Comments on: How the Stickfighter Got His Cane

By: Alex Kuffour

Alex Kuffour — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 05:52:21 +0000

Thank you, Mr. Eluma.
We have both built theories on the elements familiar to us in Terry’s world.
However, we must be wary of being mired in the tar pit of believing that the familiar is the same as the truth. There might be some convergence of the twain, as is usually the case in the short run, but we would be unwise to hold that the two are one and the same.
The boys do not inhabit a world of their own manufacture, nor of mine, nor of yours, they inhabit a world of Terry’s manufacture.
What sort of world is this,seeing that we are, all of us, children of two worlds?
It must be the world of the imagination; I doubt that there exists in “our world” a Salad or a Raul that match the description of the characters in “Stickfighting Days.” But the rules, of physics or normative behaviour may and/or may not be suspended in that court of arbitrariness, the imagination. There are no rights, wrongs in the protean innerscape.
Alas, the wayfarer would that the sand dunes were an abiding land mark!

By: Benson Eluma

Benson Eluma — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:07:23 +0000

Kudos Alex Kuffour. Your ‘what ifs’ show plenty of imagination. You have begun to ‘retell’ the story to yourself and to others too. But these boys do not inhabit a world of their own manufacture, what you call the ‘Fantastique’. By referring to Tolkien and the classics, by referring to ‘psychology’, they inhabit our world. Their world is hermetically sealed, but in a way that seems to me too contrived. It is not like Tolkien where everything coheres; where the world is recreated, and landscape and language hang together. We know a fable qua fable, i.e. the Aesop genre, when we see one. And that is why your ‘what ifs’ make a lot of sense to me.

By: On “Stickfighting Days” « ktravula – a travelogue!

On “Stickfighting Days” « ktravula – a travelogue! — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:17:42 +0000

[...] friend Benson Eluma has written a review aimed at the insularity of the lives of the characters of the story. Not taking anything from the [...]

By: Alex Kuffour

Alex Kuffour — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 05:42:31 +0000

I fear that the reviewer has subtly rewritten Terry’s story and forthwith proceeded to criticize his own rehash, and rightly so.
Aesop put the tongue of men in the mouth of animals and we allow this device because we accept Aesop’s stories for what they are: fables.
The question one should ask is whether Terry does a good job of convincing us that the boys in his piece of Fantastique know Tolkien and the classics.Isn’t it telling that the reviewer had to read the original thrice?
A close reading of “Stickfighting Days” suggests it would have been counterproductive to provide a “larger social backdrop.”
If Terry had set his story in Government College, Kumasi, it would be false for so many reasons…
However, since Terry doesn’t provide any such information as to the time or place, and the setting is indeed, hermetically sealed, one can argue with equal justification that these boys were a break away group from the exodus of the 20,000 lost boys of Sudan who migrated to Kenya in 1987 without any adult supervision over the period of 10 weeks.
What if some of those boys who escaped death in the desert, avoided the aid agencies in Kenya,settled in a dump, and had as little to do with the host community as possible?
What if the story was set in the period before the host community drew the attention of the authorities?
Then, into such a realist narrative the preternatural intervention that qualifies the story to be classified as Fantastique–the character Salad who, like Melchizedek, the King of Salem, knows impossible things and teaches them.
There’s nothing in “Stickfighting Days” to prove or refute this alternative theory.
“Stickfighting Days” isn’t a piece of New Journalism (Capote, God rest his soul!) or faction, it’s purportedly fictitious.
Every reader has a right to their opinion of how a story should be written, but the storyteller has the final say. Why that is, I don’t know, but one should learn to accept fiction and judge a story on it’s own merits, without attempting to divine the intentions and motivations of the writer. Except, of course, if Myne Whitman is Olufemi Terry’s pseudonym or the name of his confidante.

By: Myne Whitman

Myne Whitman — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:59:06 +0000

Olufemi Terry knew who and what he was writing for and I think he mentions his reserve of the prize in some of his comments after winning. The story is well written and plotted to capture and tug at the sentiments of the prize judges who are versed in the language Terry employs and in Tolkien and literature. I do not buy that story one bit as an authentic voice of a 13 years old urchin. And for me that was the downfall of the piece.