Good News from Nigeria

Foreign Gods, Inc.

Meet Okey Ndibe, author of a wonderful new novel, Foreign Gods, Inc.  Born in Southeastern Nigeria’s Igbo lands, Ndibe has lived and worked in the United States since the 1980s, when he emigrated to study with Chinua Achebe at Brown University.  Since then, Ndibe has held various academic posts, written a debut novel (Arrows of Rain, 2000), contributed to North American and Nigerian newspapers and journals, and worked with organizations supporting members of the African Diaspora.  Foreign Gods, Inc., I believe, is his breakthrough, a book that should move him into the first rank of contemporary African/African-Diaspora novelists.  This is good news for him; it’s also good news for readers who welcome distinctive new voices in the capacious category of  ‘World Literature.’

The ‘Foreign Gods, Inc.’ of the title refers specifically to a Manhattan art gallery specializing in ‘exotic’ religious sculptures.  The novel’s dyspeptic and displaced immigrant protagonist is Ike (pronounced EE-kay, not, as his customers insist, Eekay, which means ‘buttocks’ in Igbo), whose job driving a NYC cab barely keeps bill collectors at bay and reminds him constantly of his elite education’s unfulfilled promises.  He devises a scheme to return to Nigeria, steal his people’s war god, and sell it to the gallery.  The novel traces Ike’s satirical, tragicomic journey back to his homeland and the surreal culmination of his entrepreneurial plans. 

It’s a good plot, and I won’t spoil it by disclosing more details.  Instead, let me discuss some ways that Foreign Gods, Inc. is an exceptional – not just an interesting and/or entertaining – book.  In fact, if I were still teaching postcolonial or world literature, I’d definitely include it on the syllabus.  Not only is it brand new and great fun to read (and short enough that undergraduate students wouldn’t rebel); it’s also packed with important themes and excellent topics for papers and class discussion.

For instance, the book treats the immigrant/exile/transnational experience with humor and perspicacity.  As people and circumstances keep reminding Ike that he’s ‘at home’ neither in the United States nor in Nigeria, he tries harder and harder to become accepted, to lose the metonymic ‘accent’ that marks him as an outsider, even a failure, on two continents.  Not merely linguistic, his accent also inflects cultural negotiations.  He’s uncomfortable schmoozing with his taxi fares to secure larger tips, he doesn’t quite understand how his Africanness appeals to certain sorts of American women, black and white, who see him as an exotic trophy; he tries to buck the bribery protocols necessary to do much of anything in Nigeria; he tramples on the kinship and generational expectations operative in his home village.  Any productive paper ideas here, fellow educators?

Generous syncretism: a depiction of Jesus Christ in an Igbo Mbari shrine to Ala, the Earth Goddess.

Like many Nigerian peoples, the Igbo characteristically have adapted new deities, artforms, materials, and celebrations into their own cosmology and cultural practices.

Or maybe students (and you) would like to begin by exploring the concept of ‘foreign gods.’  There’s the first-level connotation – the trade in, and shallow buyer desire for, African and other ‘tribal’ artworks: a sculpture of an Igbo deity, stripped of its function and ritual efficacy, becomes a trendy First World commodity.  There’s the second-level connotation, one Ndibe treats with care and comedy:  the introduction of Christianity to Nigeria.  Counterpoised against an interpolated story of the first English missionary’s sojourn to Ike’s homeland and his cluelessly patronizing conversion efforts is the fantastic account of a contemporary evangelical ‘pastor’ who’s running an ecclesiastical variant of the Nigerian Email scam. The third-level connotation is the worship of otherness, both by Nigerians (who in the book’s backwater village, still regard Michael Jordan as a demiurge and happily substitute expensive cars and Western-style houses for the traditional, relational ways that an individual accrues honor and status) and by wealthy North Americans who ironically fetishize the ‘primitive,’ be it art or human beings.  All these levels merge on the fourth, the deification of `money and the status it appears to confer . . . and point to a fifth level, a critique of absolutist belief systems that attempt to erase gray areas from human interactions and aspirations.

Yet another way to approach Foreign Gods, Inc. is via its manipulations of language.  Ike, like most educated Nigerians, speaks ‘proper English.’  (English is one of the country’s official languages, acting somewhat like Latin did in Medieval Europe.)  But when Ike talks with Nigerian functionaries or people in his home village, he is accused of ‘blowing grammar’ – of showing off and, more devastatingly, of renouncing his natal place by pronouncing words in mimicry of colonial and neocolonial masters.  Ndibe uses Nigerian pidgin to register average people’s English.  This organic Creole contains its own history, of indigenous syntax and rhythms plus functional English vocabulary, and Ndibe employs it accurately enough to give it legitimacy but sparingly enough to avoid making pidgin-speakers sound ignorant.  His biggest problem, I think, is how to represent conversations conducted entirely in Igbo. Ndibe’s solution involves flavoring dialogue with a judicious amount of untranslated Igbo words and phrases, interjecting many translated proverbs, and approximating the leisurely, circuitous way of approaching subjects characteristic of tradition-based rural societies.

Misunderstood ‘foreign gods’: a random and supposedly demonic image featured in a contemporary ‘anti-idolatry’ missionary publication.  Probably unknown to the graphic designer, this statue shows a ruler either smoking a pipe or biting on the munkwisa root . . . both symbols of political power, spiritual authority, and wise speech that are also used to ward OFF malevolent forces.

Even Ike’s ‘blown grammar’ retains traces of perception modalities encoded in non-English ways of knowing and describing the world.  Whereas to most Westerners, the sense of sight is paramount – particularly when one encounters new landscapes, new people, or art objects – to Ike these encounters involve other senses, particularly the sense of smell. This is an added layer of linguistic complexity (and, as you’ll see, of plot complexity), as are the hilarious episodes of willful mistranslation and of idiosyncratic neologisms and creative orthographies spun by characters driven by unmoored ambition and self-aggrandizement.

Then there is satire itself:  a risky mode not often employed in emergent national literatures when social realism is called on for muscular work and magical realism is called upon to capture absurdities of politics, cultures, even languages jerked into someone else’s definition of modernity.  Satire is also hard to write about, as one needs to know enough about what is being exposed and ridiculed in order to detect satire at all . . . and one needs to be attuned to satiric clues without which a text reads as purely funny or purely angry.  And thus satire is hard to write successfully.

Foreign Gods, Inc., succeeds in its satire, I think, as it does in its examinations of diasporan identity, of idols of the marketplace (and of the television and the cell phone, of the shrine and the church), and of language itself.  Read and enjoy.  Then consider teaching it (and tell me how it went).  Enwe akwukwo!

Foreign Gods, Inc.  Okey Ndibe.  New York:  Soho, 2014.  Hardcover, paperback (forthcoming in October), electronic format.