Siren calls
The complexity of Africa is at the heart of this dazzling coming-of-age story.
THE FIVE SORROWFUL MYSTERIES OF ANDY AFRICA, by Stephen Buoro (Bloomsbury, $37)
“A fifteen-year-old African genius poet altar boy who loves blondes is not a criminal, not a racist, not a sell-out. But a sweet, cool, pitiful African boy.” Andrew Aziza might be deeply tangled in the contradictions and anxieties of teenage life, but that doesn’t stop him from pouring those contradictions out to dazzling effect in Stephen Buoro’s debut novel. Visions of white women, and blondes in particular, pervade Andrew’s psyche, social media and camera roll. He’s quick to explain that his preference isn’t a denial of the beauty of black women – his beloved mother in particular – and that it’s developed strictly in the abstract during his adolescence in the northern Nigerian town of Kontagora.
It’s an abstraction that Andrew credits with almost mathematical purity, when set against the complexities of daily life in Kontagora, and of his own unfolding identity. Andrew is a Catholic southerner in a Muslim-majority town, his mother having raised him alone with his father firmly out of the picture. Andrew was born from the second of two botched caesareans, following a stillborn elder brother who he knows secretly as Ydna – an intimate companion and counterpart from childhood whose voice is increasingly falling silent. Crowding out Ydna in Andrew’s psyche are Hollywood movies, visions of streetwise superheroism, alongside his “droogs” Slim and Morocca, and a nagging sense of being meant for higher, somehow purer things.
A luminously comic tragedy about the perils of getting everything you want before you can even understand why you want it, The Sorrowful Mysteries channels coming of age as a metaphysical battle. Ranged against Ydna and the forces of maternal love is a force
Andrew has named HXVX – an equally omnipotent inversion of the god of Kontagora’s churches and mosques, and the originator of all the cultural, colonial and cosmic injustice visited on Africa. Raised by teachers on fire for African empowerment, the reluctantly nicknamed “Andy Africa” is desperate to escape HXVX’s gravitational pull, even as he increasingly wonders how deeply it might be ingrained in his own identity and desires.
The novel trades in heavy territory with a near miraculous lightness of touch, thanks to virtuoso evocation of his protagonist by Nigeria-born Buoro,
The novel trades in heavy territory with a near miraculous lightness of touch.
and an abiding sense of humour in his observations of the people around him and his banter with other teens. Even the poetry in the book stands up in its own right, rich and energetic, and ascribed to Werdna – Andrew reflected in his “superhero poet” aspect. Life in Kontagora is depicted vividly, with its pop-culture and Afrofuturist inflections alongside Sunday-best designer brands and questionable interactions with money and power. The book is an education in miniature for readers, like this reviewer, with only a bare familiarity with Nigerian society.
The Five Sorrowful Mysteries embraces Catholic symbolism in Andy’s imaginings, which take an increasingly grim turn over the novel, to the point of describing life in Africa as a procession to the cross in the name of HXVX the anti-god. There’s a very adolescent sweeping grandiosity to these
expressions of anguish, but they’re shaped and proven in Andy’s mind by forces whose reality can’t be denied – religious conflict, deprivation, sexual violence and the pull of local and international metropoles. At the same time, Andrew’s backhand negativity about Africa belies his achingly beautiful observations of family life and traditions, making his stumbles and turns away from them even more affecting.
It’s delightful, entertaining, compulsive, but not an easygoing exotic holiday for Western consumption. Only when I reached the conclusion and put the book down did I remember that Andrew’s narrative opened with an address to “Dear White People”. As a precise, final blow beneath the reader’s armour, there’s no mystery about it. ▮