The Book of Everything’ by Maik Nwosu
Maik Nwosu’s ‘The Book of Everything’ is a story of a man’s search for himself, of a man questing into his past to understand himself, his present. The book is situated at that juncture “where the dim past and future mingle…”, to borrow the words of poet Lenrie Peters in “The Fence”. The past catches up with the present – or rather, the present travels back in time to meet the past and merge with it to give meaning to the life of Ile, the book’s protagonist.
Ile breaks away from the family tradition of returning home after a study abroad, partly because he has found a girl that catches his interest, Ella, but an unexpected voice message from a certain Willem Kirk of Kirk and Klaus law firm in Stellenbosch, South Africa, forces him to beat his track back to his roots. It is in that process, in the process of tracing the path that his grandfather had travelled, that Ile finds his own self. His grandfather, Ileka, after whom he was named, was presumed dead seven years after his disappearance and buried according to customs. That was eleven whole years before Ile was born. But as it turns out, the man simply left a former lifetime behind to live another lifetime in other parts of the world, all the while keeping a tab on the lifetime he left behind.
When a simple voice message from Willem Kirk unsettles Ile and sets him on a journey from Houston to Nigeria and South Africa, he is determined to learn everything he can about his grandfather. When he arrives in Cape Town en route to Stellenbosch, he declares his mission: “to learn a lot more about my grandfather”. His quest transports him to the dim past, into events that happened long before he was born. In the village, his Uncle Ibe, Aunt Rosette and Lawyer Egwuatu prove to be the bridge through which he travels into that past. As Ile would learn, his grandfather was many things in one – a rainmaker, a priest without a shrine, a medical doctor, King Lazarus, a doctor of souls. His consulting room became the place of solace for many. There he listened to their problems and proffered solutions to the ones he could.
In Stellenbosch, Willem and Thelma tell Ile the much they know. Willem describes Ileka as “unique”, and speaks of “the way he carried himself, the way nobody knew anything about him”. Thelma says of Ileka, who was known by the people as The Monk or Monk because he lived as one, “It was as if he lived for something higher than himself, higher than all of us.” In Kayamandi, he would gather people, listen to their problems and solve the ones he could, just as he had done as King Lazarus back in Fegge. The way Ileka chose Thelma to be his maid turns out to be the same weird way he had chosen and married his wife, and the same way he had chosen Egwuatu as his attorney back in Fegge. In a telephone conversation, Ivan confirms to Ile that Aileek, as he called him, moved from one disaster area to the next, from Ethiopia during the drought to Banda Aceh during the Indian Ocean tsunami.
‘The Book of Everything’ is also a story about humanity and human foibles, of friendships, trust and betrayal, of hope and hopelessness. Marriages fail. For instance, Alhaji’s first three marriages fail before he eventually meets the woman of his dreams; Beth’s husband’s first two marriages fail, and the third, with Beth, ends in fatality. There is betrayal of trust. Ella is disappointed by her Nigerian boyfriend, a pharmacist, and so distrusts Nigerian men. Yet, when she gets a chance with Ile, the same Ella of whom Ile’s childhood friend Nathan tells him, “I think you’re very lucky to find a woman like her”, ends up betraying Ile. She cheats with Joel, the same Joel who had suffered a seizure and even contemplated suicide when he walked in on his best friend Smith in bed with his girlfriend Rita; the same psychiatrist to whom Ella takes Ile in search of solution to his anger disorder; the same man who became Ile’s best friend and best man at his wedding. But it is not only Ile that Ella betrays; she also betrays Sal, Joel’s wife. For, just as Ile and Joel’s friendship blossoms, Ella and Sal’s friendship also grows, to the point that the couples have dinners at home. Perhaps it is true what they say that hurting people hurt people.
The old and new order clash in the two Ileka children, Ibe and Rosette, or Rose, though the clash is subtle. Ibe is a man who, despite all the signs of advancing modernity, holds on to tradition and refuses “all entreaties to venture out of the village”; he “tapped his wine, drank quite a bit, savored local delicacies, promoted the ogba ngbada brotherhood, and whistled about the village…as if he was the happiest man on earth”. At funerals, he would talk and sing about the land of the spirits when everyone else talked about the reunion in paradise. Rosette, on her part, “went to church every Sunday, had no time for ogba ngbada…rarely visited the village”.
