Miraculous Adjectives

Miracle was written by Tope Folarin who was born in Ogden, Utah and grew up in Utah and Texas. He is a graduate of Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Masters degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. He currently works with Google.

The story is an excerpt from a work in progress.

Miracle is a story of hope, of keeping up appearances and saving face. It is the story of the problems faced by Nigerian immigrants in America.

The whole story takes place in a church and is centered on an elderly, blind Nigerian preacher/ miracle worker and a young Nigerian boy who is seeking for a miracle.

Folarin captured the mood of the congregants perfectly, which is a mix of hopefulness and hopelessness. His take of the church and attendants was dry eyed and non-sentimental. Describing the reason why most of the congregants were in that church that day, Folarin used short, crisp sentences, which allows the reader to feel the unexpressed desperation which must have filled the church.

“We have come from all over North Texas to see him ... We own his books, his tapes, his
holy water, his anointing oil. We know that he is an instrument of God’s will, and we have come because we need … jobs. We need good grades. We need green cards. We need American passports…”

Running beneath the story unfolding in the church is the protagonist’s history, the mother who abandoned her family, his uneasy relationship with his Nigerian father who raised him and his brother as Americans.

“We need our parents to understand that we are Americans. We need our children to understand they are Nigerians.”

As well written as this story is, it is not without flaws, first of which is the author's inability to decide whether he’s writing from a First Person point of view or an Omnipresent angle. The protagonist not only uses the first person but was also able to see into the heads of everybody present as he used ‘we’ a lot (maybe it's the royal ‘we’).



“We search our hearts for the seedlings of doubt that reside there. Many of us have to cut through thickets of doubt before we can find our own hearts again.”

There were long descriptions of every occurrence, which would have been taken care of in a few simple sentences. In fact the whole story can be summed up in three paragraphs but for the (as far as I’m concerned) unnecessary use of adjectives.

“Once there, he raises both of his hands then lowers them slightly. He raises his chin and says let us pray.”

I also worried a bit about this sentence “My lids slap open, and I see the same fog as before.” Because it beggars the question, what lids? And if they are eyelids, do they slap?

In a bid to make beautiful sentences Folarin ended up with this gem “The disembodied heads are swelling with unreleased joy.” Which left me open-mouthed with amazement, (you’ll all notice that my writing is improving).

This is a story that was written carefully and with a lot of thought, I found reading the story a bit tedious because of the long descriptions, even the climax fell flat because he had given the game away while describing the boy’s encounter with the old preacher.

But then you stumble on sentences like this once in a while and, for a second, understand why the story is on the shortlist. “His prayer is so insistent, so sincere, that his words emerge from the dark chrysalis of his mouth as bright, fluttering prophesies.”

On the other hand, you wonder when the Caine Prize judges will stop choosing stories that seek to bore you to death and reinforce the image of blacks as an overly religious, miserable lot.

Once under a Kuka tree

Elnathan John is a Nigerian writer, lawyer gender equality advocate. He lives in Abuja, Nigeria and is an avid blogger.

His shortlisted story Bayan Layi, is about survival on the hard streets of life known as Nigeria. It is told through the point of view of a teenager, Dantala, a street boy who used to be an Almanjiri.

He is rescued from a fight by a young man of indeterminate age named Banda (the Fagin of the story), and turned into a ‘Kuka tree boy’, boys who made their kingdom under a Kuka tree in the village (or is it a small town?) of Bayan Layi. The boys survive by petty larceny, and acting as thugs for politicians.

They also had a regular supply of weed (which is emphasized throughout the story, so I thought I should mention it too, since it seems so important).



The story was told in a simple, straightforward language, which made reading it easy. But did I enjoy reading it?
Frankly, I don’t know what to make of this story, maybe because I am familiar with the author’s writing style and expected something ... more?

The story comes across as stilted and rather unimaginative. It has been told, over and again, in a thousand different forms, with different characters, in different settings, but it is still the same old story, of young boys living rough on the streets, of brutality and poverty.

The most unbelievable part of the story is when Dantala and Gobedanisa stole sweet potatoes from somebody’s farm, the farmer had caught them at it and in the process of chasing the boys, he had fallen into an antelope trap (laid conveniently in the middle of a potato farm). The boys had watched with disinterest as the man struggled till he died. It wasn’t that they abandoned him, they watched. After the farmer stopped struggling, Dantala had reiterated his usual saying ‘It is Allah’s will everything that happens’ also known as ‘c’est la vie’ or if you’ll pardon my French ‘shit happens’.

You can see the end right from the beginning, and one has the impression that the author was telling himself all the while writing the story ‘please, not a hair out of place’.

Like I said last year about one of the stories shortlisted for the prize, it is as if the author has a tome titled ‘How to write for the Caine Prize’ open beside him while he was writing the story.

It has every quality the Caine Prize judges appear to seek for in stories written about Africa, young children who are hungry and homeless, politics, violence and death.

I also noticed that every word that is not English is italicised, another literary tool employed to emphasize the ‘otherness’ of the story, in case you missed it. There was also the ever present fruit tree and the stealing of food by characters to appease the god of hunger.

If it wasn’t on the Caine Prize shortlist, would I have bothered to read this story to the end? I seriously doubt it, but as they say ‘he who pays the piper, dictates the tune’. As long as the West provides the affirmation that African writers need to boost their careers, that is how long it will take us to be brave enough to write our own stories.

Maybe I would have liked the story better if the characters weren’t such caricatures and so predictable, maybe I would have liked it better if it was an honest story about Almanjiri’s, maybe I should simply go and find that tome and write my own Caine Prize story.