Thursday, 3 October 2013

The Man in the Middle

A comic short story on the Fulani invasion of a Benue village.

Unusual calm reigned in the embassy today as the rain had dissuaded the usual crowd of young men and women who thronged the embassy daily in search for greener pasture in the west.

I was interjected from my quiet nap by a call from Barr. Ochre who had called to inform me that he was sending to me chief Emanaki a traditional ruler who was seeking asylum outside the country . he had carefully added that the deal involved so much and that I should handle my guest with care. I know Barr. Ochre very well , he was not one to engage in trifles and if he is involved in this one then it must be a big one.

A flash of smile spread across my face as I heard the blaring of a car horn outside the office . A huge, stout looking man of roughly forty stepped out of the Range Rover SUV Jeep and walked briskly towards my office with his umbrella. He was dressed in an ill fitted suit with a tie around his neck like a rope tied around the neck of a pig, his middle class mannerism suggested he was a Nouveau Riche who was trying to appear genteel . I wondered if he would not have been more comfortable in an Agbada or Baba-Riga. The knock on my door came earlier than I had expected.

You are welcome sir; you must be Chief, Emanaki?

Yes , and I guess you must be the person Barr. Ochre sent me to, Barr. Smith I guess

Yes I am Barr. Smith please make yourself very comfortable, trying to appear as classy as possible.

Your former principal “Barr. Ochre spoke so excellently about your lawyerly skills and seeing you I cannot but feel we have lost yet another wonderful lawyer to the corporate and beaurocratic world .

Barr. Ochre has always had a very high regard for my person and I must say I got my present job on account of his kindness and positive recommendations . I am not surprised therefore if he had fed you with a lot of high praises for me.

He said you were seeking for an asylum out of the country.

Yes, that’s true.

That is very strange it is very rare for us to get application from royal fathers, what we have is young men and women who are disillusioned by life in Nigeria who are seeking for a greener pastures in the west.

Everybody or lets say most people are disillusioned in the country, although at different levels, the country has really turned all of us into hustlers , just like you have it in the jungle, every indivual struggling for surviving.

Life appears to be very comfortable for you royal fathers , so what is making you leave your kingdom for a strange man’s land where you do not even know whether you are welcome ?

Seeking for peace … peace of mind, that is one thing that has eluded me for most of my life and as one gets older ones view of the world begins to change very radically. You see my son, I have lived a particularly rough life, like I said you remind me of myself some years back ; young ,strong and filled with hot unbridled passions. It was this passions that sent me packing out of the village. I killed a man in a drunken duel over a local bartender, the land had been desecrated. My father who had a reputation for being an impartial and fair king declared me wanted and the whole villagers especially relatives of the deceased and members of the village vigilante went about looking for me everywhere except in my mother’s bedroom. At last ,my mother had mounted enough pressure on my father to do something to save their only son, so much so that father had to devise a scheme to sneak me out to Lagos.

In Lagos I lived by the rules of the street, the streets was no man’s home and I had thirsted blood before, Nothing, mattered anymore , survival was the name of the game and I lived like an animal ; surviving from hand to mouth. And crawling from one hovel to another; today in the brothel tomorrow under the bridge, the next in the prison and right after it in a well furnished room and before you know it you are under the bridge again. All this we took with fun, the streets hustle became a part of my life and the risks became an intrinsic and inseparable aspect of existence for me. Each time you stepped into the streets you knew you may not return back home alive but you just keep coming back every morning and hoping that today will not be the last…

I had lived in total disconnection from my kinsmen back in the village during this period and I believed they too had forgotten about my existence. You can imagine how I felt therefore when mama Tolu, The local beer parlour woman told me the elders from my village where outside waiting for me . At first I wanted to runaway through the back door as I felt the long arms of the law had finally caught up with . But then Mama Tolu sensing my fears informed me that there were not with policeman.

Papa the Village head had died. His paedophile ways had finally caught up with him as he died of high blood pressure on top of his new 14 year old wife. They had come because our family cannot afford to lose the village headship. The other family were presenting an Abuja based business man and I had to come back home to save my family pride. They waved aside my complain that I had a murderous past and lacked money to prosecute the contest; just give them big promises tell them you are a general business contractor in Lagos ; importer and exporter of general merchandise. “Lagos based is Lagos based” it does not matter what you are doing in Lagos.

