Book Review of Sola Osofisan’s “Blood Will Call”
“And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the
poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing; a local
habitation and a name.”
William Shakespeare
Blood Will Call is a beautiful book that promises the planting of
the seasons faded out with the elegant winter, complex, and
complicated summer, spring, and autumns, escapism, hurting, and
wounded lives.
People who have to take stock of the exit route out. There’s abuse,
there’s mediocrity, there’s average, there’s people living on the
edge, addicted to the void of waiting, the darkness of existentialism,
the apron strings of the kitchen, the reincarnation of ghost,
illusion, and apparition. Don’t think of me as volcano, the woman
seems to say, the girl child, clouds wherever they fix their eyes.
There is legacy.
But there are also proponents for change, grief-stricken hearts,
impoverished, disadvantaged, and marginalized circumstances. There is
forgiveness, tenderness, vertigo, karmic accounts, and debts that have
to be paid, and the analysis of scandal, and love story. Rituals of
innocence, and wisdom to keep them company. I always wonder about the
writer’s routine. Just the thought of this writer hurt me.
I thought of the writer’s anguish, in much the same way I thought of
all the characters in the book, their anguish. It played a major role
for me. Then came their sadness in a supporting role. Is the writer a
morning person, an afternoon person, or an evening person? Do they
write into the lonely hours of early morning? What was the object of
the writer’s affection, the subjects they framed so imaginatively?
For not the first time in my life, when it came to reviewing a book, I
ran away. I danced away from the writer’s vision for his book. This
book was a crazy love, and the people in this book didn’t often obey
the laws of human nature, or the rules of the game, or know when to
say please, or thank you. This book was a boat journey into fire, a
river of fire, the flames licking at the canvas of my bare feet.
Invoking me to stay.
It was a crossing into the divide of sleeping and dreaming, thought
and meditation, prayer and vision. You see the writer’s mind at work,
a filmmaker’s vision, a poet’s meditation, a short story writer
dreaming away. So, the book is acrobatic, intense, hectic, and there’s
conflict, and drama that never leaves the page, but you get taken from
point to principle, from one identity crisis to the next.
The women have an uninhibited desire for courage, savvy, sass, even
when they are at their most vulnerable. They are armed with intuition,
persuasion, greatness, supernatural memory, and desire. I paid
critical attention to these women, these mothers with their large
haunting eyes. They’re not party people, they’re not beach people.
They’re people who go off to war every day of their lives.
Yet, there’s something beautiful about them. In their pain, their
humiliation, the drudgery of their lives, they take you from the
beginning of this book of short stories to the end, and you are
wanting them to overcome their circumstances through any means
necessary. And I think to myself, this is a Frantz Fanon, Chinua
Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri writing here. What now of the valley
we’re in.
We’re dreaming that our books, our pen, our sword if you will, will
hit the mark, will hit the ground running, and there’s the belief that
our books will fascinate audiences, and we dream as Africans from the
east to the west in poetry. We write our novels, and short stories in
poetry. We envision that now is the time for that. The plausible time
for the possible, and impossible, the time for Africans not to be soft
targets.
It is difficult for African novelists, and short story writers to
publish their books. The world has gone gaga over Nigerian female
writers, but where are the male writers. They’re there. It’s just that
favor, and increase has yet to work for them in the same way that it
has for someone like Chimamanda Adichie. Sola Osofisan, I don’t think
that you really understand what you’ve done. You’ve changed
everything. I see Africa on the screen of my mind. I see Nigeria on
the screen of my mind.
The writer taught me that God will put entities in your path either to
obstruct you, destroy you, sabotage you, or uplift, empower you, and
make you selfless, giving, gifted visionary. The book is a journey.
The book is a spiritual journey. Sola Osofisan has a destiny, a
kingdom, and in these pages, I took a knowledge from, lessons from my
father, stories from my mother. There’s personal fulfillment here on
these pages.
