Books We Read: 11 Readers on Reading in 2016 — Richard Ali 

Richard Ali

2016 was a difficult year as far as reading books was concerned. In no other year in recent memory have I had so many books bought or gifted which I have still not read. At the top of this list is Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland, both of which I hope to get to in the coming days yet. I think back with nostalgia for 2000/2001, a year in which I read well over 150 books (I made a list!) borrowed from my professor friend’s library. This year, I have barely made 30. For the most part, these have been African writers.

My favourite book this year was Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account—a powerfully imagined story of a North African, Mustafa al-Zamori, who presses himself into slavery and ends up on the historical Narvaez expedition. Now renamed Estebanico by his Spanish masters, they set sail for America seeking gold, meeting the resistance and hostility of several indigenous American groups. The further north they go on the increasingly delusory quest, the more the ordered society of slave and master and the elaborate rules that hold it in place fail and degenerate. Only four persons survive, and in the historical account, Mustafa/Estebanico’s voice is muted. It is this voice that Laila Lalami assumes and makes central. Her prose is quite beautiful.

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Season of Crimson Blossoms comes next to this—a story about a middle-aged woman in conservative northern Nigeria who falls in love with a weed dealer in his twenties. I read it at about the same time as Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday. Both are set in northern Nigeria and aim to tell stories about characters whose lives are impacted by forces outside their control—religion and culture—and ensuing tragedies. Both books are important. Abubakar’s characters come across as more organic and from that great opening sentence, he is able to keep the pace of the novel even until the end. Both novels approach their subject with a slant peculiar to each writer, which in turn informs the choices of style and point of view. The effect is that Abubakar’s comes across as a novel about people and Elnathan’s come across as a novel of ideas about people. Both answer the question of how much scope a person has in choosing to control their fates.

Early in the year, I enjoyed Zukiswa Wanner’s London, Jo’burg, Cape Town which, like Lalami’s book, was also published in 2014. Zukiswa is one of the finest writers we have on this continent and this book about South Africa in the period after the end of Apartheid is important reading. Using prescient observation along with a special class of humour, the shades of colour of the rainbow nation are examined for their frays in the story of British-born African, Martin, his white British wife Germaine, and their biracial child. The story of their lives and the tragedy of it, and perhaps of a bewildering South Africa too, is told with empathy even when it saddens. My gutsy friend, Hawa, writing as H. J. Golakai, also published a lovely read, a crime thriller titled The Lazarus Effect in which we follow Voinjama “Vee” Johnson, a Liberian journalist who follows the story of a murdered girl through a peculiar dysfunctional family while keeping the demons of her own trauma from the Liberian civil war and love at bay. The novel starts off slowly but once Ms. Golakai hits her stride, there’s no letting up.

A recent good read, great read even, is Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North which recalls the fate of Australian prisoners of war pressed into building a mad railway for the Japanese through Burma in the course of World War II. Using the memories of a “hero POW”, Dr. Dorrigo Evans, in today’s Australia, the experience of the men on the line and the stories of the Japanese Army commanders and their Korean accomplices, it questions love and suffering equally candidly. It is a moving account, a story of death and the many senselessness-es of life, of diarrhoea and cholera and madness. At the heart of it is the killing by all present, Japanese, Korean and POW alike, of a sergeant named Darky Gardiner, who most symbolized hope and who is beaten to death. Flanagan is able to enter the motivations of men all on the brink of death and something in this sad choreography makes a powerful novel. It reminded me of Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K in its brutal eye to human degeneration, only this is far more elegant, far sadder.

I’m a sucker for great prose and the master of prose this year is Maik Nwosu. His new book, A Gecko’s Farewell, is one of those for which the temptation to underline prescient language is strong. I imagine that falling into this temptation will lead to a sort of art, yellow highlighting marker on paper like zebra stripes or leopard patches. Farewell is the story of three exiles of disparate lives who meet online. There’s Etiaba, a sacked Nigerian schoolteacher; Nadia, an Egyptian photojournalist endangered for taking a timely photo of an Islamist terrorist just before he unleashes mayhem, and Mzilikazi, a fugitive South Africa boy soldier the only survivor of a village massacre in Kruger Park. Then there is the inimitable Dr. Lookout, a serious madman walking the endless plank of sanity in dystopian country, for which release can only come from falling and exile from a homeland where one is no longer at home. As they narrate the stories of their lives, some of the most enduring images of Africa are created by Maik Nwosu’s prose. This is writing of sheer, sheer beauty.