I had my doubt and plenty reasons to remain in Lagos, especially with the expected hit from one of my con schemes on a senator who wanted a house in Dubai , however my mind could not just abandon the life of near Eldorado that the village promised me ; Free Booze, free women, free meat Free everything all this in a cool easy and unquestionable manner devoid of all the criminal fears and anxiety of life in Lagos. So I boarded a bus back home the next morning after a few pretensions rejection of their offer and obtaining a promise that my sins have been forgotten.

The village headship election was done in a fortnight and I won with the widest margin ever in the village history, of course “ My Camp” had deliberately fabricated a story that my rival from Abuja was not a son of the soil and that his mother was originally impregnated by a Fulani man and not Ada onyala as he claimed. the trick easily worked given his fair slim complexion as opposed to his father’s dark skin. The kingmakers therefore claimed they acted in protection of the purity of the kingship line. It was better to have a prodigal son as king than an outsider whose paternity could not be ascertained.

And so it was my dear son , that I came to sit on the throne of my ancestors as village head and my ancestors did not disappoint in granting me all the desires of my heart ; obedient subjects who obeyed without complaining almost without reasoning, free booze, free women free meat. The village ensured I did not miss Lagos a bit. That was until the strange herdsmen started burning houses and slaughtering human beings like cows around us .Although the herdsmen had not struck our village, the whole village however lived in fear and only went to farm after I and the village chief priest had done some fake rituals to drive away the spirits of the herdsmen. The next day after the ritual cleansing our Market women ran from the markets after They saw herdsmen with menacing faces coming towards them shooting guns sporadically in the air.

My streets reflexes were quickly activated, I had not seen blood in a while and I yearned for those adventurous days in Lagos when the agonising cry of a dying police officer brought a smile to our face as gang men . Together with the vigilante and palace guards we gave the said raiders a swift chase and we clamped in on them at the market square while they were filling in their bags with wares of our market women, which they had left behind while running for their dear life some of the marauding herdsmen were even stupid enough to have killed some goats that were brought to the market square and were busy making barbeque. There was no time to be lost we quickly opened fire on them and killed them before they even noticed our presence. None of them could survive the assault of my automatic pump rifles, the last of my armoury that I had brought with me from Lagos. My examination of the corpses of the marauding men showed they were not real herdsmen but rogues from the neighbouring village who wanted to use the rumours of herdsmen attack that filled up the whole surrounding villages as a cover for their raids on market squares.

The defeat of the “herdsmen” quickly turned me into a war hero, villages all around came to pay allegiance and seek alliances, for it had never being heard that any king had defeated the furious herdsmen from the north. Deep inside I knew the men were not real herdsmen but hungry villagers who had disguised as herdsmen to raid the village and loot our food stocks after there had been raided by the real herdsmen. But who was I to stop the people from worshipping and exalting their king and hero, after all it had broadened and delocalised my network of free booze, women and meats.

The dust raised by our sham conquest had hardly settled before the village headmaster brought a letter from the real herdsmen informing us of their scheduled visit to cleanse our community of infidels . Being one who had lived by the rules of the street, I knew that whoever sent the letter meant business and must have been well armed and prepared. But a war hero is a war hero and will be very disgraceful to run away from my people immediately after fresh conquest, the shame will too much and I decided to take the threat with all the preparedness I could muster around from my highly obedient subjects who had come to see me as a deity to be worshiped.

For all our preparedness and alertness, we were caught off guard by the herdsmen. I was in my palace with the village chief priest burning incense to chase away the Fulani herdsmen when a bullet shattered through the chief priests skull with splinters of the bullet hitting my face. Before I realised it another bullet hit my chest and the rest was history as I went totally blank and unconscious , later to discover myself in a hospital bed in the state capital. That I survived the bullets of the herdsmen was a miracle. The fact that I survived after the death of the chief priest only added up to the myth surrounding me.

On the seventh day after my full recovery news was sent sons and daughter of the village by the elders at home that their beloved king who had saved them from numerous herdsmen attack had demanded their presence to discuss vital issues that relate to the survival of the village.

