How To Tell A Story: A Book Review
Every couple of years in the Nigerian literary scene, a writer debuts with a magnificently excellent collection of stories whose dazzling effects are sure to reach everlasting proportions in the future. Just to limit my picks to recent releases by young writers, in 2019, it was Nnamdi Oguike’s Do Not Say It’s Not Your Country, a collection that brings Africa into one house—in such a manner that expands, that forces its readers to rethink their understanding of nationhood—through crisp prose. In 2022, Arinze Ifeakandu’s God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, a collection that presents the blessed lives of Nigerian queer men. You can call it the Nigerian Gay Manifesto, only that such an appellation would be a disservice to the nature of its language, as it is not normally in the nature of manifestoes to possess words strung together to flow like honey: sweet, thick, sublime. Even when Ifeakandu’s characters face tragic ends, one continues to be dazzled by beauty, a beauty that draws forth empathy. God’s Children affirms the humanity of the Nigerian queer man. Not to mention that it is an exemplar of how to tell a story, how to fill a blank space.
It is 2025 and we have a new debutant to join the list. His name is Jesutomisin Ipinmoye. And his masterpiece is How To Get Rid of Ants. Unlike the two authors I mentioned above, Ipinmoye’s work defies any neat categorization: it has no grand agenda (unless, of course, to advance the author’s vision of storytelling). It just tells stories; if any themes emerge from these stories, if any wrongs are righted through them, then it’s only but an addition. The idea is to tell “short, sharp stories,” and with the fifteen stories in this collection, Ipinmoye shows, just like the author, Sylva Nze Ifedigbo, observes in his blurb of the book, that “just as there are many ways to get rid of ants,” there are also “diverse and captivating approaches to storytelling.”
In the first story in the collection, ‘that space should have been left blank’, Ipinmoye invites his readers into this world he creates, a world complete in and of itself, sustained by its own logic where everything is possible and even the fantastical is real:
“The first time Pa Gbenga came back, it was in a withering cashew tree that sprawled far and wide, casting a spotted shadow over the cemetery. Pa Gbenga had been pulled through earth and grime up, up, up through the roots of the tree, his essence trapped within flaking bark and dying leaves…”
This opening paragraph may read like folklore, but it comes with a seriousness not usually evident in folklores, all the while making sure it does not place upon itself the burden to teach any moral lessons.
The life of Pa Gbenga is an interesting one that unfolds in a period when “Olodumare always chose a freely born thing to receive a recently departed soul.” In the rich trove of Igbo folklore, we have a story of a man (sometimes a proverbial bird, Nza) whose strength reminds one of Pa Gbenga. Pa Gbenga is “unmovable, a challenge to uproot.” When this folkloric man threw all his human challengers in wrestling, he sojourned to the spirit world where he challenged all their wrestlers. One imagines that like Pa Gbenga, he would “deftly flip them on their backs, and raise his hand to the skies, pulling himself taut.” When he had defeated all the spirit wrestlers, he taunted them to the extent that the spirits gathered and decided to send him his Chi, his personal god, a sickly fellow who only lifted a finger and our strong wrestler’s back kissed the floor.
This is where Pa Gbenga differs from our man in the folklore. True, upon Pa Gbenga challenging Olodumare, “Olodumare touched a bone in his spine and he could no longer sustain his life with his fists” but this man who “died fighting” stays fighting even in death. His soul, “quivering and struggling,” wrestles Olodumare, “a bodiless soul and his progenitor—the divine, under the partial shadow of a dying tree,” and such is his strength that even Olodumare has to “let go.” When cast into a dying tree, “Instead of both souls bonding, Olodumare watched as Pa Gbenga’s soul squeezed the wilting tree’s soul into the roots, sealing it there before stretching out to fill the rest of the tree, unfurling the wilting leaves.”
Such is the strength of Pa Gbenga, such is his legend. I invite you to imagine what happens the second time Pa Gbenga comes back (the narrator says it “was one too many”) after fifty years of being dead, and his spirit is sent into the body of the newly born dying grandson of the finger Olodumare touched to his spine. Imagine the chaos, then read the book.
