December 4, 2024
Review

Opusam Ete’s ‘Canoe Town’: Odyssey in the swamplands

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  • August 29, 2024
  • 11 min read
Opusam Ete’s ‘Canoe Town’: Odyssey in the swamplands

By Mingi-Yai Nengi Josef Owei-Ilagha

I became a fanatic of the novel as an art form when I met Professor Charles Nnolim at the University of Port Harcourt. Nnolim is reputed to be the foremost authority on the novel in all of African literary exegesis. If Nnolim says your novel is good, then it is good, and if Nnolim condemns your novel outright, he means it fell far short of the standard expectation. But, in either case, he would give you cogent reasons, so that if your novel is good, you want to write a better one next time, and if your novel is bad, you want to brace up and write a good one next time.

Nnolim would be the first to laugh at himself, and tell you that he has never written a novel, yet he can tell a good novel from a bad one. He will tell you that the critic is like a man who knows the way to a given destination, but can’t get there himself. That definition of the critic pretty much describes me as well because I have never written a novel. I have a book of six short stories entitled A Birthday Delight. But while the short story is a clip of life, a slice of life, the novel is an extended narrative, and I have never been able to summon the stamina to write one. Even so, I have read a good number of great novels, so much so that I can confidently tell a good novel from a poorly written one.

That is why I mustered sufficient confidence to tell my good friend, Opusam Ekinisam Ete, that his first novel could do with some revision. He had given me a complimentary copy of Aru-Ama: Town of Canoes, in the course of the last international convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) at the Writers Village in Abuja, and I was grateful. But when I began reading the book, frankly, I felt deflated. I was even more disappointed when I read the comments of Lindsay Barrett and Emmanuel Frank-Opigo. They gave the impression that the novel was flawless and worth celebrating. I begged to disagree then, and I still do.

One of the traditions we need to pass on to the future in literary criticism is intellectual honesty. We should be frank enough to tell a young writer that his book is poorly written, and advise him to be patient enough to hone his craft, rather than rush off to publish it, errors and all. There were evident lapses in the plot of the story, punctuations did not seem to have any rules, and even more obviously, there were glaring grammatical infelicities that any linguistic purist, any literary pundit worth his ink, couldn’t bring himself to endorse. I took time to point out these short-comings to the author, and I’m glad that Ete did not take offence over my remarks. On the contrary, he gave me leave to reconsider the editorial integrity of the book, with a second edition in mind.

We are here today to celebrate that revised edition. In the sentiments of Jesus Christ, new wine should be put in new bottles, so I went so far as to suggest that this revised work should go with a new title. For reasons of wider marketability, I felt that Canoe Town would be a more appropriate title for the book, and I even took the trouble to design a new cover concept for the book. The author gladly accepted the new title, but decided to stick with the old illustration for the cover. The composite result is what we have in hand today, new wine in old skin.

For the critic, the strength of a novel lies in some basic elements in the text itself. To start with, the critic looks out for a good plot, a fascinating story line, in a given setting. He looks out for characters that come alive, a selective attention to detail, credible dialogue, and sheer narrative power that is compelling enough to keep the reader awake and turning the pages till the very last full stop. In the hands of an accomplished novelist, these ingredients combine to make a good broth, if not a delectable feast altogether.

Let’s not search too far from our shores in Bayelsa. I have never hidden my admiration for the craft of Michael Afenfia. As a novelist, he has a great sense of plotting, characterization, dialogue, attention to detail and compelling narrative power. He understands the aesthetics of fiction, with particular regard to the novel. My favourite Afenfia novel is entitled Don’t Die On Wednesday. The subject matter, the engaging thematic interest of that novel, is unique.

Afenfia, in short, is adept at working with sub-plots, adroit at creating suspense, and qualifies to be called a believable story teller in his own right. He remains a good example to follow. As far as memorable novels from Bayelsa writers go, I will always vouch for Condolences by Bina Nengi-Ilagha, an award-winning novel that deserves all the commendations showered on it so far, simply on account of the deployment of those vital elements of artistry and language control that go into making a compulsive read, if not a great novel.

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I am concerned right now about the potential of Canoe Town, the novel under review, precisely because it takes on a very ambitious subject matter, namely the trans-Atlantic slave trade. If Professor E. J. Alagoa, perhaps Africa’s foremost living historian, were to read this novel, he would see reason to convert the vast raw material at his disposal, offered by history, and make capital of it by elaborating on the human involvement with everyday situations, the dilemmas faced by individual characters, and their efforts to resolve them. Ete has done what the respectable professor would not even contemplate at his age. He has told a story around an infamous historical subject, the subject of slavery, and he has done this by naming one of his principal characters Alagoa, no less.

The novel begins with Alagoa fleeing his fishing settlement with his pregnant wife, Omiete, when slave raiders invade the village. The woman gives birth to a baby boy on the high seas, and dies in the process. Confused about what to do, and in pain over the sudden loss of his wife, Alagoa paddles his canoe in the dead of night to the nearest parcel of land, all the while holding his newborn son. It is a tragic scenario that calls us to suspend disbelief as we witness the boy, Owei, virtually grow up in the course of one day, crawling away from his father and distracting him with various antics beyond the dictates of infancy, as the man tries to dig a grave in which to bury his wife.

