Book Review
Oseloka Obaze*
Sunday June 12, 2005
Blighted Blues
M. O. Ené
(ISBN: 0-9545037-1-6; Adonis and Abbey Publishers, London, England, 2005; pp. 183; Price, $$16.00)
Available at: http://www.adinis-abbey.com, AMAZON.COM & BARNES & NOBLE
“Blighted Blues is a seductive and tantalizing mesh of many interlocking stories from a gifted story teller.”
Blighted Blues is a book about cause and effect, with strong and emotive characters that dabble in troubled and uncharted waters of African politics. By writing an audacious, anfractuous exposé about Africa’s past and present dictators, Chrys Chimé, a precocious foreign student in a British university, unwittingly becomes an unintended catalyst that triggers a chain reaction of intrigues and spookily foggy-bottom encounters. In the main, the book provokes an out of the blue groundswell of belligerent Rastafarian fundamentalism as the Rastamuffins protest the heresy of branding of their icon, Haile Selassie a dictator. As a consequent subset, Amanda his girlfriend is shot in Lagos, Nigeria and Chrys himself is abducted. From thereon the story and related events ripple and spiral.
For starters, it needs
acknowledging that Blighted Blues is a refreshing and assertive
departure by Dr. M. O. Ené from the busy, tedious and near obfuscating,
Soyinkaĕsque writing mode that shooed many readers away from his last novel
Jaundiced Justice. This work runs an intercontinental gantlet,
traversing the halcyon environs of Southampton, England, the unforgiving streets
of the Lagos, Nigeria, to the cool ambience of the beautiful, valley town and
coal-city of Enugu,
all in a never-stopping joyful literary excursion.
Blighted Blues is a work that is proportionally a mix of a foreign student’s (the protagonist) biography, cultural history and unhoary African politics. Some male students out of Africa, who did their educational sojourns in the UK or the USA, would readily find bits of their transplanted persona in Chrys Chimé, his philosophy, political outlook, and other earthly and ethereal concerns. They will also identify with Chimé’s challenges and the pull to the homeland, which is frequently juxtaposed with the demanding conflict of attaining the “Golden Fleece” or facing dishonor. Add to this, the chemistry of Amanda, an elegantly tantalizing female consort – who is beauteous and brainy - and you have a veritable page turner.
The substance of the book aside, there is a clear synergy between Ené’s masterful use of supple prose (“the tail pipe was tap-dancing to the discordant rap music from the whistling fan belt and drumming exhaust system”) and his modish and non-pedantic writing style this time around. Ené’s admirable attentiveness to scenic details, his strong sense of specificity and his effective use of translated Igbo proverbs (“If you keep your ears to the ground you will hear the chants of ants” and “when you bite me on the butt, despite the danger of sinking your teeth into faecal matter, I will bite you on the head and disregard the danger of sinking my teeth into cerebral matter”) gives Blighted Blues its most endearing, compelling, and captivating flourish.
In this work, Ené employs a writer’s prerogative to liberally and with great aplomb, poke fun at contemporary Nigeria’s crass fixation with honorific titles in the quest for public recognition (“Chief, (Sir) Patrick Chukwuka Chime, KSM”). He goes further to hilariously dissect other forms of the society’s foibles, such as the efficacious use of contrivances of tone and selected ambiguity that Nigerians conveniently use in dealing with each other. In so doing, he brings some obvious added value to the existing body of work dealing with Nigerian mannerisms and whims, of which Peter Pan Enaharo’s How to Be a Nigerian remains the dominant classic.
Blighted Blues is a seductive and tantalizing mesh of many interlocking stories that are severally enchanting, mordant and hilarious from a gifted story teller. Ené crosses continental, religious, and ethnic boundaries to deliver his tale with gusto. It is well-written book that comes close to being an exhilarating work. Though some may find Blighted Blues in some instances, ornery and at other times irreverent, its is unquestionably a terrific read. With this book, Ené affirms his credentials as an up-to-the-minute au courant and commentator on Nigeria’s socio-cultural and geopolitical affairs.
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*Mr. Oseloka Obaze, an aspiring writer, is a member of the Kwenu.com Book Review Forum, which is dedicated to the promotion of books with Igbo and Afrocentric themes. He is also a supporting Member of the African Writers Endowment (AWE). Since 1999 he has been on the editorial board of INYEAKA, the journal of Songhai Charities, Inc., a New Jersey community-based charity founded and run by Nigerians based in New York Tri-state area in the United States. He is also on the editorial board of The Amaka Gazette, the journal of the Christ the King College, Onitsha Alumni Association in America. His collection of poems, “Regarscent Past: A Collection of Poems” was among the top three finalists in the poetry category in the African Writers Endowment Publishing Grant Program for 2004. He reviews books strictly as a hobby.