds up a mirror to the work of a historical novelist. Obioma has never attempted the genre before, and now isn’t he the one watching from above? An author born in 1986, summoning up the apocalypse that his grandparents lived through?

Now, these structural devices, like the supernatural elements, never soak up all the blood. Nor does a rhetoric that can seem overly formal. Like all his fiction, this novel reveals Obioma’s debt to his forebear Chinua Achebe, a master of stately prose, and Kunle at times suggests Henry James in a foxhole: “this explains the mystery of her choice of him despite his youth and insufficiency…; his characteristic reticence, a behavior cultivated out of desperation, has brought him something good in the end.” But then, how should such a story be told? Is tough-guy Americanese somehow “right” for such agony? The text is also peppered with untranslated Igbo or Yoruba. The way it all comes together, I daresay the tragedy of the Biafran struggle has found its groaning masterpiece. And beyond those poisoned territories, The Road to the Country delivers a much-needed reminder that war never takes place on screen, drone versus drone, but rather face to howling face, a slaughter of innocents.