#Reflections

In the castles of our skulls

By Busuyi Mekusi

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One is continually reminded of how society provides the raw materials for literary production, particularly when literature is viewed as the reflection of life. Even when one chooses not to redundantly confine literature to the model of Eurocentric anthropological categorisation, human sensibilities remain direct and indirect feeders of artistic imagination. Slavery and colonial experiences are some of the indispensable impetus for faction – facts and fiction. Narrative techniques are some of the instruments used to create good literatures, with narration either enhanced through knowledgeable oral traditional poets and uninformed so-called educated empty brains. Contemporary Nigeria realities of banditry, kidnapping and killing, etc., share great verisimilitude with war fiction and literatures produced about the Nigeria Civil War. No doubt, Nigeria is at war with herself!
George Lamming’s In the Caste of My Skin, like many other literary texts, parades similarities with human experiences in societies outside to that of Barbados or any clime in the Caribbean. Sociological and psychological opinions exist that human attributes and attitudes are the same in the baseline, notwithstanding the variegation occasioned by colour, religion, education, class, etc. Literary writers have also been described as the chroniclers of the experiences of their people, just like personal experiences are oftentimes escalated to the place of collective condition. George Lamming’s text interrogates blackness, and constructs black variant of skin pigmentation as a large fortified building that was built and reinforced by the liabilities of slavery and colonialism. Whereas this text dwells on the internal conflicts and contradictions of the protagonist, simply called G., this piece displaces ‘skin’ with ‘skulls’ to foreground the mental torture Nigerians are subjected to in recent times, as forming the tenure of this narration.
Lamming’s In the Caste of My Skin, which is the “story of the mundane events in a young boy’s life that take place amid dramatic changes in the village and society in which he lives”, is read based on its content location in the contexts of contemporary Nigeria. The principal narrator, G., avails us the knowing of, and implications of slavery and colonialism in the village, and the changes that human evolution brings, compared to the narrative voice in the column, which is psychologically depressed. The correlating elements in Lamming’s In the Caste of My Skin and the Nigeria contemporary situations start with metaphorical image and motif of flooding water in the village, which is similar to the unusual socio-economic and security conditions in Nigeria. The spates of gruesome killings in the country are record high, in the face of obvious helplessness of a government that reads political meanings to every critical opinion about it.
The outside bathing and nakedness of G. by his mother, which allows his friend, Bob, to look at him across the fence, is symptomatic of the various invasions of people’s privacy by intruders, who achieve such reprehensible spatial transgression of their victims through security breach and technological prying. The possibility of compromising the safety of citizens was one of the arguments put forward by people to call for the removal of Pantami who is in charge of the communication apparatus of Nigeria, given his purported renounced sympathy for terror groups. No doubt, deployment of technology is the most probable thing that terrorists and bandits need in Nigeria to consolidate their evil hold on the jugular of Nigeria and Nigerians. With the expansion of territories, most especially in northern Nigeria, Boko Haram members have assumed the place of landowners while members of the ESN are landlords in the South East, with marauding herders as overseers in the South West and the Benue Belt.
In Lamming’s In the Caste of My Skin, G. and his friends playfully put pins and nails on the rail track, peradventure because they think that could upset the train, in the manner insurgents plant ‘dynamites’ on Nigeria roads, with corresponding deaths and captivity. Such include the killing of the Kogi State Pension Board Commissioner, the little boy killed after his abductors collected N5million, and the protracted outrageous billings of the remaining Greenfield University students, whose parents were to pay N100 million ransom and donate ten new motorbikes, after the collection of N50million. The unfortunate kidnapping, raping and murdering of Iniobong Ephraim Umoren, the Akwa Ibom job seeker by Uduak Frank Akpan, reminds one of cyber crime, failed system, and desperately wicked human personality. The vulnerability of the female gender in Nigeria increases by the day, with the little girl at the centre of Princess and Baba Ijesha typifying baiting and the indecent affront of the bait and the baited.
In the text, students get curious about the history of slavery, with their teacher telling them little or nothing. The denial by the teacher indicates sliced and repressed past that is similar to the rejection of history by Nigerians, and the desperate attempts by some to misrepresent the past for selfish interest. The teacher demands silence from his class, as against the important responsibility of being a shining example to the village people, just like people who should be ordinarily opinion holders and molders have abnegated their responsibilities. Savory, the fried-food vendor in the village, convokes a rendezvous for public discourse, that is similar to game-spots, barber shops, women salons, markets, newspaper stands, Okada parks, etc., which are now local assemblies, that have substituted preposterously regimented, and constitutionally configured local, state, and national assemblies. They may be “parliaments of idiots”, after all, as quipped by Tayo Olafioye.
Close to a comic relief, the fighting over illegitimate pregnancy by two women in the book rekindles the issue infidelity and paternity, particularly considering the culpability of women who are the enemies of one another in the contest to own and snatch men, for phallic and material gains. This is as discussions are held about marriage, fidelity and polygamy, leading one to want to raise the issue of vexed monogamy among Nigerians. The likelihood of strikes and fears of people losing their livelihood in the text reminiscent the inglorious aristocratic Nigeria labour leaders, who have left their unfortunate members in the cold hands of depravity and systematic extermination.
The rioting and clashes between the police and workers in Lamming’s text exposes the contentions between members of the same social group, who are set against each other by the oppressors. Worshippers who speak in tongues and dance in the text are similar to Nigeria’s religious contemporary life that should have been purged of unacceptable tendencies in the order of Greek revelers. Furthermore, the preference for traditional food preparation by villagers in the text contrasts with modern corruptive and corrosive preponderance that has continued to put the lives of modern people at risk. The love-making on the trash heap in the book copiously represents sexualized Nigeria space, where more and more sexual organs are constructed with different elements in order to continuously keep sexual matters in focus, as found in the use of cucumber, to depict the penis, and vertically sliced orange to picture an opened vagina, as icons. Vagabonds like Baba Ijesha are representative of the violation of the landlord’s daughter in the text, and those found in other Nigeria spheres.
Rounding off this propositional commentaries about Nigeria in Lamming’s In the Caste of My Skin, just like the case of G. in the text, history continues to impinge upon Nigerians. The sales of Creighton’s estate in the novel to smaller landholders suffice a metaphor for possible restitution in Nigeria socio-economic and political spaces. The new “will” of the poor in the book, as demonstrated in riots, is consistently coherent with the various protests adoring the Nigeria streets, in form of calls for the release of kidnapped victims, demands for regional autonomy, and ravaging domination of sovereign locations by bandits and terrorists, etc. The America returnees in the text, and a new nationalist movement the development portends, are suggestive of the intended collaboration that would bring about a rebirth in Nigeria, even though the PMB government has accused some “agent provocateurs” of plotting to subvert it. The announcement of the return of another £4.2million seized looted fund recovered from the associates of Ibori is a huge deluge in a drought, just that the ‘snakes’ are always famished, even as Nigerians’ ‘skulls’ are hot within and without!

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