The second instalment of Chuma Nwokolo’s Nigeria centenary short stories collections belongs on this list. How to Spell Naija Vol. 2 comprised fifty short short stories of great hilarity and drama which, in truth, paint the most profound picture of Nigeria there ever can be. In telling a friend about the book, I said at a point that "Chuma knows people." She misunderstood me, quite tellingly, to mean that the author was "connected" in the Naija sense of being a friend, relative or client to powerful people. What I meant was that Chuma knew people down to the minutiae of their lives, to the motives that impel them for which they are ashamed to admit and sometimes for which they adopt the patent Nigerian in-your-face. The earlier collection, Vol. 1, made my Ketchup List in 2014—five print books I promised to publicly eat with ketchup only if anyone bought and did not enjoy reading—and while I have not made such a list for 2016, Vol. 2 is a top contender.

Being a poet, I should speak about the better poetry collections I have read in this year, to even out a bit a prose heavy list. The first should be an old one, HOWL by Allen Ginsburg, a gift from a German friend. There is a tendency to think of dead poets, such as Ginsburg, as being “prophets” when their writing seems to speak to today’s realities—the loss of identity and our incapacity to be happy, the seeking for something greater to make sense of things, a something we know does not exist. This is the core of HOWL. Yet, I think the reality is slightly different. These writers do not speak to us, know nothing of us. They speak instead to something unchanging and prophets they are, every few decades, from Milton to Eliot, to Lorca to Ginsburg, all come to speak for an inexhaustible sadness because even with all the years and technology and changing fashions, men have not changed really. Another memorable collection is Ahmed Maiwada’s 2013 Eye Rhymes, a short collection of great stylistic innovation. I do not think a more innovative poet than Maiwada exists in Nigeria—in terms of form and style, in terms of the prescience of his language and the overarching poetic vision. I liked his earlier Fossils but I think Eye Rhymes is a far superior collection with its use of eye rhymes and a coherent cornucopia of allusions. As with Niran Okewole’s 2007 collection, Logarhythms, it saddens me greatly that these poems are not better known and read much more widely. And then of course, there is Amu Nnadi, who gave us A River’s Journey this year. It is a really great collection of poems that threshes the riverine image, clearly inspired by Christopher Okigbo’s The Passage from Heavensgate and Gabriel Okara’s The Call of the River Nun. In most of the poems gathered, Amu Nnadi does what he seems best able to do, which is evoking pure mood in the reader. These poets are all different, but they all are doing something poetry.

In talking about the year gone by, I must also say a few words on my half-read pile. At the top of this is Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me which I started and even started annotating as I read but which went missing at some point. I am hopeful that when I clarify my dwellings in the New Year, I will find it hidden somewhere and not in fact stolen. There’s also Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen, which I read halfway and has remained by my headrest for months now. It is amongst the modest five I intend to finish before the end of January. There are a few books I would like to read which I have not bought yet—Toni Kan’s Carnivorous City, Leye Adenle’s Easy Motion Tourist and Yemisi Aribisala’s Longthroat Memoirs and then there is Kenyan writer Oduor Jagero’s Ghosts of 1894 and Zimbabwean Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s debut novel which follows her brilliant short story collection, Shadows, published in 2012. Finally, in a year of reading, mention must be made to the digital platforms where I surfed from one world of story to the next by following generous hypertext breadcrumbs—primarily, these are Jalada, Praxis Magazine and Expound Magazine.

Richard Ali is a Nigerian writer whose poems were first published in 2008. He has served in the National EXCO of the Association of Nigerian Authors and sits on the board of Uganda's Babishai Niwe Poetry Foundation. A member of the Jalada Writers Cooperative based in Nairobi, his work has been published in African Writing, Jalada, Saraba Magazine and elsewhere.

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This is the third of eleven pieces on Readers on Reading in 2016.