Chigozie Obioma paints a portrait of war-torn Nigeria so vivid that it belies its status as a work of fiction.
A review of Chigozie Obioma’s novel The Road to the Country
The Road to the Country: A Novel, by Chigozie Obioma (Hogarth, a division of Penguin Random House, 384 pages, $29.00)
C higozie Obioma in his new book The Road to the Country chronicles the Nigerian Civil War, fought over its eastern territory, Biafra, from 1967 to 1970. Outside the world wars, it is one of the biggest tragedies to stain the 20th century. Yet, Obioma’s book is a beautiful book. In fact, one cannot see the beautiful things in it without also seeing the terrible things.
I recommend this book for a greater and a lesser reason. The lesser reason is the importance of Nigeria and Africa. Nigeria’s population today surpasses 200 million and is expected to overtake that of the United States within a generation. Africa will account for one-quarter of the world’s population by 2050 and is rich in natural resources. About 85 percent of the world’s population lives in Eurasia and Africa, only 15 percent in the Western Hemisphere. We would be foolish not to pay attention to trends like this.
But the real reason to read this book is that it is a beautiful book. Make no mistake, the book is about war. But it is also a story about the sublime and the heavenly.
The narrative is held together by Igbala, an Igbo seer who can “scale the boundaries of time and the limits of existence to communicate with someone far into the future.” That someone is a bookish young man named Kunle, who finds himself forced into the Biafran army while desperately searching for his younger brother amid the turmoil. The Seer, as Igbala is called, lives 13 years before the novel’s events and, burdened by his own tragic past, foresees Kunle’s life. He does not make the events of the story happen; rather, the Seer stands outside of events and sees into them with a clarity surpassing even that of those directly involved.
Obioma does something similar when he mines the events of the book for sublime truths about mankind. One of those truths is that men are capable of terrible things. Nigeria’s war excites, terrifies, and cuts to the heart. But in it we also see worthy and beautiful characters, and it is through the plot of the novel that we see that.
The novel’s hero, Kunle, is a man like us when we are at our best. He struggles and keeps struggling, with purpose and confusion. He is doubtful and determined. Through Kunle’s eyes, we see the effect of the war on a people, the struggles with inflation and food shortages, and the resilience of people trying to maintain normalcy in wartime. It strikes the hero at one point that “the cause he’s been unwillingly roped into may actually be a good one.” One sides with him and the many good people around him. These people are recognizable like your neighbors, fearsome like your enemies, lovable like your family. One fears for them, exults with them, weeps with them. You will find that their longings and their obstacles are like your own, and so you will better understand your own. Although Nigeria is very different from our own country, we see ourselves in its people.
Obioma helps us to see this profound truth through poetry. At one point in the story, it occurs to Kunle that “the only true thing about mankind can be found in the stories it tells” and that “some of the truest of these stories cannot be told by the living. Only the dead can tell them.” Obioma revives the dead, allowing the people who lived through Nigeria’s war to tell their stories in all their beauty and tragedy. This is why, according to Aristotle, poetry holds more power than history. A skilled poet can create an image to exemplify the true essence of a thing more effectively than can a historian reporting facts. The poet connects specific observations to universal truths through imagination. We humans forget that we live in the presence of the sublime, but this novel brings it down so we can speak with it.
Obioma has shown us something, because he has the eyes to see, and he dwells on the meaning of it. It is not merely a story about one little man, confused, uncertain, brave, and driven; not only about his meeting a girl and falling in love amid the battles; not only about his suffering and infliction of suffering; not only about his fights to be free and to be good or about his sometime victories. It is a story that opens up a world different from ours, and yet we too live in it and can see ourselves there in a new light.