Arinze Ifeakandu's God's Children Are Little Broken Things: A Review

 

Arinze Ifeakandu was a young prodigy. At 17 he attended the Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop, led by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in 2013. The following year he wrote the short story “God's Children Are Little Broken Things,” which won him an A Public Space emerging writer fellowship in 2015, and was shortlisted for The Caine African Prize for African Writing in 2017, when he was 22. That year he started an MFA in Creative Writing at Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the US. As for prodigies, of any age, of any skill, much is expected of Arinze. On his 2022 debut book God's Children Are Little Broken Things, a collection of nine stories, titled after his Caine-shortlisted story, of detailed contemporary Nigerian gay relationships, he meets our expectations.

But this is Nigeria. Being gay, being queer, has been criminalized. This political atmosphere cannot be totally overlooked when reading a book like Arinze's. And yet these stories aren’t about the Same-sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) passed in 2014. It's also not not about the anti-gay law. It's Arinze's stories that do not reduce love and romance and intimacy to politics. Still, we have to read them with this background knowledge in the back of our minds, where Arinze rightly relegates it to. After all people, family members in fact, often oppress Arinze's gay and bisexual men and boys with the arrogance of a state-backed hatred. See “Where the Heart Sleeps.” The African Magic kind of drama put up by Dubem’s family against Tochukwu is an example.

Arinze’s portrayal of gay relationship and intimacy is all the more nuanced. He offers not flat and simple stories of love but deep tales of intimacies detailed with complications and comforts. More so, the stories are placed within the context of family. As a result we don't see state-sanctioned violence against gays but homophobic parents, siblings, relatives, acquaintances and strangers, who are sometimes physically abusive, sometimes emotionally, sometimes verbally, sometimes more, sometimes all. He's made sure to only offer the essence of life: love, beautiful and messy, people, flawed and loving and daring.

Actually the way he peoples his book is one reason his fiction works. (Raymond Carver: “Fiction that counts is about people.”) His Chimamanda-like dramatic descriptions could interestingly sketch out a character’s interior. You pause, wondering that someone could sense “the shape of a familiar sadness" and that a wide and soft bed and its spotless white sheets could be “filled with a shapeless sadness" all the same. But his attentiveness to life is most refreshing. It's one secret way he fleshes out characters and captures cities and life altogether. Carver extols the writer that looks at things in “a unique and exact way” and finds “the right context for [artistically] expressing that way of looking.” Arinze doesn't only look at things exactly and uniquely, and express them artistically. He's also tender with the life he's invented. With his material.

Soft, subtle, he knows the littlest of acts that is a flicker of desire. He knows when and why and how a small, sweet stirring starts in a chest and what a voice husky with need sounds like. He knows how through a window a moon cuts cones on the floor. He knows how the orange and green vests of traffic wardens become squares of light in the evening. He knows those secret habits of cities and people, the minute yet intimate, the cool and the dirty, “like childhood rhymes.” He's that guy who has drunk up life in small measures. Who finds pleasure in the fold of a curtain. Or the blinking, starry affect of Christmas hat lights. And this ensures the lived-in three-dimensionality of his fiction.

But the book is not all sensuality. The stories could be jagged and complex in structure. Most of the plots are fluid and blurred. They jerk back and forth between the past and the now, flashbacks interjecting the flow of life, a slice of the future stealing into the shape of things. Some of these structurally-roughened stories, usually told by a third-person narrator, in fact move now and again from a character’s perspective to another's. And the reader is often tossed here and there, now and then, like ping-pong. Consequently these stories are choppy, sketchy, fleeting.

The structure mimics the roughness of life, sure. Life, always in a knot like a bow-tie, isn't a straight line of events and this structure gives us that. But the structure has its limit. Take “Michael's Possessions.” Imagine if the confrontation between Adanna and Obinna has been shown and not reported. If it happens in the now, before us, and not in the past, behind us. Imagine such poignancy. It's easy to think this story should have been written in Raymond Carver's often straight-line narrative style. To favour another Carver's stylistic preference such vital moment of drama could be hinted at instead of being shown at all, dipped below the prose' smooth but broken surface, and still be poignant. Even a tennis addict, whose head follows the played ball the most among the spectators, needs the ball to rest once in a while.

The sentences, too, are long and tangled like pasta. (He claimed he wanted to write different sentences than Carver-like short, simple sentences while editing the stories for the collection.) Less full stops are used and many simple sentences are packed into a long one, clauses of adverbs doodling at the ends like ponytails. To be sure they're simple in thought, stylish, controlled, rhythmic, but complex in structure. These sentence types help slow things down but not enough. “Alobam,” for one, is tedious. Was published on Guernica before the book came out but couldn't read it, then, no matter how many times or how hard I tried. The title story, now different from the earlier version out there, is another example. The new version is structurally mature and decorative, sketchy, flying, actually, like a Delacroix's drawing. But the old version is more tender and more relaxed and more moving.

No matter. Arinze tells good stories peopled with humans in style, still. These people he does not indulge nor forsake. Life-like, he lets them suffer when they need to and afford them small mercies all the same. He's like an all-powerful, all-knowing God who doesn't lay claim to being all-good. Deliberate like a deity, he sets the laws of his fictional universe in motion and sits back to see things happen as programed. But things don't often feel programed. And when they do they do due to the circumstances of life in the society represented in the book.

Again take “Where the Heart Sleeps.” Middle-aged Dubem, a father of a grown-up daughter, chooses a man, who lives with him in his house, at least before the story begins, over his wife, who though not legally divorced now lives elsewhere. This story is both futuristic and realistic, futuristic for that kind of older Nigerian gay relationship, realistic for its overall aching sadness. Ijapa O writes that Kunle Ologunro’s “The Mathematics of Hooking up” is “queer fantasy.” This, too, is. Not because the love it narrates is so “perfect, so pristine” but because it's not yet a commonplace queer reality. It feels Hollywood, something out of American Fiction, a last-year film by Cord Jefferson. 

Things can also seem programed by how the characters’ fate is determined. Arinze is often left with two choices on how to break them. Namely heartbreak or rejection. The first by a man's lover. The second by his family or his lover's family. Rejection by acquaintances and strangers are almost default, of course. If someone has been broken by their lover then Arinze is likely to offer the small mercy of significant acceptance by family. But if they enjoy significant familial acceptance then their heart is likely to be broken by their lover. After a while this pattern becomes repetitive and predictable. But it's no fault of Arinze's. That's the reality of his characters’ society, our society. Needless to say this is a sad reality. Accordingly the book is sad, so sad we're relieved as much as refreshed when the final story, though a sad one, offers us a small surprise of happiness at the end, closing the book on that note, promising hope, offering relief. Shows how much Arinze cares about us. His characters, too. 

That last story is vital. Lauren Groff talks of the invisible architecture of the best of story collections. The first story should ask a question or set up an argument. This question, this argument, is then complicated story after story until the final story “sends a sort of prismatic light [on the question, the argument] shooting back into daily life.” Arinze's book crackles with sadness. But ends, thanks to this final story, on a promise of hope, a hope that lingers long after you finish the book, a hope that shoots back into daily life. You can't read this intimate epic and not think of Arinze as kind. His is fiction that isn't fake.