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essays
Reviewer: TERRI
OCHIAGHA
Title:
A Snake
Under a Thatch
Author: Chike Momah
Publisher: (Xlibris
Corporation 2008)
ISBN-13: 978-1436363785
A Snake Under a Thatch
is the much-anticipated sequel to the author’s opera prima,
Friends and Dreams. The novel told the poignant story
of the friendship between Cyril Jideofo and Bernard Ekwekwe,
who grew up together in Nigeria, were separated when Cyril
fulfilled Bernard’s dream of travelling to the United
States, and are reunited few years later. Not paying heed to
the evidences pointing to Bernard’s involvement in an
illegal business, Cyril’s naïve and trusting nature finds
him entangled in his supposed friend’s drug trade. He is
condemned to an eight-year prison term from which Bernard
and an accomplice, Obi Udozo, could have saved him had they
procured a letter that proved his innocence.
A Snake
Under a Thatch
does not take over immediately where Friends and Dreams
left off. Twenty years later, Cyril, now an apparently
placid middle-aged man, and his wife meet their daughter’s
boyfriend, Bola Akande, for the first time. Cyril’s fleeting
thoughts on the course of this encounter take the reader to
the years of his unfair and painful imprisonment, the
uncertainty of Cyril’s position when he is finally released,
and above all, the wish to clear his tainted name, which
becomes the driving force of the novel. After relocating to
Newark, hints from other Nigerians put him back on track of
the letter that could have exonerated him twenty years
before. Cyril’s thrilling investigations and their aftermath
take up the rest of the narrative. Bola’s own first-person
narrative, which forms the bulk of ‘Book Two’ and the
epilogue, sheds light on some of the mysteries surrounding
his own life and their connection to Cyril’s ordeal.
In spite of being an
entertaining novel, Cyril’s narration of his imprisonment
and quest for justice is introspective, powerfully
showcasing the intricacies of the twin matrices of memory
and trauma. Both Cyril and Bola’s narrations of work, family
and social life give a larger picture of life in the
Diaspora such as the adjustment to life in a strange land
and the determination to keep in touch with the
pre-diasporic self through the observance of cultural
patterns, the membership of Igbo and Nigerian associations
and the reinforcement of the use of Igbo and
Nigerian-flavoured English in the home and while
communicating with other Nigerians. It is interesting to
note that in spite of their seemingly permanent abode in the
States, Cyril mentions that “the Igbo person’s mind is never
far away from his original homeland – no matter where he
lives. Is there any of us who, when the time comes, doesn’t
want to be carried home to be buried there?” (112)
Undoubtedly, clearing his name would enable Cyril to return
to the country he left twenty-five years earlier, to
palliate the sorrow his imprisonment caused to his family
and to restore their good name.
Although the novel
begins to show the tints of a detective novel after the
first hints over the whereabouts of Obi Udozo, attentive
readers will realize that the web of suspense was already
cast in the very first chapter. The formal division of the
novel into three books is also a clever devise, and a good
way of keeping the readers thrilled while allowing them to
approach the final denouement with two interspersed
viewpoints.
As aforementioned, the
overarching theme is friendship. The gravity of Bernard’s
betrayal is underscored throughout the novel. The constant
description by most of the characters of Bernard as a friend
of Cyril’s in spite of past occurrences and their intents on
righting this verbal wrong may seem obnoxious at first, but
they end up being justified by the final outcome of the
novel, which comes to proclaim, like Cicero, that “ virtue
(without which friendship is impossible) is first; but next
to it, and to it alone, the greatest of all things is
Friendship.”
A visit of Bola and
Chizube to the theatre to watch Romeo and Juliet is
interestingly used to discuss the issue of tribalism. Bola
and Chizube (Cyril’s daughter) belong to different Nigerian
tribes, the Yoruba and the Igbo respectively. Rosemary,
Chizube’s mother does not thrilled when she learns of this
fact, although she relaxes somewhat when she finds out that
Bola speaks Igbo. Bola also worries about the possible
implications of their ethnic differences and traces the
parallelism between the play and the struggles of some
inter-tribal couples:
I came very close to
tears at the end of it all. And it set me thinking about my
country Nigeria, and the eternal feud between my Yoruba
people and Chizube’s Igbo people. Two peoples, each blessed
with a large enough population (easily twenty to thirty
millions), and abundant natural resources, to be a viable
nation by itself, but who were forced along with two hundred
other ethnic groups I, into an artificial creation called
Nigeria.[…] The Igbo and the Yoruba are always, so to speak,
at daggers drawn. Their never-ending struggle for primacy in
the country has been largely responsible for the lack of
cohesion in the Nigerian body politic. Their mutual distrust
is so tangible you could slice it with the proverbial knife.
It is rare for the two to intermarry, the prognostication
for such unions being, routinely, disastrous failure. (163)
Unknown to Bola, the plot
of the play is symbolic of future vicissitudes later on,
yet another of Momah’s dexterity in constructing Cyril’s
story…
In spite of being a
sequel, A Snake Under a Thatch can be read as a
freestanding novel, for Cyril’s exercise of narrative memory
recuperates the key elements of Friends and Dreams,
infusing them with further meaning, now that they can be
assessed in a more retrospective manner. Because of its
experimental structure, negotiation of memory and trauma,
recreation of Diasporic life and its deliciously thrilling
and entertaining storyline, Momah’s latest novel is a
welcome addition to African literature in general and
Nigerian literature in particular. SLQ
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EDITOR'S NOTE
DRAMA
ESSAYS & REVIEWS
FICTION
POETRY
COMPETITIONS
TERRI OCHIAGHA
is
writing her dissertation, which is an imagological study of
Europeans in Nigerian narratives, at Complutense University,
Madrid. Her other research interests include first
generation Nigerian authors and the literary ambience of
Government College, Umuahia. She is a member of the research
project 'Studies on Intermediality as Intercultural
Mediation', funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education.
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