By Olukorede Yishau
Two days after policemen manhandled many a Nigerian at the Lekki Tollgate to prevent a planned protest, a novel titled ‘ The Madhouse’, was released to the market. I was reading this book while the madness in Lekki was going on. Most actions in the novel written by T. J Benson take place in a colonial structure.
One day a woman storms the house and meets a near-naked man in the house. She brandishes a receipt from an agent, but the man insists he has a right to the house. They start co-habiting and soon become lovers. And soon they start having kids, and the madness begins. Like Nigeria, their home becomes a place where anything is possible and bad things override the good ones.
Through the strange family, Benson subtly tells the story of Nigeria: We read about Fela dying of complications arising from HIV/AIDS; we read of Abacha dying from rumoured Indian prostitutes bearing apples; we read of the 2012 New Year gift of fuel subsidy removal; we read of OccupyNigeria protest; we read of the Miss World crisis caused by a piece by Isioma Daniel, then of ThisDay; and we read of Dele Giwa who was parcel-bombed under the military administration of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida.
The story is told through the eyes of the father, the mother, Max (the first son), Andre (the second son) and Ladidi, the adopted daughter.
The 343-page long novel is about how a brother loves a brother and much more. Some pages into it, a brother narrates how his brother always comes into his dream to save him from danger. If you wonder what kind of a thing that is, well, welcome to the madhouse, where all things and anything is possible, where the lines between reality and fantasy are blurred, where it is not strange that the living cohabits with the dead and the dead with the living, where a pot of tomato stew made by no one can suddenly find its way into the kitchen, where a child begs his mother for permission to pretend God doesn’t exist for one year, and where if care is not taken, you find yourself howling at the author’s antics.
Max is always ‘entering’ Andre’s dream and saving him from death. Their parents search for answers to the troubles of life from two extremes: church and alcohol. The wife, known as Sweet Mother, jumps from one church to the other; once she cannot find what she is looking for, she moves on. The kids are bathed in River Kaduna but the dreams refuse to stop, and the advice that she should wait on the Lord is discarded. Her search thus continues for an end to the homicidal dreams. Nothing is too extreme for her once it is decreed by a man of the cloth, but still her woes remain, hale and hearty. She even anoints her nipples and gets her boys to suck for as long as possible on a miracle worker’s instruction. Still the dreams persist.
At a point, Sweet Mother decides that the best thing is for Max to go to a boarding school, a decision that draws him further away from his mother and his father who supports the idea. In school, his mind is always on Andre, who he has spent the bulk of his life protecting from one harm or the other. On her first visit to him in school, she declares after Max queries her for not bringing Andre: “I know he is your brother but you are too attached to him. Even I, and he grew in my stomach, I don’t attach myself to him like that ehn.”
At 29, working with NAFDAC as a pharmacist, he takes a break and travels to Amsterdam in search of his beloved younger brother. There, he runs into a White girl in a lingerie shop. They go their separate ways after some chit-chat but run into each other again at the venue of a concert his brother is supposed to be performing with his band. From then on, the girl takes his attention and his brother takes a break from his heart. He gets his first kiss and also his first shag on this trip. The enigmatic girl’s strange effect on him worries him, but he is captured enough to extend his stay and enjoy the world with this babe respected in the art circus for her photography, even when her name and identity are shrouded in secrecy.
Though set largely in Kaduna and Amsterdam, the cities are not characters in this work. The bizarre tales the author tells obviously requires them to be passive. Max and co supply enough vibes to keep the reader turning the pages.
You will find this work experimental, but in a cool, smooth way: At a point, the quotation marks disappear in conversations in parts of the book; this reminds me of Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker winning ‘Girl, Woman, Other’ and some parts of Helon Habila’s ‘Travellers’. You have to be attentive to connect with this part.
This book is very Nigerian so do not be surprised to see expressions like ‘they were waiting for Nepa to bring light’. Once you get into the plot, you are in for a marvelous time with this harmonic work that reminds me so much of the writings of Professor Adebayo Williams (‘The Remains of the Last Emperor’) and Maik Nwosu (‘Alpha Song’ and ‘Invisible Chapters’).
Benson delivers a tale of a strange family steeped in dreams, politics and history. He tells the story with accustomed dexterity, poetry and drama. His language is sophisticated, his sentences are a mixture of simple, compound and compound-complex structures, and the story structure is complex and non-linear. The non-linear nature of the story aids suspense. Benson understands characterisation and develops all the principal characters to a point where if seen on the road they can be identified.
As sad and disturbing experiences of the characters are, they are delivered with such elevated craft that makes the reader joyous. The novel is grounded in earth-shattering travails rendered in vivid and poignant light. Its open-ended ending adds to the beauty of this extraordinary novel that will sure stand the test of time and hum long after the author’s time is done on earth.
My last take: Unlike the leaders of Nigeria whose crisis resolution skills are suspect, Benson resolves the crisis in ‘the madhouse’. He uses the sections narrated from Max and Andre’s points of view to lay out the issues, and the points of view of the father, the mother and Ladidi resolve all the confusions beautifully. His ending of the novel with Ladidi will sure generate discussion when book clubs and festivals start dissecting this fantastic book from a fantastic writer whose work oozes wisdom from page to page.
•YISHAU, an award winning columnist, is the author of IN THE NAME OF OUR FATHER and VAULTS OF SECRETS.