However, it is in the relationship between the neo-Christian movement and traditional worship that the conflict is more pronounced. Pastor Isaiah’s followers, in what came to be known as The Cleansing or Holy Isaiah Fire, move round the villages pulling down shrines and beating up priests and priestesses who try to stop them. When Ibe tries to plot a revenge, some villagers advise him to forget it and move on, that the gods are capable of fighting for themselves. The scene mirrors a similar case in Things Fall Apart during Okonkwo’s exile in Mbanta. One of the Christian converts, Okoli, boasts of killing the sacred python and, against Okonkwo’s counsel to chase the Christians away from the village, one of the elders argues that the gods are capable of fighting for themselves, saying, “It is not in our custom to fight for the gods.” Just as in Things Fall Apart where Okoli, the python killer, dies in mysterious circumstances, Pastor Isaiah also dies under inexplicable circumstances, apparently boosting the people’s belief in the power of the gods.
The superstitious proclivities of both the traditional worshippers and the Christians also crop up, as seen in the stories weaved around Pastor Isaiah by his followers and in the villagers’ reaction to some natural occurrences. For instance, when the village faces an erosion/landslide challenge, some villagers ascribe it to the anger of the gods. Also, when an epidemic breaks out in Isiani and the neighboring villages, Christians attribute it to the judgement of God, while some villagers say it is the vengeance of the earth goddess.
But it is not only the traditional worshippers and Christians that clash. There are clashes even within the neo-Christian movement. Pastor Isaiah clashes with his mentor Pastor White and his church, the Jesus Jesus or Double J Church, faces a succession crisis after his mysterious death.
A number of deaths occur in the novel. Ile’s grandfather, after being assumed dead for forty-four years, eventually dies in Stellenbosch: he slept and did not wake up. Ile’s grandmother dies, killed in an airstrike when the war was almost ended. Ile’s father dies: he slept and did not wake up. Ile’s mother also dies, knocked down by a car while trying to cross a road. Beth’s ex-husband kills Beth, her boyfriend, and himself. And Pastor Isaiah dies under mysterious circumstances. Death, life’s ever-present companion, is always lurking in the shadows. And there are many ways to die.
There’s a sprinkling of proverbs across the book, used mostly by Ibe, the symbol of tradition in the book. Ile also recollects some proverbs used by his father. When Ibe informs Ile of the death of his father, he does not speak in plain words. He rather says, “The sharpening stone eats into the knife, just as the knife eats into the stone.” Proverbs have not ceased to be the palm oil with which words are eaten.
In South Africa, Ile notes the striking contrast between Stellenbosch, the sprawling “village of the oaks”, and the Kayamandi township where people like Thelma live in hovels. The contrast points to the remnants of the apartheid policy. He also notes, through Isaac the driver, the negative perceptions of South Africans about Nigerians in South Africa, of whom Isaac says they are “particularly loud, greedy and arrogant”; go after South African women and confuse them with “money and nonsense”. Ile in his musings, however, tries to offer counter-narratives to these stereotypes.
Ile is in many ways like his grandfather. He becomes a life-saver in the case of Osita, who tells him during a later meeting, “You saved my life.” When he decides to give the house his grandfather bequeathed to him in Stellenbosch to Thelma, he says his grandfather knew that he would know what to do. In other words, Ile understands his grandfather just as the man also understood him, even though they never met.
In the end, Ile makes progress in his quest, but the more answers he gets, the more questions tug at his soul. The Wall of Everything, the white walls of the living room in the Stellenbosch house covered with pictures, paintings, writings, and other artifacts, provides some clues but it does not fully solve the puzzle. Even the mystery of Ann Portinger remains unsolved. However, Ile has come to a new understanding. He does not fully understand everything, but he understands enough, just as he whispered to his grandfather’s spirit when he knelt by his grave in Stellenbosch. It is that understanding that controls his reaction when he walks in on Ella and Joel that night. He has finally found himself, knowing, as he professes in the end, “that my story had become – and had always been – bigger than Ella and Joel”.
