Chris Abani

By Annalisa Oboe and Elisa Bordin

This is the first full-length book on the work of ‘global Igbo’ writer Chris Abani. The volume dedicates a chapter to each of Abani’s fiction books, the two novellas Becoming Abigail (2006) and Song for Night (2007), the three novels GraceLand (2004), The Virgin of Flames (2007), and The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), which are read against the grain of Abani’s most important essays and poetical production. By combining close readings and more theoretical reflections, this volume provides a significant insight for both scholars and students interested in the literature produced by the emerging African voices in the twentieth-first century, in the debate about human rights, and in general in how aesthetics is deeply linked with ethics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Feb 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526147196

Book preview

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Contexts and intertexts

This study of Chris Abani’s writing – the remarkable narrative range of his production and the compelling quality of his stories, in which love and violence compete, mingle, lose, and win – proposes that its power and beauty greatly hinge on the writer’s ability to face life in all its manifestations and to represent extreme forms of brutality and cruelty alongside unforeseen gestures of kindness. This, in a nutshell, is what drives his writing: an exploration of violence (against other human beings, against the environment) and of love gone wrong, interspersed with epiphanic clues of salvation. ‘The world is never saved in grand messianic gestures’, he says, ‘but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion’.¹ Against the background of the different geopolitical and cultural contexts in which he himself has lived his hybrid existence, Abani’s books trace the experiential trajectory of women, men, and children split between the pervasiveness of cruelty and the surfacing of micro-acts of care, assumed to be the only possibility for human beings to become human.² His writings willingly suspend judgment on the conventional meanings and perimeters of ‘humanity’ and in many ways deconstruct grand narratives of identity and subjectivity, particularly as ‘becoming’ is a constituent part of existence; they allow marginal inhabitants of our societies, such as underprivileged individuals, trafficked women, child soldiers, people with disabilities, migrants, and freaks, to make their way to the page, to become visible and assert presence in rather unexpected ways.

It therefore seems appropriate to state that the ‘signature’ of Abani’s work can be found in the ways in which it stresses the impossibility of severing literature from a generous embrace of the human, as well as in how it spells out the need of making ‘the wretched of the earth’ visible. The writer’s focus on what allows people to be resilient and to survive, despite tragedies and horrors, connects to and continues the timeless works of great writers of all times (from Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Dickens to Woolf and Duras, from Baldwin, Ellison, and Morrison to Achebe and Soyinka, just to name a few) and also adds critical momentum to the contemporary debate on literature, human rights, and the future of the planet. His texts offer complex figurative representations of the performative nature of subjectivity by giving life to characters who walk the thin tightrope between survival and death in states of exception: they thus speak metaphorically to notions of biopolitics, necropolitics, and the unresolved concerns in human-rights discourse and policies.

Most of the information and inputs about the author and his writings, as well as the overall approach of this first chapter, rely on a series of forceful authorial statements about his own life and literary work, his reflections on the need for identity and the looseness of this notion, his musings on questions of ethical responsibility and the aesthetics of his work. Information about his origins and life experiences can also be found in articles, essays, poems, and interviews. Among the latter the Truthdig interview with Zuade Kaufman provides a summary of Abani’s early life as a writer and activist, which focuses on a decisive phase in his personal and artistic growth. Kaufman writes that, in 1990, ten minutes into the production of his university play ‘Song of a broken flute’, ‘Nigerian literature student Chris Abani found himself under arrest and forced to choose between his own life and the lives of all his fellow student cast members. Abani, then 21, had already been imprisoned and tortured twice, both times for novels he had written that the Nigerian government regarded as subversive.’ The third time around, he was given an ultimatum: he could sign a document confessing to treason or sign the death warrant of all his friends in the play. ‘Abani admitted to treason and was sent – without trial – to death row at a maximum-security prison. He languished there for the next 18 months – six of which were spent in solitary confinement in a six-by-eight-foot hole.’ Such harrowing experiences led to his exile from the Nigeria of military dictatorships: in 1991, ‘alone, and with nothing’, he managed to escape to London.³

This reference to some of the most challenging moments in Abani’s life, at the outset of this book, wishes to highlight the entanglement between life and literary work that this chapter intends to analyse, and to anticipate that no attempt is made in this volume to provide a full picture of the life and times of Chris Abani. Our aim in what follows is rather to offer a fresh overview of the substantial literary production of a world-class author, which variously dialogues with an autobiographical substratum that keeps resurfacing.

