The Road to the Country is a novel whose portrayal of the maximal exertions of guilt and love in a time of war will continue to disturb the memory long after it has been finished.
By Chimezie Chika
Chigozie Obioma’s third novel, The Road to the Country, begins with both a vision and a memory. The vision is that of an Ifa priest in 1947 who foresees events that would take place twenty years in the future, beginning in 1967, when the Biafran War (1967-70) began in Nigeria. This is the framework upon which this historical novel of war and its human costs is based.
For nearly a decade, Obioma has produced unique fiction which, at this point, can be collectively put under the tag of mystical realism. Each of his novels is often framed by an overarching metaphysical conceit marked mainly by a singular prophecy or prediction of immense tragedy.
In his last two novels, The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), Chigozie Obioma has mastered the kind of fiction in which the tragic lives of his characters are greatly controlled by forces beyond the human realm, and the one recurrent thing is that these forces are always made known to us.
The reader is introduced to these forces as strange or otherworldly characters within the story, even while the story retains all its tangible hold on realism. In the mystical, yet authentically African lore of Obioma’s fictional world, the structure and story of The Road to the Country fits in perfectly.
A tendency towards the epic—another trait of Chigozie Obioma’s fiction—is also evident here in this gripping story centred around Kunle, a young introverted university student of Yoruba-Igbo parentage wracked inexpressibly by guilt regarding a childhood accident that renders his younger brother, Tunde, a cripple. He is given a task to go find his brother who had suddenly disappeared into the breakaway Eastern Region of Nigeria where the Biafran War had just begun.
This review does not need to recap the bloody history of that war, but in the novel Obioma sketches out the motivations for the war through conversations between Kunle and his father. And, as with all of Chigozie Obioma’s work, the sense of fated doom is evident from the beginning of the story.
Upon arriving in the Eastern Region, Kunle finds himself adrift. He gets unwittingly conscripted into the Biafran Army as a survival strategy and experiences the horrors of the war first-hand. Along the line, Kunle develops relationships that come to play a vital role in his survival.
It is interesting indeed that no amount of factual information on the Biafran War (which available books are not enough) quite cushions one for the raw brutality of it.
Few war-induced famine, malnutrition, disease, and suffering has been as thoroughly televised and captured in Western media as those seen during the Biafran War (images of that war still pops up when you google words like “Kwashiorkor”), famously leading to colossal relief efforts by humanitarian organisations, including Caritas and Red Cross, crowd-funding drives and mass protests around the world, culminating Bruce Mayrock’s heroic incineration of himself in New York over the stance of the West on the war.
This war was also famously behind the formation of the now influential Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) by French doctors who were thoroughly shaken by what they saw of the war.
In this story, Obioma unflinchingly brings all these horrors close to home. There is almost no respite for the reader, for everywhere in Kunle’s experience of the war, we see suffering of mental, physical, and emotional proportions.
Chigozie Obioma’s prose is unrelenting and his narrative is especially gut-wrenching for its details of war-making and the physical costs as well as the emotional turmoil of it all. For many years now, the only novel that has treated the topic of the Biafran War with adequate prosaic gravitas remains Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2006 book, Half of a Yellow Sun.
Obioma’s novel fictionalises this dark period in Nigeria’s history with the kind of understanding of life which would place it among the best stories written on the war.
But The Road to the Country tells the story differently, since we see the events of the story from a soldier’s point of view; and though it is not first Biafran War story from a soldier’s point of view, it is without question the best to tell the Biafran story from that angle, in addition to being stylistically and structurally an entirely different other excellent novels of the war.
The Road to the Country is also told from a Yoruba perspective, the first time a serious novel about the war is given such a voice, bringing a different set of cultural and historical connections to the story (a number of Yoruba soldiers including, Colonel Victor Banjo, fought on the side of Biafra).
In terms of its attention to the physical and psychological horrors of the battleground, the novel bears out the comparisons that have been made between it and Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 classic, All Quiet on the Western Front.
The novel possesses tonal fraternities with other African war novels written in the 21st century, especially the likes of David Diop’s 2018 book, At Night All Blood is Black. It will not be too out of place to observe that war novels are an especially important part of African literature, perhaps because the continent has seen and has continued to be embroiled in too many devastating wars and internecine conflicts, the Biafran War being one of the most devastating in modern African history.
As real and personal as it is for an Igbo writer, what especially separates and places Chigozie Obioma’s narrative beyond most other novels already written on the conflict, is his recourse to the spectacular spiritual language of the mystical.
It gives The Road to the Country a certain cosmic feel, a sense of a narrative whose significance stretches beyond the realms of history to encompass the very stakes of human existence. And war, many would argue, exerts high stakes on the business of survival and on human life.
Chigozie Obioma employs metaphors as a potent concept in the story, so that as the narrative progresses we begin to feel Kunle’s story is not just that of one man, but that of a generation, a lost generation, whose lives and understanding of life have been defined by the experience of war.
The Road to the Country is then not just the treacherous journey to the war-torn Eastern Region of Nigeria in ‘67. It becomes a metaphysical journey into the origins and battlegrounds of man’s very fate on earth.
Each of Kunle’s death-filled encounters becomes a struggle between the larger forces of life and death as it were—amidst the vague but significant aura of mystery that pervades the narrative.
Obioma excels in portraying the grim pessimism of war realism and the oddly experiential wisdom that comes out of having experienced it. His masterful prose glitters with many vivid and sagacious gems:
“Tunde’s disappearance happened so suddenly—as if trouble had walked in on them in broad daylight with noiseless, black feet, and wreaked its wrath before anyone could stir.”; “The vehicle blunders into the undergrowth, tugs blindly to one side, and jerks to a stop like an old hog shot through the heart.”; “They have seen so much, and they will see yet more. They must learn to withstand what they have seen, to adapt. If it shocks you, then it can haunt you; if it haunts you, it can damage you.”, and so on.
One question central to the novel is how does life make sense in the middle of the senseless trivialisation of life in war? How do we continue to live, to love, and to hope, while death is having a field day all around us?
Kunle’s “journey”—his navigations of personal and collective guilt, his witnessing of incessant bloodshed and his encounter with war’s burring of the line between the oppressed and the oppressor—offers great insights into this.
The Road to the Country is for this reason not a read for the faint-hearted. It is a difficult read in an emotional and historical sense, but it is a novel filled with Chigozie Obioma’s characteristic empathy, this time for characters trying to survive another day in the grim battlefronts of a genocidal war.
There are early sections in the first part of this novel which I found inauthentic—Kunle’s memories of his childhood and his relationship with his parents which appears as if the author missed a few opportunities to properly outlay parents-son relationships in those unique circumstances.
But having picked up with a strong sense of writerly purpose after that, we realise immediately that this is a novel whose vital story is told by a writer who possesses a talent for depicting the raw emotional power of the human condition.
With its immensely gratifying ending, this is a novel whose portrayal of the maximal exertions of guilt and love in a time of war will continue to disturb the memory long after it has been finished.
Chimezie Chika’s short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, Channel Magazine and Afrocritik. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on Twitter @chimeziechika1.
Cover photo credit: Hogarth Books