Ipinmoye’s mission is to make storytellers of his readers. He employs his endings toward this end. Most of them are not really endings but questions. One of the stories, ‘a little misunderstanding with ice,’ actually ends with a question mark. It would be wrong to say his stories end in cliffhangers, but it is right to say that his endings provoke the question, “what happens next?” What happens next, after the spirit of Pa Gbenga has declared a battle against his killer’s grandson? Does another human being become food for a man cursed with unquenchable hunger in ‘belle full’? What happens when curses and “Jazz is prepared and mailed through DHL” in ‘lalubu street, oke ilewo’?
Cliffhangers, by nature, leave the reader in suspense. Yet, in the alluringly puzzling nature of this collection, stories end in suspense without the reader hanging off any cliff. The reader is, instead, invited to transcend passive readership, take possession of the story, and become a co-writer of the narrative.
The act of taking possession of a story is taken to its extreme in ‘how to tell a story you haven’t lived’ where it becomes impossible to differentiate the metaphorical death of the author from their literal death, to separate the metaphorical coming to life of a character from a character’s leap off the page, into the real world. Think of Frankenstein, only this time created with just written words.
But such clashes, such confusions, exist only in the reader’s world and not in the world of the collection where the fabric that separates reality from fiction is a see-through so thin it is almost inexistent. The world of the last story in the collection, ‘synecdoche, lagos!’ is the complete representation of the self-sufficient and self-sustaining world Ipinmoye creates in this collection, that we can read it as some sort of an explanation, a blueprint to understanding the totality of the collection. There, theatre is life and life is theatre and these are not mere metaphors. Theatre here becomes life just like a character becomes human in ‘how to tell a story you haven’t lived.’
Any reader familiar with Chuma Nwokolo’s fiction knows that no matter how serious the subject of his story is, it can only lead the reader to tears through laughter. Humour is the foundation upon which Nwokolo builds his stories, the “quirky humour of Chuma Nwokolo,” to quote Tope-EniObanke Adegoke, in his blurb for the book. Ipinmoye adopts this quirky humour in this collection. We see a modernized babalowo service, Jagbajantis Jazz Services, that operates beyond the shrine, on digital platforms. It exists so that “thunder can fire your enemies!”: “A professional babalowo service, registered with the CAC and dedicated to meeting your witchcraft needs!”; “the first babalowo service making use of the internet to democratise access to traditional forms of judgement.” In ‘how to get rid of ants,’ ‘oga’ is defined: “Not a boss, and not a manager. An oga. That is to say: a man with the bulging stomach of an oligarch and ears that were used to being massaged by the begging of those beneath him.”
Poking fun at the self is also included. Artists described in ‘synecdoche, lagos!’ as “people burdened with the curse of curiosity,” are the butt of the joke in the story, especially in the ways their ego clashes—even in death. Footnotes are fashioned into weapons, and there is no shortage of such unlikely weapons in the collection. In ‘good sh!t’ for example, there is no missile more powerful than freshly deposited human faeces wrapped in nylon. With it, in the world Ipinmoye creates, you can rob anyone of anything you urgently need.
At the heart of this collection is the question, how to tell a story? Ipinmoye answers that there are a thousand and one ways to do that; that there exists an inexhaustible depth from which words can be drawn to fill a blank space. An application form can be, in and of itself, a complete story; a story can be a single sentence that sings (‘a little misunderstanding with ice’); or a combination of scriptwriting and prose fiction (‘gallant guys of great gusto’); and nothing stops it from being just a combination of editorials, interview transcripts, and academic essays (‘synecdoche, lagos!’) or a narrator’s diary entry (‘lalubu street, oke ilewo’). It can be heavy with stuff like police brutality and mental health and physical degradation of the body wrought by cancer; it can be struck with stark clarity, or it can be brilliantly muddled, or just about goats becoming humans and humans turning into goats. The sin of the (grand)father may be visited upon the (grand)children and these sins can sink the (grand)children, or they could just punch the damn sin in the damn face. There is no rule as far as Ipinmoye is concerned. Only that your sentences must sing in joyful tunes, and the world you create must engage.
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