Charting the immaterial: genealogy and the self (early days)

Eha’m bu Chris Abani. Abu’m onye Igbo. My name is Chris Abani and I am Igbo. This is America’s gift to you.

Abani, ‘Coming to America’

In an article titled ‘Coming to America – a remix’ Abani tells of his experience of estrangement in the USA, the place he elected as his own after leaving Nigeria and spending a few years in the UK. The piece opens in a busy airport lounge where people come and go. No one notices him and he feels lost to the point that he does not recognise his own reflected image. This triggers a chain of reflections linked to situations in which he is exposed to American people, their expectations, and their beliefs, which leads him to an epiphanic moment at a Starbucks by the beach in Santa Monica when, sipping a cold chai latte, he finally realises that the deconstruction of his sense of self, of family ties, and of linguistic roots that he is experiencing in America is full of potential:

you are losing language, your language, and faster the longer you don’t use it. There is, however, an incredible freedom in this, the sudden understanding that your language is fluid, must be, and that as a writer it is your duty to make this language even more plastic. That like Shakespeare you are in the realm of possibility and that all language, like the culture it derives from, is forever evolving.⁴

By confronting the life of a diasporic black subject in the USA, Abani becomes aware that his sense of self is rooted not in the Western obsession with race and racism but ‘in an ethnicity’,⁵ and that the coexistence of fragments of different ethnic traditions that make up his puzzlingly mixed inheritance may allow him to surge above the strictures of nationalism and national language, and to be honest about the impossibility of fully embodying any one ethnic or linguistic code. All of this, he claims, is a source of freedom for both the artist and the man:

You would never have begun this journey when you were still in Nigeria. But you have made a decisive step. You will not become less Igbo […] After all, you are bi-racial, tri-cultural, and trans-national, you are a hybrid […] The many parts of you come together when you no longer have the need to prove absolute residency on the land that birthed you. If it means that you are part Ejagham, Ibibio, Igbo, Aro-Igbo, Igala, English and now American, then you are truly and perhaps for the first time, honestly approaching your fluid self.⁶

There is no racial (black), national (Nigerian), or continental (African) essence to hang on to or advertise: identity is made up of many different strands, it is constantly becoming, and it manifests itself only in relations and over time, through tangible but not necessarily coherent actions.

The writer’s search for the openness of a hospitable subjectivity and for what he calls a ‘comfortable’ face is reiterated in two intense texts, one poetic (Daphne’s Lot) and one narrative (The Face), which reconstruct his ties and belongings in a genealogical or lyrical vein, at the same time probing, critical, and heartfelt. Having definitely left the country of his birth and crossed the Atlantic, he responds to the need of reaching back to his beginnings and the sources of his process of becoming, of acknowledging gifts and debts coming from mother and father, salvaging good memories and elaborating violent heartbreaks on the path to a freer life of beauty.

Abani was born on 27 December 1966, just before the onset of the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70, which began after the unilateral declaration of independence of the predominantly Igbo Eastern Region of Nigeria. The years since independence from Britain had been extremely unsettled in Nigeria, as ‘the federal system that had solidified regional divisions in the 1950s devolved into utter dysfunction’.⁷ When, on 30 May 1967, Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, up till then the governor of the Eastern Region, unilaterally declared the independence of the newly founded Republic of Biafra, President Yakubu Gowon’s government proclaimed the state of emergency in Nigeria and imposed an embargo on the secessionist region. What was meant to be a quick ‘police action’ to regain control of the oil-rich eastern area turned into a thirty-month-long ‘total war’ and resulted in heavy casualties, concentrated in particular on the Biafran side as a consequence of the economic blockade imposed on a progressively shrinking enclave.⁸

The humanitarian crisis that followed was so devastating that it earned Biafra wide international sympathies on the part of both non-governmental and governmental organisations. Despite its notable resilience, the defeat of the Republic of Biafra proved inevitable and, on 10 January 1970, Major General Philip Efiong announced Biafra’s surrender. Shortly after the war, Gowon promised that the country would return to civilian rule within two years, but the state of emergency proclaimed in 1966 was lifted only in 1979, when the new constitution signalling the establishment of the Second Republic was signed into law.⁹ In the meantime Gowon had been removed from power in the 1975 bloodless coup that initiated the so-called Mohammed/Obasanjo regime.

