By Hyginus Ekwuazi
Title of book: Deeper into the night
Author: Dul Johnson
Publisher: 1] Ahmadu Bello University Press Ltd., Zaria
2] Sevhage Publishers, Makurdi; 2014
Year of Publication: 2014
What this book is all about is succinctly captured in the blurb: ‘Mamzhi saves Gwagtim, his community, in a time of grave crisis to great admiration. Slowly, admiration turns into hero-worship by the villagers who are blind to the growing vices that Mamzhi picks with increasingly acquired power. The people notice his destructive nature near too late and every corrective measure falls short. Only one option remains: to take down the man who once took up the cause of the land. Deeper into the night is the chilling tale of a community taken captive by its own hero and the fight for its soul’.
The central issue here is power. Power is not neutral. Power cannot be neutral. By its very nature, power cannot but be ideological. A quick illustration from a work which it is safe to assume we all have read—a work which, I dare say has become the cultural property of us all: Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. If Eze Ulu is the kind of chief priest who leads a god like Ulu to destroy itself then the obverse can also be canvassed: in which case, Ulu becomes the kind of god that leads a chief priest like Eze Ulu to destroy himself. Power is at the centre of it, notwithstanding whichever side of the coin comes up top…. Power as an end in itself or power as the means to an end. Lord Acton quickly comes to mind—and I am recalling his oft quoted view: ‘Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ This power-corruption conundrum is precisely what Dul Johnson has endeavoured to capture with the word ‘night’ in his title.
I want to interrogate this power-corruption conundrum—that is one of my preoccupations in this review. This interrogation should prepare the ground for the question which I should ultimately seek an answer to. The question is simply this: in times like this, what is the relevance of a work like this? My other preoccupation is circumscribed around this question.
Let me quickly preface all the foregoing with two quotations which, to my mind, are quite germane here. Skip Gates, I believe, is the one who said something to the effect that ‘Every work of art contains within it the argument for how it should be read’. I have always understood this to mean that whatever critical cannons we bring to bear on a work, such critical cannons must be sufficiently elastic to accommodate the peculiarities of the work. The second quotation should throw more light on this. I can’t readily recall the source. However, let me paraphrase it: The scales which one finds on the floor may well belong to animal, bird or fish. It is the finder’s personal madness which determines to which of these to ascribe it. I suppose there is no better way to capture the subjectivity inherent in criticism—and such subjective biases become valid only to the extent that they endeavour to query the peculiarities of the work under study.
And so, to what I consider the major thematic focus of this work: power. The characters, their back story, the orientation of the entire story and the orchestration of the plot—all are pointed in one direction: the periscoping of power. Power here becomes a prism. What you make of power, what you perceive power to be, all this depends on which of the characters you happen to be focusing on. However, the story is such that from whichever character you happen to be focusing on, there is a trail, a dotted line, to three characters: Nimfa, Mamzhi and Alhaji Maiguguwa Nisa. In effect, the whole story becomes a game of chess involving these three—a game in which Nimfa aligns with Nisa or Mamzhi; and when Nisa is eliminated, Nimfa and Mamzhi have to confront each other. The consequence is a dialectic: the dialectics of power, so to say—the dialectics in which these three characters transform, respectively, into the complementarity of thesis, anti-thesis and the synthesis.
Nimfa straddles two worlds: the traditional and the modern. Taking advantage of the former, he is able to achieve power in the later. In his unapologetic belief that the means/meanness justifies the end, we see him moving in and out of any religion that helps or no longer helps him to consolidate his hold on power. Nisa is the invidious outsider who becomes a settler and uses religion to amass both spiritual and temporal powers over his host community. Mamzhi carries a large weight of destiny on his shoulders. Hamlet-like, he believes the world is out of joint and that he has been born to set it right. The Jos ethno-religious crises become for him a kind of blood bath. He emerges from it as a ruthless killing machine. He is the arrow head of the victory of Gwangtim over her otherwise implacable enemies.
I must confess, however, that for me, the most bothersome aspects of this novel centre on how this issue of power plays out—meaning, the story-events that have been woven around two of these tripodal characters. Of course, I have in mind Nisa and Mamzhi. Couldn’t more and mor, and still more, story-events have been built around Alhaji Maiguguwa Nisa? Couldn’t such a build up of story-events in that direction have transformed the work into a study in the never ceasing warfare between the settler and the indigene? Yes, Mamzhi is an odd-ball. Women and wealth simply do not matter to him. Why, then, is Gwangtim so pathologically afraid of him and most eliminate him at all costs? Is it because of who he is or because of who he is likely to become? Perhaps, what we are dealing here with is an accident in the creative process. Perhaps, here is the proof that the old saying is really true: that all the writer does is create the characters—but the characters go in directions that are of their own choice.
Without prejudice to the foregoing, I must remark that Deeper into the Night is easily that kind of novel that easily fits into the intersection of literature and history. The novel does grow in the reader the suspicion, amounting to a conviction, that Gwangtim is but the fictitious name for a town on the Plateau; and that the major characters, though fictitious, are but composites of historical personages. This, I suppose, is what the new historicism is all about: what Wolfrys has described as the historicity of texts and the textuality of history. What I understand this to mean is that it is permissible to fish for history in literature and to use literature to interpret history. [Just quickly, you may want to note Danmatsi’s statement to Nimfa: ‘If you have money and you want to buy a title, go to the South, especially the South East. There, you will get any title you want to buy. In fact, they will even turn your name into a title and then sell it to you.’]. In the final proportioning, a crucial part of the significance of this work must be deposed on this plane of historical relevance.
Deeper into the Night has two other distinguishing features that must be noted. At over 326 pages [or 273 pages, depending on which edition], it still manages to be highly elliptical. Even more striking, to me, is the writer’s ability to construct dialogues underneath which much, and I mean, very much, drama is building up and threatening to explode. One example should suffice here: the confrontation between Tyem Zhimak and Nisa at the latter’s arrival with his household, goods and chattel. I can’t readily tell how many times I have read this passage: the beauty is simply bewitching. The overall narrative technique is more or less like that. At any rate, it is only slightly dented by authorial intrusions, here and there—the most conspicuous being the paragraph beginning: ‘In these parts….’ [See page 158/134]. I still wonder why those three paragraphs have not been structured as the point of view of a character in the story, especially, seeing that the writer has adeptly handled the idiom of point of view in this work.
Indeed, the overall narrative technique is captivating. No where do we smell the midnight oil; no where does one find oneself groping with the writer for the right word, for the proper expression. The pace is sure footed, the story compelling. What more can anyone ask for, really? Take it for all in all, Dul Johnson’s Deeper into the Night is a significant novel—the kind of work that should endure long, long, after the din of its launching will have settled down.