And so it was that fourteen days after the attack and seven days after my recovery that the market square was filled with sons and daughters of the kingdom both noble and ignoble, illustrious and the illiterates all of them were all seated on the mango trunks that have been made out into a chair only the king sat on his imperial throne and my demand to them was very simple “Our gods had been over powered by the strange powers of the herdsmen . the oracle had to be strengthened and updated through sacrifices and cleansing of the land if not we will not be wiped out”

They were dissenting voices but at the end of the day, each man gave into his fears as the elders appealed to their children to please to do everything possible to protect our collective heritage. Thus each man paid according to their station in life. Let me tell you the truth, where ever two or three people are gathered money is there. Who would have thought that those poor villagers and their useless Diaspora children could raise such huge amount of cash to appease the gods of the land. Anyway that is not my business , what is important is that I had their money and money is money no matter from who it comes from.

And so my dear son, I had moved from a mere war hero to be a multi-millionaire and like they say ; nothing changes a man’s thinking like money. The village became suddenly very boring. my mind raced back and front with what I could do with the money, to hell with the stool of the ancestors, who knows what the herdsmen would do the next time they came around for their usual infidel cleansing, my life was important , the people can always find themselves a new king or a new war hero when I have disappeared , yes I had existed to them as a myth, and who knows what myth they would form after my sudden disappearance; perhaps they will say I have disappeared to the land of the great beyond to protect them from their enemies.

Wednesday, 2 October 2013

Edna O'Brien: 'I would die now if tomorrow morning I could not write'

The Irish author of The Love Object, a 500-page retrospective of stories, looks back on life, loves, and time spent with Hollywood stars, from Marlon Brando to Jane Fonda to Jude Law

'I do not call writing a labour of love; I call it a labour of semi-madness' … Edna O'Brien. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

^'Irish Revel" is the first story in a big, bold new collection of Edna O'Brien's short stories, and 50 years after she wrote it, her account of 17-year-old Mary's invitation to her first party, where she turns out to have been summoned as an unpaid skivvy, remains one of the best. Mary sets out on her bicycle, bursting with romantic expectation, and returns from the pub next morning bereft, having spent the night with furniture stacked against the door to avoid being raped.