In the essay ‘The graceful walk’ (2016) Abani recalls how his father used to say that his mother’s protracted labour to give birth to him, their fourth son, in December 1966, was a ‘catalyst for the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War’ which began a few weeks later.¹⁰ The conflict soon turned Afikpo, Abani’s obscure birthplace, into a key location in the governmental war strategy, being ‘the perfect secondary access point to the Igbo homelands’,¹¹ and undoubtedly a very dangerous place to live in. When the Nigerian troops reached Afikpo, his white English mother decided to gather her four children and to run away without waiting for the return of her husband Michael, who would soon join the Biafran Army. His mother’s bravery ensured the survival of all her children, thanks to her determination to leave the wartorn territory of the unrecognised Biafra State. The dangerous journey to London – interrupted by her giving birth to her fifth child, a girl and the author’s youngest sibling, in an evacuated hospital under an air raid – lasted longer than two years.

Daphne’s Lot (2003) is a tribute to the author’s mother, the strongest presence in his personal and literary life, and to her selfless love. The second ‘genealogical’ text is The Face: Cartography of the Void (2013), which is about the author’s own mixed heritage and, at the same time, ‘about my father and the lineage I know for sure. The Egu and Ehugbo’ (F, 11).

Daphne’s Lot

And I realize, this is all there is.

The stitching of life into transfigurations.

Abani, ‘People like us’

In a quotation from Exodus 35:35, which stands as an epigraph at the opening of Daphne’s Lot, Abani invokes a sort of divine wisdom of the heart ‘to work all manner of work, of the engraver, / And of the cunning workman, and of the embroiderer’ (DL, ‘Genuflection’, 11). The last poem in the book, ‘People like us’, appropriately concludes the artist’s creative endeavour by embracing ‘stitching’, a woman’s work, which puts fragments (of clothes, of stories, of relationships, of people, of countries, of life) back together, restoring a sort of transfigured wholeness (DL, 111).

This is the work Abani sets out to do in order to tell his mother’s story through an act of ‘rummaging’, ‘fashioning’, and ‘pasting’ her yesterdays in Daphne’s Lot – a poetic text in the epic tradition, which subverts the genre’s conventional narrative of the res gestae of the mythical hero by putting a woman at the centre of a background of war and focusing on love and survival (DL, 9). He thus pieces together the existence and character of the Englishwoman who used to work as a typist in Oxford in the 1950s, fell in love with a Nigerian student from Afikpo, ‘a small, rather obscure fishing town at the end of a dusty road going nowhere’ in Igboland, married him and gave him five children.¹²

A tough silent woman, with a tough life scarred by the tragedy of the Nigerian Civil War, Daphne comes to life again thanks to the recollecting effort and the devotion of her son. At the same time the process of claiming her out of the shadows coincides with the thrilling promise of ‘inventing me, this child, this man’ on the ‘dark path’ to poetry (DL, 13). The dedication of his new kind of epos to Daphne, ‘whose dreams are my art / and whose silence became my voice’ (DL, 5), confirms that the text is a tribute both to the gifts of motherhood and family ties, and to the creative, life-giving power of singing the mother out of silence and her child into an aesthetic life.

Daphne’s grown-up son thus starts a genealogical quest that celebrates the mother–child link and produces a composition that, ideally, should aim at an ordered structure: ‘Hard. Fast. Structured. Beginning, middle, end’ (DL, 33). However, ‘like Jazz’, the poem holds ‘room always for the gifted / to improvise, create, digress, circumbobulate’ (DL, 33). The digressions, the creative moves away from the facts of history, the surfacing of the interior emotional voice – against the unfolding of a story marked chronologically by the passing of years and by the incessant move from the present of writing (2001) to the past that is being reconstructed – are often the inspired moments in which truth ‘as memory’s best guess’ comes to light (DL, 13). So the ‘jazzy’ story delivers a family picture of Daphne and her offspring – Daphne’s Lot meaning ‘a shorthand for us’ (DL, 60) – in the form of an ongoing negotiation of love and survival, amidst the violence of the civil war and the violence within the family: the fighting in the world out there and the fighting with the demons within.

