Say You’re One Of Them

The story: Akpan’s debut will be a bit difficult to describe as it is a collection of five novellas but I’ll do my best.

Ex-Mas Feast. Its that time of year when Santa finally puts Rudolph, Prancer and crew to good use. Needless to say he bypasses 8-year-old Jigana and his siblings in the most abject of slums in Kenya. So destitute is his family’s condition that his 12-year-old sister, Maisha, who is a v-jay-jay utilise, is considered to have the luck of the draw. After all, she gets to ride in her clients’ Jaguars and other such fancy cars. There is also the baby which the siblings use as a pass-the-parcel prop for begging. Their living conditions are horrendous to say the least. Their most prized possession is a bottle of glue which the children take in turns to sniff in order to stave off their hunger pangs. Maisha decides to leave the hovel in search of a better life and the story ends with her family pleading with her not to leave as she drags her meagre belongings into a taxi.

Fattening For Gabon. This was the most harrowing story of all in my opinion (but we’ll get to that later J). 11 year old Kotchikpa and his 5-year-old sister, Elewa are under the care of their uncle, Fofo Kpee. Their parents have AIDs and are no longer able to care for them. One day their uncle returns home with a shiny new motorbike – the children’ s joy is unbounded! Their uncle  tells them it was a gift from their parents back in the village, both of whom are recovering well. Pinocchio ain’t got nothing on Fofo Kpee. He also tells the children that they have godparents who will be alleviating their poverty-stricken lives and relocating them from Benin to Gabon in a matter of weeks.  True to form, these godparents come to pay them a visit, bringing good tidings and lots of food! From the beginning, you get a strong sense of foreboding which also begins to fester Kotchikpa as the novel progresses. Their uncle forces them to recite lines about their new family, feeds them more food in those pending weeks than they’ve probably ever received in their lifetime and conditions them to get used to sleeping in an airtight room (to prepare them for the passage on the ship). During this transition. Fofo Kpee begins to have a change of heart and realises he can no longer do this. The way Akpan describes his descent into depravity is brilliant! He then tries to run away with the children on the motorbike but he gets caught and beaten to death, literally. The children’s new captors keep them locked in the room whilst waiting for departure date to arrive. Kotchikpa hears a grave being buried for their uncle and realises he’s dead and the next day, manages to get the keys of the padlocked window from his uncle’s jacket. That fateful night, he unlocks the window, awakens his irritating little sister (admit it, she was!) and tries to push her out of the window to her freedom. A blast of air hits her face and she screams, alarming their sentinel outside who rushes in. Kotchikpa is able to make it out of the window in time, leaving us with the poignant final words, “I knew I could not outrun my sister’s screams”.

My Parent’s Bedroom. Based in Rwanda during the times of the civil war between the Hutus and the Tutsis, I imagined this story to be told from the point of view of one of the unfortunate children from the film, “Shooting Dogs”. A young girl of mixed Hutu and Tusti lineage watches her Dad use a machete to crack open her mother’s head because she is a Tutsi – never seen a more severe case of peer pressure in my life! Before the gruesome death, her mother tells her that if anyone asks of her tribal origins, “say you’re one of them”.

Luxurious Hearses. Dear old Naij is where this story is based. On one of the infamous “luxury” buses that cart the local people from state to state acts as a microcosm for Nigeria’s tribal turmoil. A young fundamentalist muslim named Jubril is trying to escape from the north (where his heritage caused his so-called friends to questions his dedication to Islam). He gets on one of these luxury buses where he pretends to be a Christian. This would be an easy feat except that homeboy has a strong Hausa accent and is missing his right hand as a result of a Sharia punishment. Also on the bus, you have a deranged ex-soldier, a pious Igbo chief, a Mother Theresa aspirant, some razz university girls to mention a few. In a nutshell, Jubril accidentally slips his right arm out of his pocket to the enlightenment of his fellow passengers who eject him from the bus and promptly send him on his way to his maker.

What Language Is That. a young Ethiopian, Christian girl is forbidden from speaking to her Muslim best friend. No, seriously.

Rewa’s take on things: People hail Ex-Mas Feast as the best story in the collection but my personal favourite, well not favourite because the content was gruesome, was Fattening For Gabon. I think the reason for this was that in all the stories, we know that the young people are destined for doom, they know it too but only in Fattening For Gabon were these young children given a false sense of hope, only for it to have it dashed. The way in which Akpan describes Kotchikpa’s joy and tears during his first ride on that damned motorbike, his joy at eating the bullet-ridden meat provided by his purported godparents, his eventual realisation of his planned demise is just stellar.

With Luxurious Hearses, I was keen to find out how Akpan would make Jubril’s fate pan out. From the onset, it was obvious to me at least that he’d never make it across, too many odds stacked against him to maintain his disguise. Say You’re One Of Them was just horrendous. I found myself constantly wishing the young girl would escape rape and death but just knowing she would encounter both on the war-torn streets of Rwanda. Best Friend was totally pointless.

In summary, don’t read this book if you live in an airy-fairy world where such things are un-heard of. Read this if you want an eye-opener into the plights of young lives faced with ethnic cleansing, civil, political and religious wars over which they have absolutely no control. Weirdly enough, I find that I’m unable to review this collection of stories as I have been the other novels. I think its because they’re just too true, if that makes sense. I cannot say they are good or bad because these are the children who are involved in the conflicts we read or hear about on the news every day but just dismiss because we don’t know who they are, we don’t know their names, their hopes, fears, dreams. But Akpan brings this to light in a way that is bitterly brilliant.  Heartbreaking, I believe, is an apt review of Say You’re One Of Them.

 Time to move on to something far more light-hearted!