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Unlike Mary, O'Brien never lived on a mountain. "We lived down from the mountain," she says. "That is not to say we were very well off, not by the time I came, but our house was a little grander, while not being really grand."
But she spent summer holidays with her grandmother up the mountain, lonely and spartan weeks she didn't enjoy at all, and knew the disdain with which the "mountainy" people of western Ireland were regarded by the richer, more worldly inhabitants of the bigger farms and towns.
Like Mary, O'Brien yearned to get away ("to stay in a hotel and have breakfast in bed", as the girl in one of her novels puts it). Unlike Mary, and the women in most of her stories, O'Brien did escape, first to a job behind the counter of a pharmacy in Dublin and then, as the runaway bride of the writer Ernest Gébler, to London.
There she wrote her first, famous novel about her childhood, The Country Girls, in a blast of nostalgia and relief at all she had left behind. Written in the first person and widely admired for its sauce – among other escapades, Caithleen and Baba get themselves thrown out of their convent school for writing a dirty note – the book was banned and burned in Ireland. O'Brien has since published 30 more books – mostly fiction, but also plays, biographies and a memoir. Now she has gathered together a career's worth of stories in a 500-page retrospective called The Love Object.
O'Brien's novels have been divided into phases: the early, autobiographical books about women's struggles and desires; the later state-of-the-nation works about Irish history and politics. Her stories don't really fit this template, so the new book demands we reconsider O'Brien, and stakes a claim for her work overall, a claim backed by John Banville in an introduction that compares her to Henry James.
"Somehow there was the perception, which is completely off the wall, that I had this gilded, adulterous life moving from one affair or soiree to another. Well, you can't write all these books and rear children and earn your living and have a gilded life," she says, spitting out the word "soiree" as if it disgusts her. "You can't work on a book one day a week. It's like a toddler off out into the street: you can't find it again. So in that sense, I am possessed."
Standing in the doorway of her study, she rubs her fingers together as you might over a piece of fabric, or when making pastry. "It's very hard to get the truth in it, and the sheen on it," she says. But if her private life after her brief and unhappy marriage ended was never the sex and champagne binge of legend, it is no surprise her parties are a source of fascination. For a time, O'Brien supped with Hollywood royalty – Robert Mitchum, Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, even Judy Garland passed through her sitting room – and for all her evasions ("it still baffles me how I came to know all these people," she wrote in her memoir Country Girl), she is proud of how far her talent, ambition and all-round attractiveness took her. And why not? The new book is dedicated to Philip Roth "in long friendship". Her memoir describes her delight, while staying with Harold Pinter in Dorset not long before he died, at being kissed by another visitor: Jude Law.
Along with some teaching in New York, O'Brien has always supported herself by writing, and I meet her in the Knightsbridge house around the corner from Harrods that she has rented for nearly 30 years. She lost two previous homes. Selling number 10 Carlyle Square in Chelsea was a personal tragedy she has blamed on "love, generosity, the pipe dream" – another way of saying she forgot to take care of practicalities, so consumed was she by one of her affairs. More recently, she sold at a loss the house her architect son, Sasha, built for her in Donegal. Her experiment in homecoming was ended by the antagonism of her neighbours who didn't want a famous writer in their midst, and the fact that she found she was unable to write there.
She says she is "a bit pathological" about noise, needing silence to concentrate (she abandoned a flat where a dog barked incessantly in the communal garden), but feels less lonely in the city. Her house is cluttered with books and papers: pages of notes, a novel by Gabriel García Márquez, her own work in progress piled up on a table. Technology is a struggle: "My emails are legendary. They're so illiterate – not deliberately, but like moments out of Finnegans Wake: you can't make anything out!" She does not drive, and swims with armbands.
Does she have a method when she writes? "I have to read something astonishing beforehand. Very often it is a poem, or it can be a scene from Shakespeare that is absolutely dynamic and contagious in that it gives one a longing to write something that isn't totally a dud."
She breaks off to fetch her diary from a desk, and reads aloud a few lines by Ezra Pound. "I write with a pen, by hand. Of course I make endless cups of rooibos tea. Then I write a paragraph and read it aloud to see if it stands up in any way. Usually, out of 10 lines there might be three words that are OK. So it's a question of rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. I do not call it a labour of love; I call it a labour of semi-madness. Then I keep with it, go for a little walk. It's getting a little harder for me now, harder on the eyes. I'm 82 this Christmas. I work for five or six hours each day but my achievements in those hours are not great. If we're going to measure it in pounds, shillings and pence, it's more pence than shillings."
O'Brien was the youngest of four children born to farmers in Tuamgraney, County Clare, and this household, the neighbours, surrounding countryside and town with its 27 pubs never let her go. "It's not describing a field or a gate or a bog or an avenue; it's the emotional association with those places that makes a line come true or alive," she says. Most of all she was drawn to her mother: "Everything about her intrigued me: her body, her being, her pink corset."
But the rhythm of life was beaten out by her father's cycles of bingeing and remorse, as he left the work to hired help and spent the family's remaining money on drink and horses. "Those two old chestnuts, parents, come up again and again," she says. "We are to a great extent unconsciously ruled by our first experiences. Sometimes we hide the fact and sometimes we fight it; the only thing we can do in order to emerge from it is to admit it. So I admit my mother within me, the mother who wrote me hundreds of letters, all of which, in their own way, and ironically for a woman who mistrusted the written word – especially my written words – was a born writer. They're little masterpieces, my mother's letters."