We come across a pattern here, on which it is interesting to pause in view of the following analyses of Abani’s works: in Daphne’s story we experience the porousness of the borders between love and violence, and realise how quickly love may turn into hostility and anger, even in a domestic context. Moreover, the poet weaves subtle connections between macro-phenomena like the Civil War and micro-phenomena such as individual and family life. He makes the link visible by transfiguring the personal notes in his mother’s private diaries, which not only describe the unforeseen reality of war – when ‘just like that, you wake up one day and lose everything by lunchtime’¹³ – but also her daily life in Igboland, where love almost seamlessly gives way to hidden suffering:

Then changing mood with the abruptness of a needle

scratching across vinyl, lines describing heat

rashing the skin between her legs red, burning

in the salty sting of sweat. Then the deeper secret.

Gathering like dark clouds preparing to break,

it brewed thick like tea with too much tannin,

good only for curing buffalo hide. Then the fists unleash

the storm, tattooing her body in bruises like marble cake.

The violence always there. Then skimmed over,

For the children’s sake.

(DL, 30)

Skimming over, making something invisible does not mean to make it disappear completely. The secret can remain productive in its seeming absence, a sort of ghostly revenant that has social repercussions within and beyond the family. As he brings to light his own family secrets in Daphne’s Lot, exposing the violence of his father against his mother – as well as many other violent secrets in the lives of the troubled fictional characters that fill his narrative production – Abani asks the reader to keep an eye on the links between state violence, institutional violence, environmental violence, and what goes on at a smaller, lower level in society. In other words he juxtaposes and connects ‘spectacular’ forms of violence with what Rob Nixon – mainly addressing environmental issues – calls ‘slow violence’: the uneventful and seemingly undemanding injustices that slip beneath the radar and are easily disregarded or dismissed.¹⁴ For Nixon, to confront slow violence is to take up, in all its temporal complexity, the politics of the visible and the invisible. He adds that, in order to shift the balance of visibility, it is necessary to push back against the prolonged inattentions that exacerbate injustices of class, gender, race, and region. Because the underrepresentation of slow violence grows whenever ‘it is the poor who become its frontline victims, above all the poor in the Southern Hemisphere’.¹⁵

Nixon’s concept has been applied in sociology to understanding the social causes and impacts of family secrets, stigmas, traumas. The sociologist Ashley Barnwell, whose work analyses intergenerational family secrets as slow violence, argues that, bringing Nixon’s idea to the family unit, and examining the symbiosis between intimate lives and wider social attitudes and policies, opens a more inclusive socio-temporal scope, ‘one that offers the potential to register less visible forms of violence and locate evasive causes of entrenched inequality’.¹⁶ She moves attention towards what Nixon identifies as a need for violence ‘to be seen – and deeply considered – as a contest not only over space, or bodies, or labour, or resources, but also over time’.¹⁷ In particular, ‘to think of violence as a contest over time may help us to envision and demand different levels of accountability’, Barnwell argues.¹⁸

Various forms of slow violence find expressions in Abani’s texts and point to the unacknowledged effects of such temporal contest. In Daphne’s Lot male domestic violence makes visible the failure to take into account prevailing ethnic traditions that slowly carve uncertainty into Michael’s choice of a white wife, and hints at the long-lasting, perverse effects of colonialism’s racial and cultural ruptures through generations of families. In the end the man’s inability to face these cumulative constraints and contradictions, in the form of historical, social, and intimate forces at work within himself and his family, undoes him, like a modern-day Okonkwo (DL, 29). As for the main character in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), his undoing is witnessed by his son, whose difference from his father, and his closeness to his mother, elicits violence and a severe process of re-education.

Slow violence within the family, Barnwell says, can take the forms of shaming, silencing, ostracising, withholding recognition, and effectively erasing memories and relationships. All of these forms are present in Abani’s writings. While revealing his own family secrets, fighting silence, and facing shame, he makes public a slower set of ramifications of violence through which ‘we can keep track of how this present resonates, and perhaps also contests the quiet retreat of social responsibility’.¹⁹ Generations of families with secrets are at the heart of his novels, too. We can trace the slow accumulation of apparently uneventful injustices in the story of underage trafficked Abigail, of Elvis in the Maroko slum, of the boy soldier My Luck, of the black conjoined twins Fire and Water in Las Vegas, and of Sunil Singh’s South African past and Apartheid-tainted family story. This focus is strategic, in that it tells of human beings in fragile, unstable power relations of beauty and ugliness, light and darkness, and it allows him to bring the unsaid to the surface, which is the only way to encourage individual and social accountability. As Abani states in the third section of The Face, aptly titled ‘A slow violence’, ‘the thing is that, in the end, we each must decide how comfortable we are with how much we hurt other people’ (F, 7).

