"No European writer could have written 'Things Fall Apart,' " says Ernest Emenyonu, who chairs the department of Africana studies at the University of Michigan at Flint. It was "a new kind of writing," for two reasons:

The first was the way Achebe made the colonizer's language his own. By incorporating Igbo speech patterns, proverbs, folk tales and beliefs, he invented an English that could "articulate African aesthetics and African poetics." The second was that he "explored the psychology of imperial conquest" and challenged Eurocentric views.

In other words: Part of what Africans suffered at European hands was the loss of control over their own narrative.

Achebe took back that narrative.

-         Bob Thompson, Things Fall Into Place,

         The Washington Post, March 9, 2008

I have just finished reading Biyi Bandele’s latest novel, Burma Boy. Major kudos to Farafina, the publishers of this book. Farafina has come a long way since I last read their production of Tanure Ojaide’s The Activist. Burma Boy is a beautiful production, carefully laid out with a nice cover, bereft of typographical errors and significant editing issues. It is remarkably easy on the eyes. I salute Farafina for a job well done. In terms of the contents of the book itself, have you ever read a book that you could never put down because you feel this weird obligation to finish it? To relive that experience, buy Biyi Bandele’s book Burma Boy and try to read it. You will never put it down. Spurred on by Bandele’s boundless enthusiasm for the story and his reverence for his father’s noble contributions to the war effort, I so badly wanted to love this feisty book. Unfortunately, I had trouble reading it to the end. I got lost in the middle but I re-booted my motivation and started over. And I slugged through the book again. And again. The exercise was tedious; not painful, but tedious. This book is an ambitious project but I am not quite sure Bandele pulled this one off.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely loved the dialogue in Burma Boy – Bandele’s skills as a really good playwright are evident and enviable. I loved the galloping intensity of the first chapter of the book as hearty chunky sentences raced me through the colorful streets of Cairo and the demented tortured soul of the book’s first character, Major Wingate. Unfortunately, the transition from a playwright to a novelist is bumpy at best. For example, a play can happily absorb umpteen characters; you know, market women, street urchins, hangers-on in the king’s palace, etc, etc, but a novel does not have that much staying power. There are all these characters, inchoate, rambling on and on with malarial delirium. Also, caricatures have their place in plays; properly deployed they can be delightful exaggerations of the human condition, witness the riotous and manic delights of the characters in Wole Soyinka’s Jero plays. Burma Boy struggles with an identity problem, a play wishing to be a novel.

What is Burma Boy all about? It is about a certain war takes place in Burma but I shall return to that question later. The book’s one major failing is that it fails to anchor the story in its proper context. The reader is initially left hanging, wondering why this book is talking about a certain war. You would almost have to read about what Burma Boy is trying to deliver in order to have a fair shot at enjoying it.  The alert reader quickly learns that it is about a certain war, some of which took place in Burma and boatloads of Nigerians fought in this war, and it was a war that they didn’t have a dog in but one they fought in like dogs. But what was the war all about? Those who truly want to understand what Bandele is trying to say should first read the books he recommends in his helpful “Author’s Notes” at the back of the book. I especially recommend James Shaw’s A March Out. Then they should read Burma Boy. In this respect, the book fails to deliver what would appear to be an enchanting story. Anchored to a succinct context, the story would have been a crowd pleaser. Bereft of an enabling context, the reader keeps asking the irritating question: Where are we?  The book lurches drunkenly from obese sentence to obese sentence, egged on by legions of tragic-comical characters.

So what is this book really all about? The near-context for all this penkelemesi is buried in one sentence one-thirds into the book: “The story of the day is that Kingi Joji, monarch of Ingila is fighting a war in a land called Boma and he wants our help.” (p 42) As seen through the eyes of Private Ali Banana, the main character, it is about the heroic exploits of West African soldiers who were part of the Chindits, forces that fought gallantly during World War II. The Chindits, under the fearless and lunatic leadership of a British officer named Orde Wingate were a part of the allied Special Forces of the 2nd World War. As Chapter 1 of Bandele’s book shows Wingate was easily one of the most charismatic, if not lunatic military chiefs of World War II.  The Chindits were highly effective against the Japanese. They destroyed bridges and railroads, attacked logistics units and disrupted vital supply lines, all while staying largely embedded inside enemy territory. These West African soldiers or “Burma Boys” were a critical part of these operations; however most of the stories in print tend to glorify only the white combatants. The most charitable of the stories involve condescending, patronizing, and mostly racist commentaries about these soldiers. Their white counterparts certainly found them fascinating, if not exotic and tended to write about them as if they were sub-humans. Books like Shaw’s The March Out that Bandele praises effusively are written in this vein. Bandele set out on a noble quest - to write a story from the West African soldiers’ perspective. Unfortunately, he takes the ball from the white writers, and mostly runs fast in the wrong direction.

There is plenty to frustrate the reader in this book. Bandele obviously read a lot of books about the Burma experience and it shows. It is not a pretty sight however. Numerous scenes are lovingly slapped together and they hang together, tough but separate, hardly ever jelling in this unlikely stew of a story – like the unhappy ingredients of a pot of okro soup put together by a hungry and impatient cook. Every ingredient stands alone refusing to play Bandele’s dream symphony. The okro soup’s richness is rendered destitute by the narcissism of its feuding ingredients. For example, in design and execution, chapter 1 is easily the best part of the book, but what is the point of this chapter other than to introduce a perversely eccentric character – Major Wingate? Also characters are born and rapidly killed off – there is no staying power.  A painful riot of too many minor characters ensures that the reader stays distracted from the message. The book is a caricaturist’s delight. Stereotypes, mostly ethnic fall upon stereotypes and jostle gamely for space in the reader’s limited span of attention. Here, in this book, exaggerations are an inappropriate tool for scoring points. Also since the war theatre remains oblique to the reader, let me suggest that a map of the war theatre in that region (Burma, India, etc) would have been useful.

Overweight sentences puff and huff their way through a maze of a story. The very first sentence in the book screams, “I need to go on a diet!” I am not exaggerating; two mere sentences go on for three quarters of a page. Awkward sentences, fat, with muscles in the wrong places and fat everywhere else. Exhibit one:

“Godiwillin Nnamdi, a school-teacher’s son from Onitsha who had joined the army to spite his father for some slight he could no longer remember, ominously announced that only last week two Indian nationalists, who wanted neither the British in their country, nor the Japs, but would prefer the Japs if they had to make a choice, had been caught trying to poison the base’s water supply.” (p 56)

There are all these long sentences thrown into a room and thy loll about like grenades that won’t go off. Exhibit 2:

“A wandering bomb soared beyond the trucks and disintegrated into several smaller bombs as it struck a tree like an axe with a thousand blades, carving the thick stem into several pieces and flinging the disembodied upper trunk with its crown of shattered branches into the solid undergrowth behind.” (p 114)

The attempts at humor only register and arrest the beginnings of a smile on the reader’s face like the beginnings of great sex arrested at half climax. Frustrating. There are good moments. Hear Private Ali Banana, the main character:

“’… I pay homage to the scorpion for, as the saying goes, he who spurns that which is short, hasn’t stepped on a scorpion. Am I being spurned because I’m short? It surely cannot be because I don’t speak your language. I’ve tried learning it, your eminence, God is my witness. But every time I start from a to z, I get lost somewhere between β and đ, and my head hurts and I have to lie down to recover. May you live long kyaftin sir.’” (p 40)