Tiny Sunbirds Far Away – Christie Watson
By the time I finished reading this novel I felt it had emerged from a realistic, though fictional, story about characters and their relationships, privations and struggles, into a more overt description of the political problems and issues that beset Nigeria today. It had become, I feel, a 'docudrama'.
It is also a story of the haves and have-nots and the injustice and corruption that seems so prevalent in Nigeria and that maintain this terrible inequality. Above all, however, it is a story of Blessing, the imagined narrator’s character, a twelve-year-old girl, and her development from ignorance to understanding – from the natural ignorance and naivety of a girl to the maturity of her independent spirit as a woman by the story’s end. There is also a delicately presented romance between her and Boneboy that concludes the book.
Along the way we meet a variety of characters, though for me none was so appealing as Blessing herself. This is because her descriptions of the squalor of the village she and her mother and brother are forced to move to, compel one to feel her experience in all its awfulness and degradation, and therefore to feel great empathy with her. She is also a character of tremendous courage, tenderness and subtle intelligence.
She grows to respect and love her grandmother (Grandma) and because of this we learn to respect and admire Grandma ourselves, with the one question mark against her actions as a midwife when on one occasion she indicates that, in spite of her own enlightened views on female genital mutilation, she carries it out in a case where the birthing mother is desperate to have it done to her baby, because she seems to be a prisoner of this awful 'tradtion'.
Blessing’s courage and intelligence is graphically presented in the birthing scenes with (and without) Grandma, and in her affection for Ezekiel, her brother, whom she tries to steer away from the teenage soldiers and their deadly ideology.
Much of the novel’s interest lies in the presentation of Nigeria itself, its food, customs, poverty, wealth, militarism, violence and corruption. The finger of blame for the country’s failure as a state is pointed clearly at the government, its ministers and its exploiting foreign corporations in the oil industry. Then there is the semi-comic, semi pitiable presentation of Alhaji with his panacea marmite, his dubious conversion to Islam with his makeshift mosque and his complete insensitivity to Grandma over the introduction of Celestine as his second wife.
The development of Ezikiel, from brilliant student with ambition to be a doctor, to ignorant and angry teenage terrorist is another strand that keeps tension in the narrative.
Commentators have referred to the novel’s witty humour. Presumably this refers mainly to Celestine, her gross size, her fake ‘degree’ her behaviour as a public mourner and her totally misplaced love of lycra for her own use at the total expense of Alhaji’s and Mama’s hard earned savings. Personally I found this less amusing than pitiable, more as Mama and Grandma thought of her than comic.
I felt that the story was more documentary than drama, but as such it certainly engaged my interest.
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