Nigel Jack’s ‘Naked’ a liberating truth

NIGEL JACK’S “Naked” explores the deep spirituality, complexity and attraction of nudity which has the capacity to ensnare, vex and puzzle, yet at the same time liberating.

What is worrisome, as Jack highlights, is not the idea of nakedness, but the realisation that one is indeed naked — exposed — to the vagaries of Man and nature.

It is this knowledge of one’s nudity that is both frightening and empowering.

The opening lines of the book are apt: “I do not live like any normal youth. I am haunted by the past, limited by the present and frightened by the future.”

Using the autobiographical mode, Jack captures his own experiences with such zeal that leaves the reader aghast.

Through shared experiences, the individual’s biography is allowed the freedom to interact and merge into a national discourse that sustains a collective vision.

This shared vision is somehow obliterated by its exposure to forces it has no control over.

Jack uses a narrative technique that reminds one of the many battles that one has to endure in a world that derives excitement in the trauma that war brings.

War, as the writer is conscious of, is not only physical, but also psychological and emotional.

Depending on the outcomes anchored in the psyche, Man is capable of destroying both himself and others.

He has the capacity to create his own wars whose battles he may win or lose in the eyes of his mind.

Sean Quincy, the first person singular narrator in “Naked”, who appears to be Jack himself, suffers the pain of growing up in a nomadic family. His family’s wandering nature exposes the narrator to different setups, which physically and emotionally burdens his young and fragile mind.

His exposure to both rural and urban settings gives him an insight into the core of the human heart, controlled neither by colour, sex nor age. He soon learns that vice is simply inherent in Man.

The reader is drawn from the beginning into the narrator’s secret space, although he or she may wonder why his defeatist and rather misogynistic nature could carry the day for the downtrodden who feed on hope.

As a bildungsroman, “Naked” gives voice to a boy, who at six is robbed of his innocence by a Form Three girl, Sipelile. She is given overnight accommodation at the narrator’s family house in Concession.

The trauma he suffers is exacerbated by his silence as his fear of exposure bars him from telling his parents of the abuse.

Though he still cherishes the sweet nature of women, Sean Quincy belies their fecundity and coarse nature which make them irresistibly inviting and evil rather than feeble and vulnerable.

Rosemary, his cousin, who at eight is the village femme fatale, indulges him in sex when he is still smarting from Sipelile’s assault. It is at this stage that he realises that a woman is a woman because she is simply a woman.

Inasmuch as women may feel that they are thrown into a men’s world that is naturally oppressive to their ilk, they are capable of using their sex to inflict pain on others, or to satiate their carnal desires.

Sean’s paternal grandmother with whom he lives when he meets the girl-sex-predator, Rosemary, is no saint either. She falls into the category of those women who despite their industrious nature or otherwise good-naturedness remain victims of their own carnal desires.

She abandons her husband and children for another man, whose children she also leaves upon his death.

The constant shuttling between rural and urban settings finds Sean at a crossroads, unable to determine his fate, especially on love matters and career prospects.

Fate has a way with people and no matter where one runs to, one’s destiny always lies in wait.

After completing his Advanced Levels, the hero finds a job in the insurance industry where he earns a measly commission.

He realises the consequences of trust and his own shortcomings as a naked soul when he is arrested for a crime committed by the bogus insurance brokers who sweet talks him into taking them on in the industry.

However, he wins his freedom by greasing the palms of a police officer.

The story takes an interesting twist when Sean gets a place to study journalism at a Harare college. The world begins to expose his nakedness in the most profound way.

His country, Zimbabwe, is going through a lot on the political, social and economic spheres.

Having been born in 1979, a year before independence in 1980, the protagonist reminisces: “Harare had no cattle, but I never spent a day without eating beef. Harare had no maize fields, but its people had the widest choice of maize-meal, ranging from the creamy roller meal to the crystal white ‘Ngwerewere’ and ‘Pearlenta’. What irony of life was so deeply rooted here?”

Although there were problems here and there, the narrator remembers well that food was plenty. Fast forward to the years between 2000 and 2004, and the ghastly travesty stares one in the face.

Jack captures the dearth of hope if it is not premised on faith. He also chronicles the divide and rule tactics that colonial hegemony imposes on African countries.

Through such heinous machinations the continent’s resources are looted while brother and sister hackle each other’s throat.

The illegal economic sanctions imposed on the Motherland at the instigation of the puppet opposition reduce the breadbasket of the continent to a basket case. The Western media has a field day in demonising the land reform programme.

Hope begins to fade as the individual’s nakedness becomes the universal neurosis that leads to the paralysis, malaise and stasis at the core of the national discourse.

It is during this time that Sean is weaned off his childhood dreams though he remains clinging on to his faith. As a Christian he knows that faith really moves mountains, but also as a human being he is conscious that mountains can also crouch at the horizon of faith.

Mr Akinola, the Nigerian whose family he at some point lives with; for four years to be precise, imparts on him the essence of knowing the self in the fight against the self and others.

He also learns a lot about love, deceit and hypocrisy during his stay with the Nigerian family.

Sean loses US$100 to a conman who dupes them at college into believing that he has secured scholarships for the 10 of them at Howard University in the United States of America.

Although Mr Akinola believes his story, his wife takes none of it, insisting that he restitutes them, which he eventually does courtesy of his affluent maternal uncle.

Having been exposed to abuse at an early stage in life, Sean finds it tasking to propose love to women for fear of reprisals. He fears that if his love is not requited, then he would even suffer more for it, which worries and saddens him.

His internal struggles preclude his desires, thus the protagonist fails to tell the full and beautiful Tobi, Mr Akinola’s daughter, how much he loves her until she is far away at college in South Africa when it is already too late.

He learns from David, the Akinolas’ gardener that Tobi is in love with the scum and outcast, Jan who used to frequent their home. He is heartbroken when David tells him that Jan, who followed Tobi down South after being chased away by his mother, is HIV-positive and critically ill.

She also used to have sex with her younger brother, Tolu because their parents were too strict to allow them to go out on their own.

Sadly, the narrator loses his job at the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC), because of his lack of attraction to Susana, the CEO who offers him a lift to work almost on a daily basis.

Sean is expelled over trumped-up charges which seals his fate as a misogynist, as he feels naked, dejected and hurt.