E. C. Osondu, Voice of America.
HarperCollins, 2010. Hardcover, 224 pp., $19.99.
In 2009 E. C. Osondu, a Nigerian-born author who currently teaches in the states, won the British-based Caine Prize for African Literature. A year later he released his debut collection Voice of America. The title suggests that Osondu’s stories represent the “current” America—a land of immigrants in various stages of assimilation—but this isn’t a terribly novel idea or even the most interesting aspect of the collection. The strength of Osondu’s stories lies not in how well they define America but in how seamlessly they cross borders.
Osondu’s characters populate both the rural villages of Nigeria and its capitol city, Lagos; they move between New York City and Silver Spring, Maryland. Sometimes they are trapped in refugee camps that lack traditional borders at all. This range of settings runs the risk of producing a collection that feels scattershot, but Osondu weaves his stories into an ornate tapestry. Many of his characters, regardless of whether they find themselves in Nigeria or America, put their faith in the supernatural to cure their problems and are left to deal with the consequences when that magic proves to be flawed or non-existent.
In “Waiting,” the child narrator Orlando Zaki chronicles his experiences living in a refugee camp. Orlando’s name, like his friend Acapulco’s, comes from the slogan on a T-shirt given to him by the Red Cross; the camp’s young residents also include Paris, Sexy, and Lousy. Orlando has been given a copy of Waiting for Godot by a nun, and like Beckett’s play, Osondu’s story is at its best when Orlando and Acapulco trade in honest dialogue about living in exile and what the future may hold. Here’s a snippet:
“Orlando, do you think the photographer will come today?” he asks.
“Maybe he will come.”
“Do you think an American family with adopt me?”
“Maybe, if you are lucky.”
“Will they find a cure for my bedwetting?”
“There is a tablet for every sickness in America.”
Orlando’s claim about a “tablet for every sickness” is the sort of misconception about America we might expect from a kid in his situation. Surely there is some truth to what he says—there are many tablets for sicknesses in America—but Americans have not eradicated illness. It is a hard truth Orlando will no doubt discover in time.
There are many such hard truths in Osondu’s stories. Nigerians seeking visas to America lose their savings to phony pastors, and childless women try to cure their infertility by drinking cow urine. The world is not as magical as we might hope.
In “Bar Beach Show,” a rumor passes through the crowd at an execution that the criminal’s native doctor has cast a spell that can repel bullets. Unfortunately for him, the bullets prove quite capable of doing their job. As a hard rain washes away the blood, the narrator says, “Some people say the rain symbolized something.” The crowd is unwilling to fully let go of their belief in the otherworldly. Though the miracle, bullet-stopping magic fails, it is replaced with an inexpressible symbolism. It is the sort of line one might find about the fates in Cormac McCarthy or about Beatrice in Dante. The rain must mean something.
In fact, it would be too simple to say Osondu merely conceives of a world where the supernatural is subsumed by reality. There is true magic in some of his stories, but even miracles come with downsides. When the town elders in “Jimmy Carter’s Eyes” keep a girl who possesses second sight from curing her blindness through an American aid program, she loses her talents and, in effect, her usefulness to the community. In “Miracle Baby,” Ijeomi travels from New York (where she’s had access to the best American fertility doctors) to have Nigeria’s latest miracle pastor help her conceive. Not long after the pastor accepts a five hundred dollar offering and tells Ijeomi to pick a fish from his pond, she becomes pregnant. Her daughter is born with pale skin and a long black birthmark along her side—eerily similar to the “tiny white fish with a little black stripe” she chose at the pond. The parallelism is too direct to deny that a miracle has occurred; however, Ijeomi’s daughter has weak lungs and dies. The story leaves us both astounded that the charlatan pastor’s magic worked and heartbroken for Ijeomi’s loss.
Osondu thrives in these complex narrative moments, and his stories often end before characters’ wounds can be sutured and heal. In “Stripes on My Mother’s Eyes, Stripes on My Back,” a hardened Nigerian father living in America bemoans the fact that his son has not undergone a proper “test of manhood.” In response, he takes his son to a local grocery and lets him pile junk food high in their cart, but when they reach the checkout, the father reveals he does not have enough cash and the boy must return his treats. The lesson (is it about personal responsibility? Or having respect for what his father does provide?) is thwarted by a lady behind them who offers to pay for the groceries. The father’s test of manhood becomes a con, and he is reduced to simply thanking the woman. Osondu writes that the son and father “walked out of [the store] loaded down like hunters with their kill.” Osondu has not given us a clear lesson. Are we supposed to be happy that the father and son made out like bandits? That this act of kindness might soften the father’s antipathy towards his new country? Or have we simply witnessed the bastardization of a ritual when it moves from Nigeria to America?
The eighteen stories in Voice of America revel in such ambiguity. And while Osondu’s prose does not fly off the page, it is solid and serves his plots well. One knock on the collection as a whole is that many of Osondu’s characters—especially the adults—develop into stereotypes he rehashes in story after story. The men are often sexist bores or pot-smoking outcasts; the women singularly obsessed with bearing children.
Fortunately, those children—who appear as narrators in numerous stories—hint at exciting possibilities for Osondu’s future work. They are smart, precocious, and in the process of adapting to a world of shifting borders that lacks cut-and-dry lessons. Whether it is learning the customs of a new country, keeping a failing marriage afloat, or surviving in a refugee camp, Osondu’s characters face concrete and pressing hardships. And in a world capable of great cruelty and filled with ambiguity about right and wrong, Osondu teaches us that it might be okay—in fact, necessary—to place our faith in a little magic, no matter how corrupt. We need something to tell us the world just might heal its wounds.