Caught between mourning his wife and celebrating the birth of his first child, Alagoa paddles away from the deserted settlement he calls Aru-Ama, finds refuge in Igbogene where he leaves the new born child with his long-standing friend, Sorgwe and his wife, Izibefien. In the course of paddling through the creeks, grieving all the while for his wife, he stumbles upon fabulous fortune that would command a fair bargain even in the eyes of local slave dealers. He journeys on to Mbiama where he finds favour in the eyes of the Headman after courageously saving the princess, Ada, from slave raiders. The princess is duly given in marriage to Alagoa who goes on to become the father of three other children, but the memory of his first son, Owei, is so strong that he brings the boy to stay with him.

The princess sees a threat in her step-son, with particular regard to ascending the throne, and plots his downfall. She succeeds in mobilizing the youth to drive Owei into exile, but the young adventurer has a date with destiny. He survives great hardship and torment in the rain forest, and is rescued by the guardian spirit of his mother, who leads him to confront the slave raiders with the help of Nabia, a clairvoyant priestess of the wild. The resolution of the story comes with the eventual arrival of Owei in Aru-Ama, the resting place of his mother, where he is proclaimed king over the people, given his heroic exploits to overcome the slave dealers with the symbols of power in his hand.

In this first novel, Ete revisits the nineteenth century and recreates the response of coastal communities to the havoc of the slave trade, underscoring its disruptive effects on life among the first people to come in contact with the colonialists along the Niger Delta coastline. By popular historical accounts, the slave trade was stopped by William Wilberforce and other explorers of his ilk.

In this work of fiction, the viewpoint alters dramatically, and the treacherous role played by greedy chiefs and local merchants comes in for scrutiny as exemplified by Chief Ekundayo Ogundele, the middle man who shuttles the creeks from Arogbo in the Yoruba axis to the salt water territory in Ijaw land as typified by Nembe, Ogbia, Kaiama and Mbiama. It is even more refreshing to know that the hero of the struggle against slavery is a hapless boy rejected by his people who goes out of his way to free captives, reverses the status quo, and holds the slave raiders in bondage.

The novel comes in seven sustained chapters, and an epilogue that presents a satisfactory resolution. The events are circumscribed within a time bracket which takes its initial pillar in 1807 and ends with the relative close of slave trading activities in 1832. It is safe to say that, in this novel, Ete underscores the power of the younger generation to bring about change in society, even if they act on wrong advise.

The author also gives pride of place to women of great activism in the mould of Tari, the voluptuous Nembe lass who runs away from home to escape capture. She provides succor for Owei in her solitary hut in the jungle, and gives the young man a greater resolve to hunt down the slave raiders when she is kidnapped at the point when their feelings for each other begin to flourish. But the real heroine of the novel may well be Nabia, the Ogbia-born priestess with the temper of a tigress who leads Owei on a dizzy expedition across mysterious short-cuts to the hide-out where the slave raiders lie in wait to export their human cargo.

Needless to say, the author shows a commendable familiarity with the Niger Delta terrain. We can virtually follow him as he navigates the swamplands, traversing Nembe kingdom, Ogbia kingdom and Epie kingdom at large, recreating cultural patterns of life and living. He goes from one fishing port to a palm kernel outpost in an era when the plate and spoon had not replaced fingers feeding directly from the floating calabash. The sea itself becomes an inevitable character in this novel.

Chapter after chapter, the author does well to capture the changing temper of the creeks and rivers as they pour into the wider waters of the Atlantic Ocean, marked by calm and sobriety as much as the occasional tempest in due season. The swampy mangrove vegetation of the Niger Delta, with its rich and variegated content of marine life, is evoked to great effect in the body of this work in much the same way as the range of characters are portrayed in recognizable terms by their actions, the thoughts which propel them, and the credible dialogues they articulate.

It bears repeating that Canoe Town celebrates the heroic adventures of Alagoa, the brave fisherman who loses his wife in the throes of giving birth to their only child, Owei, a son imbued with greater mettle, destined to become king of his people, in spite of truly gruelling odds. Like every worthwhile odyssey, the younger protagonist arrives at a point of fulfillment when he steps on the shores of Aru-Ama twenty-five years after he was born, and is duly acknowledged by the kingmaker, Ebele, who recognizes the totems of authority in his hand.

Ultimately, the strength of this novel lies in its unrelenting spirit of adventure, the promise of the crusading youth to change the future for the better, the intrigues conceived by traitors, and the faithful evocation of pristine nature in a rugged terrain. Canoe Town will count amongst the few historical novels to have emerged in this day and age from the annals of Niger Delta literature. This review is by no means exhaustive. The least I can do, therefore, is to recommend it to the individual reader who may be curious as to how our forebears confronted the menace of slavery in nineteenth century Africa, along the Niger Delta coastline.

* Mingi-Yai Nengi Josef Owei-Ilagha,
Pope Pen The First
August 18, 2024. Yenagoa

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