“I would have said A Small Silence is my love letter to Lagos, but this is not my Lagos book… I love the city very much. The Lagos of Mushin is different from the Lagos of Ikoyi. But we have a common language, but it’s not of strife. The Lagos we know wants to exist. Lagos is dysfunctional (compared to other cities); Lagos hasn’t been as fast-paced as you’d expect of a place like this. I do love Lagos, but it has different dimensions.”
By Anote Ajeluorou
IF Nigerians lived in the global North, the entire country’s citizens would be admitted in one huge rehabilitation centre on account of the continuous and relentless trauma they suffer daily. Is it economic? Or insecurity? Or health or joblessness? Or education? Or something as basic as water? Indeed, the country is one vast cauldron of boiling trauma. Yet that spectacular Nigerian spirit helps them forge on as if trauma is second skin they wear with pride. But trauma isn’t what comes to the average Nigerian mind when explaining his condition. However, Dr. Jumoke Verissimo, a specialist on trauma using literary lenses, has cleverly diagnosed the pervasive condition and has named it for what it truly is in her acclaimed novel, A Small Silence. It’s a novel she forged out of the anvil of Nigerians’ collision with brutal military rule that lasted many years before civil rule took place since 1999.
While civil rule ought to have held out hope and healing for the many from trauma, this hasn’t quite happened as the wound the military rule inflicted ran so deep that democratic governance seems to have made it worse with its bumbling ineptitude. This is partly why Verissimo joined the ‘japa-ing’ gang to find better living conditions abroad, where she teaches at Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada. And so last Sunday at Rovingheights bookshop at Landmark Centre, Victoria Island, Lagos, festival programmer and writer, Osaze Samuel sat with Verissimo to talk about A Small Silence in a hall packed with literary buffs, family and friends.
Inspired by the journalist Kunle Ajibade, who wrote Jailed for Life as his anti-military rule prison memoir, Verissimo traces the life of Professor, a character in the novel, who went to jail on account of his political activism but struggles to adjust to his acquired freedom even among those who tried to make life meaningful for him again. A Small Silence gives Verissimo a handle to speak to the trauma Nigerians continue to suffer without knowing it, as it has become a way of life. Professor, in her novel, finds solace in darkness, a condition he obviously got used to while in prison, but this becomes metaphorical for the average Nigerian, who continues to wallow in the economic, insecurity and governance darkness they are perpetually thrown into by the misgovernance of the political class.
“A Small Silence is set in the aftermath of transition from military rule to democratic rule,” Vesrissimo told her audience. “The activists were struggling. We position them as very strong people, but who can also fall and need strength to stand. Darkness here is a place of contemplation. A whole lot of memories that the darkness would consume him (Professor). Darkness is supposed to be creative. Creatives find darkness as a place where something (good) can emerge from. But Professor was looking for solace in darkness. I look to darkness to create and think. Professor leaves prison but prison doesn’t leave him.
“Something that inspired this book is Kunle Ajibade’s Jailed for Life. There was something about his eyes (when he returned from prison); you could see that a lot needed to be told. I think about sorrow, someone witnessing something and not being able to tell. That inspired me.”
Verissimo said she was once at a friend’s place and there was power cut “and the idea came to my head, to say: what does it mean to stay in the dark? It’s a story about those who fought for democracy, came from prison and nothing has changed and the trauma of being a Nigerian.”
Dr. Jumoke Verissimo (left) and moderator, Mr. Osaze Samuel
Verissimo argued that the trauma Nigerians and Africans suffer came from a long march with history, not least from the continent’s contact with Europe and the suffering that that contact brought and still continues to engender in neo-colonialist policies. As a descendant of a long line of those who returned from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Verissimo stated that everyone needs therapy and healing. Nigeria also fought a civil war whose ghost is yet to be exorcised, with its trauma yet to abate in the minds of millions, she noted. This forms her new poetry collection, Circumtrauma.
“I still need therapy, everybody needs therapy,” she said. “Post-colonial nations continue to be haunted by our past. The trauma of not being able to stand on our feet as independent nations, so much so that even basic things become a form of sorrow. Trauma is not linear; it’s cyclical. I’m a descendant of returnees who came back from the slave trade. We had a civil war, trauma of economic want, the inability to have basic needs; we don’t think about it as trauma.”
