NigeriansTalk

A review of Olufemi Terry’s short story ‘Stick­fight­ing Days’ which won the 2010 Caine Prize

This stark story of prim­i­tive vio­lence has to it the qual­ity of ele­men­tal fable. It is told in prose that is hewn often with a pre­cise chisel. Yet I couldn’t help feel­ing short­changed by the writer as I read the story for the third(?) straight time. Olufemi Terry’s con­struc­tion of a land­scape of urban dystopia peo­pled only by under­age boys can­not be taken for granted. It must be accounted for, how­ever thinly or vaguely. No doubt, emplot­ment and moti­va­tion in the story are superbly han­dled, and the scenes of bru­tal fight­ing linger in the mem­ory like grace­ful move­ments in styl­ized danc­ing. But there is a basic lack. How can we read this story and be com­fort­able with urchins who are schooled in Tolkien and in the his­tory and man­ners of Laco­nia and its cap­i­tal Sparta? It is not enough to say that Salad taught them all of these things. Who taught Salad? And I was aghast at this sen­tence from thirteen-year-old Raul, the nar­ra­tor and self-confessed street urchin: ‘I know that what I did wasn’t tech­ni­cally ille­gal, but I feel an apol­ogy is needed.’ This is from a dia­logue. Raul is not here address­ing the reader. He is talk­ing to another street urchin like him­self in the lan­guage of a bar­ris­ter! The land­scape in which the boys dwin­dle their vio­lent exis­tence is deformed and bleak through and through, but their lan­guage now and again crests on a lit­er­ary, indeed eru­dite, height. I mean just lis­ten to the urchin Lapy deliver this line: ‘Psy­cho­log­i­cally that would have demor­al­ized Markham too much.’ If he can say ‘psy­cho­log­i­cally’ then he might just as well say ‘anthro­po­log­i­cally’ or even declare thus: ‘By the prin­ci­ples of aero­dy­nam­ics, I think you have an excel­lent rapier in that Mormegil of yours.’

My the­ory is that this prob­lem of inco­her­ence, for inco­her­ence it is, has been cre­ated by an author who has refused to fur­nish any kind of larger social back­drop for his con­struc­tion of a ter­rain of urban ter­ror. There is an ‘out­side’ to the world of the dump, an out­side where peo­ple clutch their purses in fear when they see an urchin, an out­side that ‘wants to pity but can’t’. Not only is this out­side briefly brought in only to be ban­ished forth­with from the frame of the story, but the world inside the dump is her­met­i­cally sealed off from social variety—no men, no women, no girls, and there is no expla­na­tion or excuse for this. The con­cept of boys, more or less iso­lated, liv­ing out a fable of brood­ing or stark evil has been mate­r­ial for great lit­er­a­ture before. For instance, this short story calls up to my mind William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. I dare­say it is obvi­ous to any of us that Olufemi Terry’s ‘Stick­fight­ing Days’ shares a genre affin­ity with that mas­ter­piece. All the same, the recall comes to me with a feel­ing of dis­ap­point­ment at what Terry does not achieve by iso­lat­ing his boys in a socially wrecked never-never, and expect­ing that we will take at face value their being cut off from the rest of the world. That right is denied these boys because they allude to our lit­er­a­ture, not a lit­er­a­ture of their own man­u­fac­ture. How did they come to know it so well as to domes­ti­cate it in their never-never of abjec­tion and ter­ror? This query may seem extra­ne­ous to the all-important ques­tion of craft in the short story. But then con­sider the for­mal lan­guage of much of the dia­logue, con­sider the ‘deep’ learn­ing of these urchins in Tolkien and the clas­sics, and it becomes clear why I think the story has not been fully, and I should say fully well, told until we know some­thing of the edu­ca­tional back­ground of these slum-dog professors.

What is more, we can’t be con­tent to hide behind the cur­tain of print and watch these boys clob­ber one another into the dust and slime. We need to be told, how­ever dis­mis­sive the man­ner of the telling, why we are inca­pable of inter­ven­ing. After all, these boys could not have been wholly respon­si­ble for the orig­i­nal wreck­age of their social milieu. Yes, unmedi­ated iso­la­tion makes for a strik­ing and intense tableau of ter­ror; yet it all seems con­trived, arti­fi­cial. For boys do not come into such atro­cious being by them­selves even if it saves us much nar­ra­tive labour to assume that we can pluck them out of the cor­rupt air and dump them in a place where they can­not be reached by the PTA, by sis­ters and girl­friends, by laws, reg­u­la­tions and morality—a place where boys may safely inflict on one another stark-naked violence.

True, Olufemi Terry achieves uni­ver­sal­ity by leav­ing out a plau­si­ble larger social back­drop for the action and exis­tence of these boys, but it is a uni­ver­sal­ity that encom­passes not the world of gen­uine peo­ple but rather con­jures up a species of chimeras that not even fic­tion can bring fully alive. Street urchins in Lagos whose argot is in Man­darin Chi­nese can­not be taken for granted, nor would we take for granted yob­bos in Dundee who hold street cor­ner read­ings from the poetry of Ade­bayo Faleti. It is in this sense that I feel the author short­changes us, though by that very act the imag­i­na­tion is fired to spec­u­late ad infini­tum on how urchins may acquire an edu­ca­tion that gives such lit­er­ary shape and cloth­ing to their rit­u­als of naked violence.

So I con­fess that ‘Stick­fight­ing Days’ pro­vides an exam­ple of what a piece of good lit­er­a­ture, how­ever inad­e­quate we deem it, does to the imag­i­na­tion. It presses one’s imag­i­na­tion to engage it and to retell the story in a way that makes one begin to see an out­line of the larger pic­ture, if not the larger pic­ture itself. I believe it is through this kind of exer­cise that we can com­pen­sate our­selves for the fast one that Olufemi Terry pulls on us in his story. And it is not the clas­sic Barthean death of the author I am talk­ing about here. My con­cern is with the dearth of the tale. Part of the gist which my imag­i­na­tion has sup­plied as back­ground to the story is that some­how Salad, one of the old­est boys who, by the time we meet him in the story, is now the only man in the dump, long ago pil­laged the library of a Pro­fes­sor of Lit­erae Human­iores liv­ing on the out­side. He is thus able to give a proper fin­ish to his own edu­ca­tion and to sup­ply the other boys with the nec­es­sary rhetoric and meta­physic for mak­ing sense of the cul­ture of vio­lence which they live out in that milieu of utter des­o­la­tion. The brutish life is com­ing to an end one of these days for all of these boys. But even as they poi­son and maim and destroy one another—the sticks that Ein­stein famously feared a Fourth World War will be fought with enjoy pride of place in their retrenched arsenal—they still have lit­er­a­ture to fall back on. One of the themes of this fable, then, is that lit­er­a­ture will always have a place in the world, no mat­ter how ter­ri­bly things dete­ri­o­rate; in fact, the fable tells us that lit­er­a­ture pro­vides a frame for how vio­lently we live our lives and that we will always find it hard to explain how peo­ple get their stories.

The writer of this story has won him­self a prize by serv­ing up fare that catches fire in the imag­i­na­tion. And I con­grat­u­late him, but with the reser­va­tions con­tained herein.