Re/Views & Critique
The Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka’s First Novel Since1973
written by
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
A review of (or essay about)
“Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth” is at once political satire and murder mystery, and a lament for the spirit of his native Nigeria.
In the first pages of his poignant 2006 memoir, “You Must Set Forth at Dawn,” Wole Soyinka quotes an old piece of Yoruba wisdom: “As one approaches an elder’s status, one ceases to indulge in battles.” In the 15 years that have since gone by, Soyinka has stubbornly refused that advice. As a political activist, the 87-year-old Nobel Prize winner has never stopped intervening in our public conversation, whether to defend freedom of expression, condemn religious fundamentalism or destroy his American green card after the election of Donald Trump. As a writer, he has produced essays and plays with remarkable regularity, but “Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth” is his first novel in 48 years, and only the third in his long career. It is also the ultimate rebellion against the Yoruba dictum, a huge battle of a book, and to read it is to watch in fascination as Soyinka indulges in it.
“Chronicles” is many things at once: a caustic political satire, a murder mystery, a conspiracy story and a deeply felt lament for the spirit of a nation. The plot — convoluted, obscure at times, often tying itself in too many knots — turns on the aptly named Human Resources, a sinister online business that sells human body parts for private use in rituals and superstitions. As often happens in satire, the outrageousness of the fictional premise comes from its proximity to the truth: The belief that human organs have magical properties, leading to business success and political power, has been known to lead to ritual murders in Nigeria, and Soyinka even quotes a real-life national headline verbatim in the text: “Thirteen-Member Ritualist Gang Broken Up.”
But the novel is not merely interested in indignation; it is after bigger game. On its surface, “Chronicles” asks who runs this macabre industry of human flesh. Between the lines, however, it examines the state of mind of a community in which violence of this particular kind can take place. Where is this brutality born, what feeds it, how does it succeed? These questions, moral in nature, are harder to answer than the whodunit riddle; they’re also much more interesting. If the main intrigue quickly loses relevance, it’s because the important conversations are happening elsewhere.
‘For all its sarcastic undertones, for all its puns and plays on names, “Chronicles” is a pessimistic novel, the work of a man with no illusions.’
One such conversation occurs halfway through the book, between the two main characters — Duyole Pitan-Payne, an engineer and bon vivant, and a surgeon named Kighare Menka — whose “ancient” friendship is the most moving storyline in the novel. As young students in England, they and two other Nigerians formed the “Gong of Four,” a kind of tongue-in-cheek secret society complete with code language and a common dream: to return to Nigeria and try to give something back to their country — or, in their own words, “Get back and make a difference!” It was an abstract mission, but it took a more concrete shape in Menka’s project to build a hospital in his small, underprivileged hometown. Decades later, one member of the group has disappeared without a trace, another has been in prison for money laundering, and Duyole is leaving the country for New York as a representative to the United Nations.
As for Dr. Menka, he has become an unwilling local celebrity: At a time when terrorism is ravaging the country, with Boko Haram killing hundreds of civilians every month, he has specialized in amputation, operating on the victims of suicide bombings, and has even been awarded a civil distinction for his dedication to those survivors and their wounded bodies. After the most recent atrocity — the murder of an unarmed officer by an angry mob — is reported in the media, Menka comments on how fortunate his friend Duyole is, not having to see these images anymore in America. Although “they have their equivalents over there,” Menka says. “Ask the Black population.” Duyole disagrees: “Not like this. Occasionally, yes, there does erupt a Rodney King scenario. Or a fascistic spree of ‘I can’t breathe.’ America is a product of slave culture, prosperity as the reward for racist cruelty. This is different. This, let me confess, reaches into … a word I would rather avoid but can’t — soul. It challenges the collective notion of soul. Something is broken. Beyond race. Outside color or history. Something has cracked. Can’t be put back together.”
Something has cracked: This fracture is where the novel takes place. On one side of it are the Duyoles and the Menkas, decent human beings trying to expose a criminal enterprise in a corrupt society. On the other side are the powers that be, represented mainly by two men: Papa Davina and Godfrey Danfere. The first is a self-fashioned religious leader who realizes, after several picaresque Moll-Flanders-like failures, that “he had only one commodity on offer — spirituality.” The second is the least interesting of Soyinka’s characters: Mendacious and hypocritical, ambitious but petty to the core, he is a caricature of political power gone awry. Both are disturbing individuals, and their possible involvement in the commerce of body parts is never far from the surface. But they are, simultaneously, the object of constant derision. When Papa Davina builds a site for prophecy, he calls it a “prophesite”; and Sir Goddie is the leader of the “People on the Move Party,” but he never acknowledges the fact that the acronym spells POMP.
What I mean is this: I well understand why Soyinka would have chosen satire as the medium through which to explore the crossroads between corruption, religious fanaticism, endemic resentments and a legacy of colonial divisiveness. Humor is a time-tested defense mechanism. But for all its sarcastic undertones, for all its puns and plays on names, “Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth” is a pessimistic novel, the work of a man with none of the illusions suggested, in full irony, by the title. Maybe this explains why the best section of the book has only a casual connection with the often verbose, contrived main intrigue: A Nigerian man has died on Austrian soil, setting into motion a confrontation between several members of his family, who want him to be buried where he died, and Dr. Menka, who wants to bring the body back to Nigeria. The novel seems to change in tone and pace during these chapters: It becomes grave, affecting, oddly intimate. What has happened?
It’s here that Soyinka’s longtime readers will remember the aforementioned memoir, “You Must Set Forth at Dawn,” whose most stirring pages are dedicated to his friendship with Femi Johnson, a Nigerian man who died in Frankfurt, and to Soyinka’s efforts to repatriate his body against the family’s wishes. “Chronicles” virtually reproduces those real events; in them you hear the writer’s voice break free of the demands of genre and the strictures of the intricate argument he has devised. When an undertaker feels close to a doctor because “they both worked on the same material,” you hear Wole Soyinka, the humane intellectual, reflecting on mortality. The fragility, the vulnerability of the human body: Yes, you say, this is what the novel was always about.
About the Author
Juan Gabriel Vásquez is a Colombian writer, journalist and translator. Regarded as one of the most important Latin American novelists working today, he is the author of seven novels, two volumes of stories, two books of literary essays, and numerous articles of political commentaryHis novel The Sound of Things Falling, published in Spanish in 2011, won the Alfaguara Novel Prize and the 2014 International Dublin Literary Award, among other prizes. His novels have been published in 28 languages. In 2012, after living in Europe for sixteen years, in Paris, the Belgian Ardennes, and Barcelona, Vásquez moved with his family back to Bogotá.
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