“The melancholic whistle of a chugging train trailed off in the far distance. Cars coughed and grumbled awake, their horn-blares cross in the pre-dawn silence. The whisk of working brooms, mesmeric in their regularity; the slap and whirr of pigeon wings; the careless slam of a wind-caught door; the rhythmic thumps of hurried pestles; the smell of rising dust and curling woodsmoke and boiling water and the warm sad waft of abandoned shit; the lonely lilt of a mother’s voice raised in melodious devotion: one and all they signaled the daily miracle of man’s resurrection.”

Without trying to write out everything in A. Igoni Barrett’s new book, ‘From Caves Of Rotten Teeth’, a collection of short stories, the above excerpt shows a writing that defines memorable.

The book is a collection of commendable stories that turn everyday clichés into an entirely new experience. In the opening story of the book, ‘Pluck Today Tomorrow’s Wilted Flower’, first published in Farafina magazine, the readers get a taste of the author’s style.

The story is about a day in the life of a circumstantial character who learns to live with her situation. Here, the writer tells the story many people draw in their minds about Chadian beggars. All those questions they wish to ask, and ask about, those lovely but most times sickly-looking children who do the begging whilst their parents sit by idly, waiting for the day’s delivery, are raised by him in this succinct tale. The reader is however left to ponder on where they (the beggars) go, what they do, how they think, and their lives away from the streets.

This, ultimately, is a story that leaps out from the page into the streets, making every Chadian beggar the reader comes across after its perusal, less of a stranger.

Barrett won BBC World Short Story Prize in 2005 for ‘The Phoenix’. The story is about a handicap, and an itinerant modiste, who is mistaken for a thief by a mob and is burnt alive. When the mob realise their mistake everyone begins to make excuses, leaving the charred body of their victim in the ‘ashes of his dreams’.

The stories in the collection are an apt description of pertinent issues in Nigerian (indeed African) society, creating concrete imageries for those events that surpass the daily choice of words.

There are 14 stories in the collection, and one way or the other they swing around the subject of despondency, hunger, anger, pain, hatred, ignorance and gloom, in fact, all those evils we pray to ignore in society.

In stories like ‘Domination’, ‘The Tempest’, ‘In The Heat’ (these three previously published on the Laura Hird Showcase), in addition to ‘The Twilight Zone’, ‘Dancing Down A Road That Leads Nowhere’ and ‘They Would Be Swine’, stories that every reader is acquainted with are told with a fresh vitality that memorably condenses several aspects of life.

A. Igoni Barrett presents to his readers those points that confound their daily experiences, as he opens a visual percept on his society through his many characters and places, creating in the process an atmosphere on the pages of a book that is both an interesting and refreshing read.

A striking example of the more satirical bent of his writing is the somewhat experimental story, ‘The Father, The Son, The Pastor And The Holy Spirit’, where the narrator, I.(there is a temptation to call him Igoni), bears witness to the unfolding story of a father, his son, a pastor and of course the intervention of the ‘Holy Spirit’. With a sense of deep involvement arising from the nature of the storytelling (which could also leave the reader open to the confusion the characters suffer from), this story exposes the ignorance and prejudice rife in the new-day evangelical churches that are an integral part of modern African society. This is a state of affairs in which, as the story so successfully depicts, an individual can be subjected to both physical and psychological abuse in the name of casting out of ‘evil spirits’, and where every form of human degradation is integrated by the overzealous to establish a divine law that they can barely understand.

In conclusion, the stories of ‘From Caves Of Rotten Teeth’ condense several aspects of life, and the book is a welcome addition to the pantheon of world literature.

Jumoke Verissimo lives in Lagos, Nigeria. She has published her works in The Guardian, Ashes and Diamonds, and AIA link. She works as a sub-editor with farafina-online, in Nigeria.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.