A Kind of Madness takes female relationships seriously. Many of the stories here explore that nuanced dynamic, in both positive and negative light.
By Chimezie Chika
“Nwunye Belgium”, the story that begins A Kind of Madness, Caine Prize-shortlisted author Uche Okonkwo’s debut collection of short stories, explores a particular side of marriage desperation, which Nollywood has captured well for the Nigerian audience.
In the story, a poor widow and her daughter receive what they believe is the marriage proposal of a lifetime. Overestimating the intentions and symbolisms of success that the idea of an overseas husband has come to represent in their own life, mother and daughter unwittingly dismantle their conventional stability in favour of the uncertainty of vague assurances, which they live to regret.
This sort of metaphorical madness, in which seemingly stable people are willing to disrupt their own lives, by their own hand or through the agency of their perfunctory or inordinate desires, threads through the stories in A Kind of Madness.
In “Shadow”, a petulant young boy overestimates his own importance in his aunt’s life. In “Debris”, a supposed street urchin is ready to tear down lines and cause commotion in order to obtain food at a charity event.
In “Long Hair”, young boarding school girls cluster and scheme over another girl’s seemingly privileged status due to her “foreign” appearance. The Caine-shortlisted story, “Animals”, is a subtle narrative of a young boy’s inordinate search for bonding, and though he seems to seek it with a chicken, there is more at play here.
Some of the best stories in A Kind of Madness, “Milk and Oil” and “The Harvest” particularly highlight sensitive issues in contemporary Nigeria. The former is about a close friendship between two little girls, one suffering from sickle cell anemia.
It is a finely drawn, fully realised story of the petty roller coaster relationships between very young girls who love and yet are prone to mutually harmful misunderstandings, mostly due to their age. Here, Okonkwo’s steady-handed assuredness triumphs. It is even more the case with “The Harvest”, arguably the most accomplished and provokingly poignant story in the collection.
In the story, an unsuccessful pastor finds himself fighting a losing war to keep his small congregation in an increasingly materialistic environment replete with affluent new generation churches peddling the message of opulence, wealth, and power. While our harried pastor thinks he has his spiritual mandate all stubbornly figured out, he finds that his ideals versus the reality around him, amidst his wobbling marriage, are very different things.
“The Harvest” strikes very close to home. It is a very Nigerian story in every sense; in its meshing of the Nigerian dream and the Nigerian Christian/evangelical paradigm. It is the work of a thoroughly good writer. The stories that bookend A Kind of Madness all depart from it, even as they still touch different notions of madness. “Eden” is like a demonstration of what happens to children when a parent fails to be morally careful.
“The Girl Who Lied”, another girls boarding school story on female relationships, subtly exposing the flippancy with which mental illness is treated in Nigeria. “Burning” features another mentally disturbed character, a woman who blindly seeks out the cun-world religious healings for non-existent spiritual conditions she somehow seems convinced about, with no second thoughts about harming those close to her.
A Kind of Madness takes female relationships seriously. Many of the stories here explore that nuanced dynamic, in both positive and negative light. In particular, mother-daughter relationships are Okonkwo’s strong suit, from “Nwunye Belgium” to “Milk and Oil”, “The Girl Who Lied” and “Burning”.
Another noticeable feature of A Kind of Madness is the child characters. In short, the author seems to be far more interested in children—and childhood experiences—than in adults, or has adults in the background of children, since eight out of the ten stories feature children. And herein lies my one gripe with A Kind of Madness: why do many of the children think and reason, and sometimes act, like adults? I’d like to get Ms. Okonkwo’s thoughts on this. Some of those children’s voices seem like a mix of authenticity and the egregiously inauthentic.
Most of these stories are set in Lagos and, through Okonkwo’s sharp-eyed observations of urban life, we see the parallel lives that run through the city’s distinct geographical and class divisions, marked by the Island and Mainland parts of the city.
The former has the wealthy living insular protected lives in mansions and gated estates; the latter has the familiar dust, chaos, stench, and precarity of the typical Lagosian life to which the city’s vast rank and file are familiar. It is to the author’s credit that she excels in showing the far-reaching economic disparities that make Lagos one of the most unequal metropolises on earth.
But make no mistake about the dynamism of the serious issues that topicalise these stories, Okonkwo suffuses just enough situational humour here, replete with Nigerianisms and the comic absurdity of pursuing the unattainable, believing the intangible, or keeping up appearances.
To this end, Nigerian readers, who now have access to the Nigerian edition since its publication on March 28th from Narrative Landscape Press, will find many points of kinship in the familiar Nigerian trajectories of these stories.
Above all, Okonkwo’s plain, unhurried prose helps to clarify the ramifications of figurative madness in this book of many pleasures, whether writing about a woman who believes her daughter is an Ogbanje, a girl who tells lies on impulse to shield her insecurities, a little girl’s conviction that her sick friend is just pretending, or a boy who is determined to make a chicken part of his family, or another who desperately wants his aunt to remain barren so he could be her child.
However, each emerges, Okonkwo seems to be telling us that our blind pursuits as human beings, adults or children, can create parallels between the realms of imagination and reality.
Chimezie Chika is a staff writer at Afrocritik. His short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Channel Magazine. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on X @chimeziechika1