The Un-Lonely Voice of A. Igoni Barrett

Nigerian writer, A. Igoni Barrett, points us towards an alternative vision for art. In his stories, there is an affinity for villainous arcs, embedded within colourful, everyday life.

We travel a great deal in A. Igoni Barrett’s fiction. Poteko, the fictional landscape of his second short story collection, Love Is Power, Or Something Like That, combines bits of major Nigerian cities: Port Harcourt, Lagos, Kano and Warri. Though it is an attempt to bring into view the multiplicity of the Nigerian experience, it is the peculiar achievement of Barrett’s language that places him among the most important contemporary Nigerian writers. The tools of his imagination reveal an interesting angle into the poetics of societal imagery, especially coming from Nigeria’s cultural background that infamously holds a burning torch to the grandest of fictions.  

I came to Barrett’s work through the aforementioned short story collection, during the early 2010s when literature in the continent was blooming. On popular sites of networking, both online and offline, one was conversant with the works of leading contemporary writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta and Okey Ndibe. This reading was paired with the consumption of the lesser-skilled but hearty writing being published on social media, arguably more connected to the grain of everyday life. ‘The Shape of a Full Circle’, the Barrett story I encountered during this period, combined the rawness of those young writers with controlled flair, a sensibility coloured by Barrett’s openness to digital writing, as he was one of the champions of online publishing in the 2000s.  

‘The Shape of a Full Circle’ is the opening story in Love is Power, and the protagonist Dimie Abrakasa, is fourteen years old. We are taken to his family residence, whose ‘corridor [smelled] of kerosene smoke and rat fur’. It is the residence described in Pidgin-English parlance as ‘Face-Me-I-Face-You’, whose variant demography makes it a favoured scene for exploring dramatic tensions. Barrett seeks the internal however: the perplexing state of Daoju Anabrabra, Dimie’s mother, who sets the story in motion. The opening scene presents Dimie’s challenges: to get food for his two younger siblings and medicine for Daoju, whose helpless alcohol addiction is incisively captured by her absence throughout a vivid conversation amongst the three siblings, and the one time the attention turns towards her, it further discredits her trustworthiness, a very dire quality to be lacking in a mother. More crucially, it is her ferocity, by means of her innate power, that sends Dimie into the streets, where the midafternoon’s harsh light is revealed, on the horizon, like ‘a mass of bruise-dark clouds bearing down on the sun’.  

Dimie’s state of mind is magnified by the angst of suffering. As Dimie becomes physically distant from the house, so do his mental preoccupations, immersed now in his immediate surroundings. He’s soon in the group of boys his age who  have ganged up on a madwoman, and even without the basis for their attack on her being justified or even sensible, Dimie finds himself picking up a brick and throwing it to the side of her head, unleashing a scream that was the ‘explosion of mingled pain and rage’.  

Such an image sets the book interestingly, as Barrett moves in-between disturbed characters, showing us that their love is important despite—or perhaps even because—of their characteristic flaws. Through his not-so-subtle manipulations on the theme of love and power, we are able to see a side of Nigerian life that hasn’t found purposeful depiction in our fiction, which is the lives of people who operate under the lower spectrum of the human imagination. Devoid of the poetic abilities of introspection and beaten by life’s whirlwinds, their actions and words carry strong significance—one that has been previously considered as a technical touchstone of short fiction...