Onitsha Book

Heart of Africa

Is it possible to write of a journey upriver into the African heartland without falling into the shadow of Heart of Darkness ? And yet the example of Conrad's masterpiece need not be a dead weight, as Onitsha, the 1992 novel by the recent Nobel laureate J. M. G. Le Clézio, proves. As Conrad had done, Le Clézio begins his book with a long voyage by water, in this case from Bordeaux along the coast of Africa to the mouth of the River Niger. His protagonist is a young boy, Fintan, who travels with his Italian mother (nicknamed Maou) to join his English father Geoffroy Allen, whom he has never seen, working as a shipping agent in the river town of Onitsha. Fintan's situation is clearly based on that of the author himself, whose father was also separated from his mother during the War, and who similarly spent part of his childhood in Nigeria.

I was surprised to discover that Onitsha is actually a real city, for it is also presented as a place of myth. All through the long voyage (deliberately prolonged to emphasize Onitsha's remoteness), Fintan and his mother look forward to a tropical jungle paradise. What they find is a deforested commercial outpost run by British colonial officials on behalf of the trading companies. Fintan meets a slightly older African boy and soon discovers his own Onitsha, running barefoot through the savanna and pottering in the reeds at the water's edge. Maou fits poorly into colonial society and at first feels very lonely, but eventually she forms her own ties to the place and its native people. And Geoffroy, no more than competent in his official work, becomes obsessed with the idea that the Onitsha region might contain the new city founded by the semi-legendary Queen of Meroë at the end of her long trek across the continent from the Nile, two millennia earlier.

Conrad's novella is about the evils of colonialism, and some dark force that takes possession of its central figure, Kurtz, and drives him mad. Le Clézio also sees colonialism as evil, but he presents it in its last dying throes, denouncing it less for its horrors than its isolation and irrelevance. For the mysterious heartbeat of Africa that seduces each of the three main characters is not some kind of black magic, but the sense of an ancient history, an even older religion, and a oneness with the land and its elements. Once these things have entered the bloodstream, they are impossible to remove. Only war, famine, and commercial exploitation can do that; but the worst of these things happen (as they did in the Biafran War) after the main part of the book is over. This is a powerful novel, but a magical one also, and not nearly so harrowing as the description on the back cover might indicate.

At first, the book's oddly-named characters, almost allegorical setting, and university-press printing, combined with the reputation of the Nobel Prize, almost screamed French Intellectual at me, but I found it almost impossible to put down. Even in translation, Le Clézio's writing is both evocative and crystal clear; there is poetry aplenty, but no sense of heaviness. Le Clézio is less an intellectual than a sensual writer, not just in his pervasive evocation of sexuality as a life force, but also in his sense of place. And his choice of characters is surely deliberate'Fintan is a Celtic name, Geoffroy a French spelling of an English one, Maou a contraction of the Italian Maria Louisa'all combining to create a rootlessness that is the opposite of the strong sense of place Le Clézio will establish in Africa. He almost never mentions an African place name except as part of a string of such names, as Homer might have done. This is a slim book written in a world where Homeric grandeur has long since gone. But the sense of lost greatness remains, reaching a climax in passages like the following, in which an old resident shows Fintan the wreck of a warship [the ellipses are the author's]:
Look, pikni! Here, in this hull, the officers would stand to attention when Sir Frederick Lugard came on board with his great plumed hat! With him came the kings of Calabar, Owerri, Kabba, Onitsha, Ilorin, with their wives and their slaves. Chukuani of Udi… Onuoorah from Nnawi… the Obi of Otolo, the old Nuosu wearing his leopard skin… the warlords of Ohafia… even the envoys of the Obi of Benin, even Jaja, the old fox Jaja from Opobo, who had resisted the English for so long… They all came on board the George Shotton to sign their peace treaties.Anybody still hesitating to buy this wonderful book might check out the story by Le Clézio in the current New Yorker (10/27/2008), "The boy who had never seen the sea," which shows once again his affinity with young protagonists and almost mystical feeling for nature. He is a subtle and magnificent writer.