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The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma

2015; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 89; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2015.0097

1945-8134

Jim Hannan,

Islamic Studies and History

The novel is divided into four books of roughly eighty-five pages each—The Book of the Mother, The Book of the Wife, The Book of the Sister, and The Book of the Daughter— each devoted to narrating the encounters among the four female interlocutors and Tahirih after her arrest and confinement in the house of the mayor of Teheran for the final three years of her martyrdom. The mother’s perspective is contained in the thoughts, words, and actions of the shah’s mother—the cruel, scheming, ruthless regent queen, a proxy for patriarchy and the conservative mullahs—while the sister’s story centers on the helpless abjection of the shah’s sister, whose status is reduced to that of a mere pawn in the evolving intrigues of the Qajar court in the tussle for political power between the regent queen, the shah, his ministers, and the army. The mayor’s wife joins this tableau vivant of allegedly “free” women with no voice and no vision of their own gazing in disbelief, stupefaction, incomprehension , and grudging admiration at Tahirih, their prisoner, who shocked her countrymen with her “naked face” and fearless words. Nakhjavani’s writing is exquisitely evocative as she delves into the conflicted psyches of these unnamed women known only by their kinship terms who long for the simple courage of their prisoner to speak the truth but who are unable to do so, imprisoned as they are in their gilded cages of patriarchal bonds. Tahirih’s final martyrdom and the hagiographic import of her death are detailed in the concluding Book of the Daughter, where Nakhjavani expertly weaves together the various threads of disparate lives and events that had come into contact with the poetess of Qazvin as Iran itself suffers the dehumanized panic of a “bread riot” and the assassination of the shah himself. Freedom cannot but be both a personal and a public goal in all true struggles. Gayatri Devi Lock Haven University Chigozie Obioma. The Fishermen. New York. Little, Brown. 2015. isbn 9780316338370 Set amid the political instability of 1990s Nigeria, Chigozie Obioma’s first novel depicts the traumatic events that befall an Igbo family living in the predominantly Yoruba city of Akure. Narrated by Ben, a nine-year-old boy who looks up to his three older brothers, the main events of the novel transpire in 1993, when Nigeria experienced upheaval after an annulled presidential election . Although young, Ben and his brothers journey through the troubled city as violence breaks out. “There were bonfires and burning cars everywhere, for Akure was singed that day.” On subsequent anniversaries of that day, “it seemed as if a band of a thousand invisible surgeons . . . would commit frantic, temporal lobotomy of [our] souls,” leaving the people of Akure “sodden with anxiety, hearts pulsating with fear, heads drooping with the memory of loss.” Against this backdrop of unrest, Ben’s family disintegrates after his father leaves for a job in a distant city. The father, though strict, is hopeful that his children will achieve a measure of success associated with a westernized, middle-class lifestyle. In a year punctuated by unforeseen tragedy, however, the father’s hope that his sons will be “great men . . . lawyers, doctors, engineers ” becomes “a bag of maggoty dreams, long decayed.” Primarily a plot-driven novel, The Fishermen compassionately represents the misfortune suffered by Ben’s family after an encounter with Abulu, the local “madman” who, though momentarily the object of Ben’s pity, is reviled for his despicable behavior. “He smelt of the broken lives of others, and of the stillness in their souls. He smelt of . . . fearsome and forgotten things.” While the novel’s characters blame their troubles on Abulu’s prophecy, Obioma writes with fierce passion about the psychological disintegration of Ben’s older brother Ikenna, a disintegration Kurt Caswell Getting to Grey Owl Trinity University Press The essays in this travel memoir document everything from unwillingly buying a rug in Morocco to backpacking in Iceland as well as the people Caswell met along the way. Skipping through time and across continents, the author reflects on literature, evolution, and his past. Caswell travels with friends and alone, with guides and without...