In stark contrast to her husband’s reiterated physical violence and betrayals, Daphne’s love for her children, whose survival she is able to guarantee, and her desire for love are recorded in her son’s poem:

Daphne’s diary spun a wish too precious to speak.

I want a man who smiles when he talks about me.

Smiles because he knows all of me and loves all

of me and does not want me to change any of me.

I want a man like that. A man whose voice

is the pressure on my hips when he calls

my name. Whose shallow breathing traces

the arousal of my nipples as I cook him dinner.

Whose laugh dips between my legs, catching

me by surprise and rocking. Whose hands

are rough when he touches my face honestly.

Whose embrace is desperate as though

I were the only thing keeping him from drowning.

Whose lips are moist with desire when he kisses me

and whose eyes dance with a dangerous fire.

I want, I want, I want a man like that.

(DL, 64)

And yet Daphne’s love does not seem to be powerful enough to withstand Michael’s violence and actually turns into some sort of unwilling ‘complicity’ with an abusive patriarchal order she cannot overturn: her love and care ironically join hands with his hyper-masculine violence to produce the family secret that their son will also experience, and finally disclose in his poetry, in a liberating gesture that breaks the chain of intergenerational conflict and shame.

In Daphne’s Lot Abani recounts the ways in which his parents’ secret turns into their offspring’s suffering. ‘Let me count the ways in which my father loved me’, Abani says:

[…] with fists drawing blood,

and real threats to rearrange my brain permanently

or to beat the monkeys out of me. With a meanness

that would make me a man or at least angry

enough to hate the world. He loved me in my

first book burning because he said – you should

be studying not writing. And when that book

won me, at sixteen, the second place in an important

national book award, he said: ‘If you were any good,

you would be first’ In these ways my father loved me.

(DL, 72)

Born in times of war, and having experienced spectacular violence, the boy grows up in a dysfunctional family where violence is the grammar of relations as well as a favoured ‘pedagogical’ tool, enforcing a view of masculinity and a gendered culture he finds it difficult to comply with.

On his return to Nigeria from England, Abani lived in ‘the detritus of that civil war, playing in burnt-out tanks’.²⁰ Nevertheless his early life was characterised by material and intellectual privilege. His childhood was multilingual and multiracial, certainly because of his mixed family and educated parents, but also because of his Indian and Pakistani teachers, one of whom was so ‘inventive’ as to sidestep the prohibition of talking about the recently ended Biafran conflict by telling him ‘the melancholic history of my people through the melancholic history of another people’: he thus learned about the Igbo tragedy in the Nigerian Civil War through the Jewish Holocaust.²¹

A further ‘privilege’ was access to a well-furnished library, where the young boy developed a passion for reading that prompted him to start writing at the age of six.²² As he grew older, however, his literary inclinations definitely marred the already fragile father–son relationship. His readings started to be demonised as soon as his father discovered his interest in stories by James Baldwin, recounting homosexual love, which he considered unacceptable in terms of Igbo masculine gender roles. Baldwin, whom Abani deems his ‘muse’, will nevertheless remain a constant point of reference in his writing career, marked by a search for a kind of writing which, while avoiding grand political statements, looks for other ways of discussing both the political and the human: ‘I’ve returned more and more to Baldwin’, he would say decades later, ‘because Baldwin is always about the quiet human moment’:

He never shied away from race, from the civil rights movement. He never shied away from dealing with issues of sexuality. Being ten and reading Another Country, in a very homophobic culture, I realized that for James the only aberration in the world is the absence of love. And what’s even more perverse is the giving up on the search for love, which is that melancholic voice that carries us in the quiet moments.²³

Baldwin was of course part of a series of early literary encounters, both canonical and ‘pop’, that would stay with him and mould his writing:

books like The Famous Five (Enid Blyton), Watership Down, Marvel and DC and Commando comics, Crime and Punishment, The Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, the Koran, and Baldwin and Ellison – all these and many more read by the time I was ten. I didn’t discover Achebe and Things Fall Apart until I was almost eleven. My contact with Nigerian literature before this was more Ekwensi, Tutuola, and the plays of Wole Soyinka. Another Country by Baldwin, specifically, made me want to be a writer. I had never imagined an intelligence and spirit such as Baldwin’s and his courage. He remains my muse and photos of him hang over my desk and I in many ways think of myself as a child of Baldwin. I wish I had got to meet him.²⁴

