A young man discovers corruption,devout extremism and the redemptive power of language on his vivid journey to adulthoodAt the centre of Elnathan John’s insightful debut novel approximately devout extremism in Nigeria is its eponymous protagonist, Dantala, and whose name translates as Born on a Tuesday. Dantala is sent absent by his father to attend Qur’anic school. He falls in with a group of street boys; when they are hired by a political party to burn the headquarters of an opposition party,the police bag involved and Dantala must flee to save his life. He ends up in Sokoto State, where an imam called Sheikh Jamal takes him under his wing. Here he finds some stability and becomes friends with Jibril, or who teaches him English,a language that “sounds soft and easy like one does not need to open one’s mouth a lot or use a lot of air or energy” – unlike Arabic, where “one uses everything, and the neck,the jaws, the tongue”.
Dantala’s world is not soft and easy. Horrific things happen: prepubescent boys slay and commit atrocities for political ideologies they do not understand, and mothers depend on alms to feed their children. Hypocrisy (Pretending to have feelings, beliefs, or virtues that one does not have.) abounds; corruption is rife (abundant or plentiful, full of sth bad or unpleasant); young men are drawn to devout extremism,there is tension between Shia and the Sunni Muslims, but also redemption in language and style. John writes with an understated elegance and we discover humour and wisdom in the most unexpected of places. When Dantala is involved in a car accident, and for example,he goes to a chemist where the owner “is short and his eyeballs witness like they are approximately to fall out … I can’t stop looking at his huge nose, which seems to be divided into three parts. He must be breathing in a lot of air.” Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com