Book Report: The Fishermen

3. Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen (2015) (3/2/19)

This book took me a while to complete: I found it difficult to sink into. The first half jumped around in time and scene, often filling in context with backflash. I imagine that that was a device, allowing us to assemble past memories into a whole constellation of meaning along with the narrator. But I still found it disorienting.

Not until halfway through, following a set of major crises, did the story achieve a momentum. But take off it did, and I was able to wrap up the second half of the book in one sitting.

The story, narrated by nine-year-old Ben, concerns a family of humble but respectable means in the southern Nigerian city of Akure, especially the four oldest boys (of whom Ben is the youngest). Tragedy unfolds, incident on a prophecy uttered by a madman, Abulu, one day while the boys are illicitly fishing at the river: that the eldest, Ikenna, will "die by the hands of a fisherman"—which Ikenna interprets to mean one of his brothers.

The prophecy comes to pass, and the family is thrown into painful turmoil. Though in the end, I believe, a form of restitution, or redemption, holds sway. The family, despite being torn asunder, will survive in its new form.

The story is undergirded by Nigerian history—of which I know very little, but it seems to be marked by chaos and violence, which are mirrored in this tale. Superstition plays a strong role as well, as indicated by the fact that a prophecy can take on such life force. There is also a strongly mythic quality to the descriptions. The chapters are all titled after metaphors, many descriptive of the individual characters: Ben is a moth, a "fragile thing with wings, who basks in light, but who soon loses its wings and falls to the ground." His mother is a falconer, "the one who stood on the hills and watched, trying to stave off whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children." His father is an eagle; Ikenna, a python, but ultimately becoming a sparrow; the second oldest brother, Boja, a fungus. Hope is a tadpole; grief, a leech; and the beasts of grief are spiders. Obioma does a nice job of keeping these metaphors potent as he tells his story.

That said, sometimes the figurative language fell flat: for example, "All we did for the rest of that evening was sing, the dying sun pitched in a corner of the sky as faint as a nipple on the chest of a teenage girl a distance away." No.

Here is a passage from early in the book, in which the father, having just meted out punishment to his four boys for fishing in the dangerous river, explains his hopes for them:

"What I want you to be is a group of fishermen who will be fishers of good dreams, who will not relent until they have caught the biggest catch. I want you to be juggernauts, menacing and unstoppable fishermen."
 This surprised me deeply. I'd thought that he disdained that word. Grasping for meaning, I looked at Obembe [Ben's next-older brother]. He was nodding his head at everything Father said, his brow tinged with the hint of a smile.
 "Good boys," Father muttered, a wide smile smoothening the rough creases that anger and fury had strewn over the yarn of his face. "Listen, in keeping with what I have always taught you, that in every bad thing, you can always dig up some good things, I tell you that you could be a different king of fishermen. Not the kind that fish at a filthy swamp like the Omi-Ala, but fishermen of the mind. Go-getters. Children who will dip their hands into rivers, seas, oceans of this life and become successful: doctors, pilots, professors, lawyers. Eh?"
 He gazed round again. "Those are the kinds of fishermen I want to have as children...."

This passage is echoed at the very end, in a way that suggests that Ben, at the very least (and perhaps Obembe as well), will find the strength to come into his own—if not necessarily as the professor that his father envisions him one day to become, but as someone who can accept responsibility for his own destiny.