On the other hand, and more in line with the boy’s sensibilities, his mother provided a completely different educational experience, by making him share in her social work. For example, when teaching local women of the countryside the Billing Ovulation Method, she used to take him along as an interpreter, as she was still unable to speak Igbo. This increased her husband’s concern about their son’s gender, fearing he might become a woman. In this way, from early childhood the author had to learn how to juggle different cultures and their expectations. Yet his inability or unwillingness to conform to Igbo cultural norms gave his father a pretext for the abuse he soon started perpetrating.

The Face: Cartography of the Void

To wear the face of someone you can’t help loving even as you can’t help hating them, is to be caught in an infernal struggle for your own soul.

Abani, The Face

In this slender book in segments, which are sometimes lyrical and introspective, sometimes comedic and didactic, Abani takes on the task of trying to say what a face is. Commissioned by Restless Books for a series called ‘The Face’, it consists of twenty sections of varying length through which the author decides to explore his own face, apparently a close replica of his father’s, as well as ideas of the beautiful or the physical appearance of beauty. The apparently oxymoronic subtitle, Cartography of the Void, indirectly poses the question of where one should start mapping a blank space, a vacuum, a lacuna, or an emptiness, as an initial joke from his brother implies:

Brother: You’re writing an essay on your face?

Me: Yep. Book length.

Brother: [Pause.] So a short book then? (F, 5)

The effort Abani is engaged in – as his delving into biology, genealogy, gender, performativity, family legacy, and Nigerian cultural traditions shows – seems to be that of foregrounding the ‘immaterial’ aspects that make up the ‘real’ face of people, alongside and beyond physical shape and the features that different cultures value in facial appearance: ‘It is about more than just what flesh covers my bone structure. It is about reflection too. What we see or want to see in the mirror’ (F, 8).

To produce a cartography of ‘the void’ – of the question mark that any individual identity is but, more precisely, of the blank space the writer sees in the mirror because he cannot read nor accept his face, resembling that of his father – one needs some co-ordinates in order to start delineating the edges around that enigmatic space that is waiting to be filled with meaning: ‘Biologically my face is a mix of two races, of two cultures, of two lineages. One white – English, perhaps a mix of Celt and Anglo-Saxons, and one black […] But for all that, this essay is not about them. But about my father and the lineage I know for sure. The Egu and Ehugbo’ (F, 8–11).

The Face is mostly devoted to grasping the writer’s West African heritage by approaching a site of memory and history handed down to him by his father. As anticipated in ‘Coming to America – a remix’, in which he briefly refers to what he knows about Igbo cosmology and mythology as a ‘gift’ from his father, Abani engages once again in a love/hate struggle to understand the layers of histories and stories laden on his own face as a gift. Not an easy task, when memories of descriptions of his face are loaded with alienation and estrangement, as well as what looks like the impossibility of acceptance and self-recognition. In the section titled ‘Face value’ he says:

No one accepts my Nigerianness, not without argument. In fact, the two things I have been rarely taken for – Nigerian and white – are the very things that form my DNA.

Face value.

Agemo, the Yoruba say. Chameleon.

Most of the confusion about who I am is a product of how my face is read. Thus it is perceived to be where it is thought to belong. And how it is supposed to look.

As my father used to say in the heavy Igbo accent he would adopt when particularly disgusted by some new facet of my rebellion, ‘You are just a disappointment.’

Even my grandfather, who cast kola nuts when I was born and who nicknamed me Erusi (spirit), would shake his head and say, ‘You don’t belong here or in the land of the spirits. You are a bat, neither bird nor mammal.’ I loved that. That meant I could be anything.

Even Batman. (F, 20–1)

Jokes apart, it is only after recollecting and appropriating some of his father’s teachings about West African cultures that the author can reflect on the very meaning of identity and find a reading key to his own face. In this quest his ‘cartography of the void’ becomes a revealing, open piece of writing with great insights into the person, the writer, the son, and the man.

As the quotation from ‘Face value’ clarifies, the face is a space