Pleasant poetic prose in Bayo Adebowale’s ‘Up from the Countryside’
By Ebika Anthony
AN autobiographical novel written in the style of facts and fiction, Up from the Countryside by Bayo Adebowale, begins with the author’s mysterious birth story after a sojourn of 11 months in his mother’s womb. His first earthly cry was heard in a mud room in the village of Adeyipo. This was on the sixth day of June 1944, signalling the arrival of peace for the unification of warriors in the land.
The joy of the author’s eventful birth gripped Ayanlade, his father, who in the company of some drummers, beat his talking drum so dramatically that women danced “the blissful dance of the butterfly sucking the nectars of yellow daffodils in the garden”. Men also danced. They danced “the fleet-footed dance of the antelope, gliding over the low twigs of the guinea savannah”.
In growing up at the countryside, Adebowale presents us with a very large canvas containing soul refreshing pictures. He paints a picture of poverty wrestling with villagers and instigating them to celebrate lack and want. And then he paints a picture of the rascality of village children who give their elders soured dishes of tough times to consume. In their horrible styles, the author writes, “we kids had become hot like embers inside a furnace”. Interestingly, their rascally behaviours were curtailed as teachers at Saint Andrew’s School, Bamgbola, treated them with strokes of canes.
Up from the Countryside is a meticulous recount of Adebowale’s experiences of rural community existence, academic battles, adjustments and transformation of life. His is the captivating story of morning’s barren dews, of hunger’s torments, to the flourishing grace of noon’s blessings, and to the beauteous shows of afternoon’s offerings.
With the fineness of education, civility descends on the once rascally Adebowale in the character of Gbadegesin in the novel, as he journeys through the roads of Teachers’ College and university where he had the opportunity of eating prawn crackers, ice cream, and eating with fork and knife. By the kind of sweet educational training he enjoyed, his rural behavioural pattern and level of English language change, and he becomes a pride of the countryside people.
At the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, as one of the 34 members of 1971 class disciples in the Department of English, the author acknowledges “being properly groomed for three full sessions before being finally released into the world to prove our mettle”. Having gone through the strong hands of academic and literary giants, the author excels as a thoroughbred teacher of English and literary studies at tertiary levels of College of Education, Polytechnic and University.
In travelling through the smooth roads of Adebowale’s Up from the Countryside, I noticed a rich blood of creative dexterity flowing in the veins and arteries of his powerful artistry. This, in fact, makes the novel to talk prose, sing poetry and dance the dance of poetic prose with creative elegance.
On the large canvas of this autobiographical novel, Adebowale paints several pictures. He also paints a picture of keeping the fire of creative writing aglow while he was teaching and moulding characters to be useful people in the society. Voracious reading made him to take creative writing as his ‘first and always dependable wife’. His marriage to creative writing gave birth to beautiful prose children like The Virgin, Out of His Mind, A new Life, Lonely Days and now Up from the Countryside.
A beautiful child, The Virgin was adapted into a film titled Narrow Path by the Tunde Kelani-led Mainframe Pictures. Lonely Days was a recommended Literature in English text by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC). Adebowale’s fruitful marriage to his ‘first wife’ also gave birth to laudable children of poetry such as Village Harvest, A Night of Incantations, African Melody and Oriki.
As the journey of the novel advances, the author passes through the doorsteps of his parents. About his mother, he notes, “Mama was a deeply religious woman. Her abstractions had always penetrated into the celestial. She frequently had walked on the path of righteousness and trodden the corridor of conscientiousness”. While for his father who drummed dramatically during his birth ceremony, the author notes, “Papa was my first teacher who had taught me early in my childhood days how to wriggle to the delightful rhythm of the talking drum, and how to enthusiastically dance away my sorrow. He had taught me how to raise a smile on my lips to appreciate the message of the talking drum, and how to transfer into my brain the skill to decipher the drum’s coded language”.
Obviously, there is so much exacting of creative energy in making Up from the Countryside attain a high level of poetic beauty. Truly, the novel stands as a poetic prose purely refreshing to the soul. From chapter to chapter, poetry keeps peeping into the house of prose, making prose more robust, more exciting and creatively elegant to dazzle the literary terrain.
In the journey from the garage of trials through the bus stop of travails and to the terminus of triumphs as evident in Up from the Countryside, Adebowale, in a state of victory, concludes, “Now I grinned happily in victory! Whatever will be will be! And Doris Day’s all time lyric of Que Sera Sera began to sip through my system, bringing cheerful relief to my soul and serenading me now with rhythm of a sweet lullaby”.
This is a novel of twelve chapters about typical childhood experiences that starts at the countryside and at ends at adulthood in the city centre. It follows the path of mature language use and takes the smooth expressway of poetic expression and stands out as a novel with nice narrations.
* Anthony, a seasoned writer and cultural enthusiast, lives in Ibadan