For many like Verissimo who have successfully ‘japa-ed’ to escape the continuing trauma that Nigeria and Africa throw at the populace, one would think they have overcome the trauma that comes with living in Nigeria. But the academic thinks otherwise, saying, “I think that even when you’re out of Nigeria, you’re still haunted, you still need therapy. You’re always going to be Nigerian even when you change your passport. If there are things that ring of suspicion at any international airport, you’re still singled out for questioning.
“There’s always that sense of connection. The Nigerian problem is such that what we have is not a surface-level problem. Sometimes, when you think about it you’re still confused, just like Professor who ended up in the darkness. It’s also a place of reflection, not always disentangled from trauma.”
Perhaps, the economic and insecurity costs of the trauma being inflicted on the individual is much more insidious than anything else, according to Verissimo.
“The average old person in Nigeria cannot go to a clinic and not fear that they can’t pay, (so perhaps they wait for the illness to run its course or even kill them),” she said. “There’s an inability to go to the north. To go from south to north (of Nigeria) is very difficult (because of insecurity). There’s a lot of trauma we deal with as Nigerians, but (we) don’t think about it (that way). There’s a l lot of anxiety. Our trauma is layered, historical and governance; there’re people who don’t want to make things better, and (think) we deserve it. And we know that we can make things work.”
Trauma is like a rat gnawing at a person’s foot but blowing soothing air on it at the same time, and as Verissimo put it, “The thing about trauma is that you can’t say a person is traumatised. When people say they carry the trauma of others, it means they don’t know what it is. The Oriki in Yoruba tradition is the effort of tracing your roots. There’s trauma in not being able to trace your roots. There are those who don’t know, with the language disconnected from the mother tongue that carries the life before them. Trauma can be systemic, not necessarily violent. Our history is fractured; we don’t know how to organise and build. Trauma does exist. Trauma is captured in stories told.”
A typical Lagos girl, Verissimo, who wrote A Small Silence long before she travelled out, spoke to the idea of location as a literary tool in response to a question. She said A Small Silence is part of her Lagos story, although she said she had yet to really write the Lagos story she wants. She noted that like stories, Lagos is such a multi-layered city that foreigners think only of Makoko as the authentic Nigerian place to anchor their stories that they sell to the global audience for all manners of dubious intent.
“I would have said A Small Silence is my love letter to Lagos, but this is not my Lagos book,” she said. “I love the city very much. The Lagos of Mushin is different from the Lagos of Ikoyi. But we have a common language, but it’s not of strife. The Lagos we know wants to exist. Lagos is dysfunctional (compared to other cities); Lagos hasn’t been as fast-paced as you’d expect of a place like this. I do love Lagos, but it has different dimensions.”
For Professor and Desire as characters in A Small Silence, Lagos is a multi-dimensional place. While Professor sees it as a place of solace, Desire, whose parents were forcefully ejected from Maroko many years ago, a place where people’s lives became permanently destroyed, Lagos offers different perspectives, according to Verissimo, “Her (Desire) idea of Lagos is different from that of Professor.”
“When you’re outside Nigeria, you’re also dealing with markets, not only about arts,” she said about craft. “Publishing is a business. The character embodies the location they live in.”
On ‘japa-ed’ academics’ seeming obsession with post-colonial studies as an industry in the global North, whereas it seems muted in academic circles in Nigeria, Verissimo said, “We are not theorising it to sensationalise. A lot of Nigerian academics are into the study of postcoloniality and trauma. That was my field of post-graduate study at the University of Ibadan long before I left. How do I tell a story so I don’t become a victim of my own story? Suffering is everywhere. When we are angry about our country, it is because we know we can be better. In our own country, we are angry because we see potential and we allow it to die. I know many Nigerians who travel abroad and do not make it. So, we go the extra mile to make it work.”
Verissimo’s is obsessed with giving voice to those who can’t tell their own stories, but so they recognise their voices in the stories she tells, because story is memory and trauma has an equally long memory to wake-keep from one generation to the next.
According to her, “How are those stories told? In telling those stories, it might not be something the West likes to read. How do we tell our stories, and why do we tell our stories? I want to tell the story for those who do not know how to tell their own stories. I want them to recognise their own voices in the story I tell. My projection was publishing from Nigeria to the world. Sad that you need to be in the West to be noticed by your own people. I want to be read by Nigerians. I have my roots here, spent most of my years here. My roots are connected here.”
- https://thearthubng.com/the-trauma-of-being-a-nigerian-is-layered-historical-governance-induced-says-verissimo/