There were chapters from my childhood. Things I didn’t want to
remember, but I remembered the lesson. Don’t waste the pain. Kill your
enemies with kindness. Things happen in life. Things happen in Africa.
Mostly negative things happen to women, and girl children in Africa.
But they wake up in the morning, the country is still there. There’s a
truly wonderful feeling in the air for me right now. Sola Osofisan is
Herculean, an Aristotle-in-the-making.
Anybody who writes is creative, but few writers, creatives are
historians, researchers, perfect illustrators at interpreting the past
injustices of their country. I don’t need the world to love me after
eight books. I have the same message for Sola Osofisan. Go on,
comrade. Don’t quit, compatriot. Write as if you are living on the
edge of the world, as if it’s the end times. Don’t give up your
passion.
I’ve discovered the African Renaissance in Sola Osofisan, his brave
world, his artistry, his flawless writing, profound technique, and
style, and there’s chaos, hysteria, spiritual sensitivity that he
brings to his writing. It is dazzling, and sure, hectic and pure, as
he describes the landscape of life. Of what matters, mapping it all
out for the reader, and it seems as if I have waited forever to read a
book like this. There’s conditioned thinking, church, indoctrinated
religion, theologians that are still there.
From the first page the characters hover in plain sight like the music
of the night. They are anointed, and enigmatic (nurturers, caretakers,
products of neo-colonialism that awaken others to insight, loneliness,
curbing their enthusiasm for the disgruntled, the downtrodden,
miserable pain of their lives). There is something frightening about
the reality and non-reality of these stories.
How these people are blessed by their enemies even. The stories are
filled with movement like dance, moving rhetoric that represents the
unseen system, and a country that is as captivating as a symphony
orchestra. I think of the aspects of almost prophetic vision that the
people in these stories have. Forgive them. Forgive Sola Osofisan for
taking you there. When you’re exhausted, take a break, inhale the
aromas of the food cooking on the fire, exhale the happy days that
these people will never have.
You just know that you are in the hands of a master-storyteller. More
than imprint burned on brain, more like a ghost. I miss you more than
most on some days, just thinking of the very thought of you. The book
came to me in blooming flowers, in energetic silhouettes, in evolving
waves, in vibrations, marking its intelligence in rotation in fulltime
observation, great expectations of greatness in study.
Yes, the awareness of something evil is also out there asking for the
taking. We live our lives in denial. That denial has become a pastime
whenever we are figuring out the hurting in our lives, who was
involved with the hurt, why’d it has to impact us so, hit us so hard.
I love this writer who displays in one heart the fugitive spirit of
humanity, in one soul survival and endurance, and fear and anxiety in
the rural wilderness of the countryside in Africa. This is not an
African book by far. It is a Nigerian book.
Nigerian creatives are using every story that they’ve heard from
childhood, that has doors that lead to intimacy and frustration, that
navigate you towards health, and homesickness, a basket case, and the
decay found in the wild. Camp out in ‘Blood Will Call’ but don’t get
too comfortable. Soon a force-field will hit you. The man you don’t
want to marry, risk, adventure, and radiance. You can never predict
the direction in which this writer goes. It is not the weather.
This writer eats the crumbs from our masters’ table, the dust of the
colonial masters’ until it feels like home, with his angel tongue. I
am a writer who understands the anatomy of loneliness, and the
explicit, controversial, seed-language of blood. The book will grant
you a revolutionary kiss on the lips, it is intellectual-magic, on so
many levels political, breaking and un-breaking diplomacy,
negotiation, and reconciliation.
Now a few words about Sola Osofisan, the writer of Blood Will Call.
In Africa, in tales of folklore, in the tradition, culture,
background, heritage of oral storytelling, passing stories from one
generation to the next, there is always a woman involved. Now we have
a man. Not just any man. We have a maverick-extraordinaire who knows
when to make a gracious exit in-and-out of these relationships. He’s
conscientizing an entire generation.