O'Brien broke with her parents when she ran off with Gébler, sending a letter from the Isle of Man where her father pursued the couple in a fury. She was 23 and pregnant when they married. Gébler, who had already been left by one wife, was nearly 40. He envied O'Brien's success from the start, and the marriage was a disaster. In her memoir, she describes him grabbing her throat in a row before she left him in 1962.
Reconciled with her parents, she went on taking her two sons on holiday to Ireland. But the family remained a tangle, and a grim scene followed her mother's death, when the family home, which Edna believed was meant for her, went instead to her brother.
Meanwhile, her romantic life followed its own turbulent cycle. She never remarried but became deeply attached to a married man thought to have been a senior politician. In her memoir she called him Lochinvar; his real name remains unknown: "I think everyone has the right to a secret and that's mine," she says now. I understood the last page of her memoir to confess she is still in love with one of them, but she quibbles with my choice of words when I say so, and quotes back at me the phrase she used: her love "had not died, and so it lived on and on, in that dark suck of secrecy".
O'Brien's memoir also reveals that around 20 years ago, in a hotel in Singapore, she planned to kill herself. "I was all askew," she says. "I was rather frail for a while." Around the same time, she was rushed to hospital after her appendix burst. Years before, she had tried psychoanalysis with RD Laing. She took him figs; he gave her LSD. Now she sought out another analyst, Alexander Newman, who "helped bring me back together again".
But he could not shield her from her critics. A profile of Gerry Adams she wrote for the New York Times in 1994 saw her insulted in public – "I was asked am I a groupie? I'm nobody's groupie" – while Edward Pearce, writing in this newspaper in the same year, called her "the Barbara Cartland of long-distance republicanism", an epithet she shows no sign of forgetting.
"I remember being very hurt and often furious as well as hurt, absolutely livid, with the audacity and covert jealousy of some reviewers," she says. "Of course every writer has been attacked and every writer thinks it's unfair, but I remember being absolutely heartbroken when Down by the River came out. It's a story of incest and was triggered by the Miss X case [a court ruled that a teenager who had been raped could not travel to the UK for an abortion]. It's a very serious book which began in a deliberately lyrical style, and most critics savaged the book for that lyricism."
She says she felt murderous, but not any more. "Fashion is fashion and I have to believe in what I do and how I do it. But I also believe that time changes, perception changes. Some younger women, such as Rachel Cooke, are not as dismissive about my writing as some of the older female critics, and the male ones. I did mind terribly, but I don't mind now, because things have bucked up a bit."
A few years ago O'Brien moved to a new publisher, Faber, and in 2011 won the €25,000 Frank O'Connor international short story award for her first collection of stories in two decades, Saints and Sinners, beating former winner Yiyun Li and Colm Tóibín. It was her first big literary prize, setting the scene for the memoir that followed last year, and for The Love Object, which includes most of the prizewinning stories.
Mostly these stories are about Ireland; conscious that critics have attacked her limited range, she lists those set in other places. She is particularly proud of "Shovel Kings", about the migration of Irish labourers to London and partly based on interviews she conducted in pubs. I like "Green Georgette", which starts, like many of her Irish country stories, with an awkward social situation – a mother and daughter about to be snubbed – and explodes in a fantasy of violence and tinned peaches: "Mama said it would be an extravagance to open a tin at that hour, while promising we would have them some Sunday with an orange souffle, which she had just mastered the recipe for. Mixed in with my longing was a mounting rage. Our lives seemed so drab, so uneventful. I prayed for drastic things to occur – for the bullocks to rise up and mutiny, then gore one another, for my father to die in his sleep, for our school to catch fire, and for Mr Coughlan to take a pistol and shoot his wife, before shooting himself."
O'Brien has kept her accent and sometimes lowers her voice to an atmospheric whisper. She can be dramatic, as when she says: "I would die now if tomorrow morning I could not write." But she is also friendly, generous and disarmingly honest, for example about having had a story, "Chekhov's Ladies", rejected by a magazine last year. The experience shook her and afterwards she laid low and did a lot of reading. Then she began a new novel about the night economy of migrant cleaners. She expects it to take another 18 months, after which she is determined to write two plays and see them put on.
She is anxious not to appear self-aggrandising. "I don't mean I'm gifted," she says at one point, and apologises for comparing herself to James Joyce. But O'Brien does take herself seriously. When she refers to other writers, they are not contemporaries – whom she flatly refuses to comment on for fear of causing offence – but Beckett, Nabokov, Conrad, Tolstoy. She wrote a play about Virginia Woolf.
It sounds old-fashioned in 2013 to talk about the source of creativity as a well or a "little brazier down there at the bottom of the fire", to refer to a work's "inner truth" and compare the "quick shot" of a story with the "unending road" of a novel, to talk about aspiring to what Søren Kierkegaard called "purity of heart, which, according to him, is what makes one do the thing, whether it's embroidering an altar cloth or making a creme brulee or writing a story".
But that is how O'Brien, shaped by her early encounters with literary modernism, self-taught and without a university education, thinks about art. Banned, burned and blamed for all manner of failings, including not being feminist enough, she has remained true to her idea of what a book should be: "What I don't want is for the imagination to have ropes around it. I want to be free. It's hard enough to write. I've had the Catholic church, I've had my mother, I've had nuns and priests from the age of nought telling me what I shouldn't do; I don't want it!"
She says she is glad to be asked about her critics, and relishes the chance to answer back: "I don't want to make a big deal of it, but I did get an awful lot of cudgels thrown at me down the years, and I don't want to sound self-pitying because I'm not self-pitying, but I do think what the fuck was that about?"
Why does she think so many writers have come out of Ireland? "Desperation and a gra for the language." The word is pronounced "graw" and she has to spell it out. "G-R-A, it's a lovely word, it's the Irish word for love."
• The Love Object: Selected Stories by Edna O'Brien is published by Faber on 5 October.