The paradox of life in Tolulope Akinrinde’s ‘The Third Floor’
By Ademola Adesola
AS I pored over the paratextual constituents, namely foreword, author’s note, and introduction, of Tolulope Akinrinde’s collection The Third Floor (2023), it was the words of a character from William Shakespeare’s seminal tragic play Macbeth that popped up on the screen board of my memory. In Act Five, Scene Five of the play, the titular character, Macbeth, soliloquizes in this manner following his partner’s demise: “Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” This thought summarizes a key thematic crux of the paratexts of Akinrinde’s collection. The unavoidable point is that the said paratexts of the collected works underline life’s vagaries, oxymora, vicissitudes, joys, sorrows, and ups and downs. Indeed, the paratexts affirm that life, to invoke the words of another superb writer, Thomas Hardy, is a cataract of sorrow punctuated with occasional glimpses of happiness. All of which is to say that the paratextual elements of the collection underscore the Byzantine complexities of life.
Accordingly, I aver that the paratextual elements of The Third Floor presage what is to be encountered in the 10 uneven stories collected therein. Different aspects of life manifest as consequential thematic constructs in the stories. The stories reinforce the lesson that life is not one thing. In other words, as Akinrinde renders it in the paratext called “Author’s Note,” any claims to knowing anything about life cannot ignore the stubborn fact that it is made up of “the good, the bad and the in-betweens. The seasons of storms and challenges are just part of the complete baggage called LIFE”. In the paratext of “Foreword” that comes before the Author’s Note, Rotimi Fasan highlights another crucial trait of what life is. Following his reading of the collection, Fasan candidly maintains that “life is about choices that are not easily made no matter how simple they appear”. The unfathomable complexities of life, to follow Fasan’s reasoning, necessitate the need for choices and account for the difficulty that characterizes those decisions. Life has and comes to us at different levels.
Because the stories in The Third Floor thematize life at varied levels, they necessarily perform a didactic function. That is, they perform the task of communicating certain enlightening lessons. Again, it is in the paratexts, particularly the “Introduction” that this fact of the collection first becomes known. In that “Introduction,” Akinrinde counsels that “the truth is, LIFE is neither a test nor a burden. It is simply a journey, a journey that each person must take in [their] own way”. When Akinrinde says “the truth,” she leaves no one in doubt that what she has put together is a collection that is decidedly aimed at teaching some lessons. The absolutism of the phrase, “the truth,” suggests that the lessons do not allow for doubts or alternatives. Rendered differently, “the truth” that Akinrinde’s collection seeks to teach takes its inspiration from the acknowledgement of an absolute divinity, in this case the biblical “the way.” This reading is not a far-fetched perception. In her “Author’s Note,” Akinrinde calls for a return to and relationship with what she calls “our source.” She explicates that “source” as “God,” counselling the reader thus: “Whichever way you want to seek Him, just make sure you find Him and get your steps back to your maker, manufacturer, God or whatsoever name you choose to call Him, today”.
In Akinrinde’s conviction, God is the surest formidable fortress anyone needs to both make sense of and navigates the confounding paradoxes of “LIFE.” That the word life is written a few times in uppercase letters in both the paratextual elements of “Author’s Note” and “Introduction” to the collection supports the author’s notion of life as an uneasy voyage that requires the guidance of an omniscient being who has the capacity to tell what is to come. Fasan also acknowledges this point as “the central message of this book – that God, ‘the author and finisher of our faith’ is the anchor that stills the storm of existential struggles. Anyone with God, not minding the apparent loneliness of their life, has the majority on their side”. Clearly, this is a collection that leaves no one in doubt about its staging as an arena for the conveyance of messages that underscore human capacities and limitations.
Whether this is the work some lovers of literature want literary works to do is a legitimate question that can be raised when considering The Third Floor. Whatever the outcome of such a discussion, what remains doubtless about Akinrinde’s collected stories from different voices is that there is an audience for it. Such readers will find different useful pearls to collect from the respective universes of the stories in the collection. Some will find therapy in some of the stories. A standard timeless function of literature. Some will derive enriching insights from them. Other will yet be wiser from reading some of the stories. Some others will learn to see life more differently. Since some of the stories invite reflections, some readers will find occasion to pause and take stock about how far they have come in life. The stories will aid some others to understand something in their own experiences that they have hitherto not grasped. Without any modicum of dubitation, by reading some of the stories there are readers who will further appreciate the paradoxes of life. They will be more at peace to know that life is not a straight-line graph, and neither is it a leisure walk in a park. They will be more pleased to know that the ebb and flow of life that they experience is not because they are jinxed or cursed. Readers will learn that whatever they are experiencing in life is not unique to them. This lesson is present in some of the stories, which Akinrinde reveals in the introduction to the anthology are the recreated accounts of the real experiences of some of their authors. It is here too that we learn the lesson the recently deceased writer of enduring consequence Ngugi wa Thiong’o teaches us – that literature is not a product of vacuum; different live factors shape it.
What the foregoing outlined range of possibilities of readerly experiences serve to stress is that stories matter; we do not read stories such as The Third Floor and remain what we have been prior to our engagement with them. After all, some of the stories in the anthology also aim at demystifying some “certain unspoken myths about life that have been passed down from generation to generation”. And so, while it is true that The Third Floor privileges didacticism that is oxygenated by attention to the divine, it is also the case that it encourages critical consciousness. There is no demystifying any myths without the least of critical consciousness. In this orientation of the collection is also evident the paradox of life that its entertainingly diverse readable stories thematize.
More, there is something to be said about the authorship of the stories that make up the 118-page anthology. The 10 stories of the collection are singly and jointly authored. This authorship is evenly distributed. Five of the stories have single authors – “Tiwa”. “A Tale of Time”, “Halitosis”, “Adebimpe”, and “Adla”; the other remaining five of the stories have shared authorships – “The Third Flaw”, “The Fantasy”, “Emmanuel”, “Desire”, and “The Third Floor”. The notable point in these dissimilar authorship profiles is that while the single author stories remind us of the fact of individual life experiences, the jointly authored ones reinforce the fact that no one person’s experience of life is through and through unique. Additionally, these different authorship designs of the book reiterate the lesson that we may individually experience the joys and troubles of life, we are never alone in those experiences of life. The singular is as important as the plural. Individuality and communality are not necessarily opposite realities; each has its distinct merits and uses. We must be wise enough to know when each should be allowed its place. In this reality too is another instance of paradox.
The Third Floor is joyously recommended, particularly to young people, most of whom make up the much-theorized idiosyncratic Gen Z.
* Dr. Adesola is Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literatures, Department of English, Languages, and Cultures, Mount Royal University, Canada
