Recent Nigerian memoirs that aren’t at the same time hackneyed hagiographies are very hard to come by indeed. The pleasure of encountering Little Birds and Ordinary People, a work straddling the nexus between the written meditation and the compte rendu was therefore a welcome relief from the monuments of literary dross littering the landscape.
There is a high-mindedness to this book which separates it from the muster of tired resolve to ‘write a book’ at the end of active careers – the apparent motivation for most of these other painful texts in the market.
There is, also, a certain grit to the telling of this fardel of many stories that gives fresh perspectives to the reader regarding the intractable problems of Nigeria, the Niger Delta and the oil and gas industry. Many of the accounts, for those who have known Nigeria long enough, provide cues and clues to the massive jigsaw puzzle that is the political economy of Africa’s most populous country.
For this reader, it was a view from the boiler room, a tour through the steam and grime that propels the ship of state. The pace of the writing is leisurely – though the book itself touches on the most serious of subjects. This is a book to take with you to the bank of a placid lake or a gentle running stream, a book to read in the early morning sun or in the cool of the evening under an umbrella or a shade tree.
This is a book to read against a backdrop of birdsong and not the busy twittering (of the electronic variety) and hum offices. It is tempting to say this book is a temptation to the bourgeois repose in reading, but, it is also clear that the mind that wrote the book isn’t of the materialistic bent. Yet there is tenderness to the telling of Mr. Haastrup’s stories, a degree of emotional intelligence necessary to get through to an audience in two minds about what the oil and gas industry has done in Nigeria. This is strength of the book but also a weakness.
At times, the work reads like an audi alteram partem brief for the demonized oil and gas industry. A compromise this reviewer worked out is to see this book as an oriel into realities we may not ordinarily access except through specialist documents of no aesthetic value whatsoever.
The main strength of the book, in my view, is the vast canvass of history it erects and the complex nature of the society it portrays. Artists say it all boils down to perspective. From the plastic arts to the literary arts, the inherent value in the work is in its power to persuade the audience to see things from new points of view.
Yet this book works as mimesis as well, the language is beautiful and efficient, and most importantly, it rings true. It may not so ring to the African born in the eighties and afterwards, who have only know the chaos and the brutish (in overall abundance) when it comes to Nigeria.
Haastrup doesn’t so much conjure as he resurrects a Nigeria that was, at some earlier point in the 20th century, a place for all peoples, a veritable melting pot, a balanced mix of the rustic and the urbane. That Nigeria, that Ibadan, was the place that led other places in terms of cultural output, announcing the pioneering talents of J.P Clark, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Den- nis Brutus, Duro Ladipo, Demas Nwoko and Es’kia Mphahlele among others, to the world. Like his grandfather before him, the author eventually chooses the urbane. It may be argued that the Ibadan which provided the ambience for the author’s formative years cannot be properly defined as a village.
However, considering that Ibadan is roughly the same age as Toronto, for instance, it isn’t so far-fetched to argue, as the author does, that the densely populated conurbation keeps a leg in the past as it does a leg in the present. Little Birds and Ordinary People goes further than the past and present, venturing and even stravaging, into the future. With very deft shifting of the gears, the author even convinces the reader to see the journey not in linear terms but as a gyre.
This, in my opinion, is when the author is at his most mystical and African. The great thing, though, is the conviction in the writing that the journey can be improved, that the cycle isn’t a closed one, that there can be what the Japanese call Kaizen. Away from the preoccupation with work and career, the book, dedicated to the memory of the author’s brother, Adesina Haastrup, works at an even deeper emotional substratum as a memorial and as a celebration of life and not of loss.
They say we are truly gone when the last human mentions our name. Deji Haastrup has erected a more lasting monument than marble to his late brother in this regard, this book will be read as long as humankind is literate.
It is an impetus that works through the warp and woof of the writing, transmuting into the author’s hope and vision for country and continent. We have come so far as individuals, as siblings, as families, moieties, clans, nations and as continent but always we have a choice to make.
We can choose better for self and community. Without fishing for a hook, the account in Little Birds and Ordinary People finds one nonetheless in its deliberately understated case for the better half of humankind, the women. I’m tempted to read women into the Ordinary People in the title of the book. Through most of human history the women have borne the brunt and the species as a whole as suffered for the obtuse choice by men in the status quo.
I personally wish the author wasn’t as sophisticated in his arguments for womankind in this book although I’m persuaded that close readers will see very clearly what the mind at work is about. History shouldn’t be read as his story alone, the author seems to argue, it is her story as well.
The hand that rocks the cradle, we know, rules the world. A way to imagine what the author envisions is to put the tableaux of the entire saga of the Niger Delta against the backdrop of a better educated, better respected and better rewarded working women. The world would be a better place.
Book title: Little Birds and Ordinary People
Author: Deji Haastrup
Publishers: Bookcraft, Ibadan
Year of Publication: 2017
Pages: 406
Reviewer: Tade Ipadeola