J.M.G. Le Clezio’s Onitsha is beautiful, a hypnotic story about a boy and his mother who leave Europe in 1948 and go to live with his father in Onitsha, Nigeria. The family members become entranced with Africa, each for different reasons and in very different ways. Their reasons for loving Africa and Africa itself are painted for us in languorous scenes that build slowly, slowly, and then break like thunder into our consciousness and suddenly we understand what is going on. A love story, and heartbreak, and the history of a continent under siege.
The novel is full of scenes of approaching rain, accompanied by thunder and lightening; then the storm is overhead, deafening, hard, unrelenting. Then it passes, the storm is gone and we see the landscape again, it is new or it is the same yet changed, and always heavy with heat and meaning. The whole book is heavy with heat and meaning and at the same time fantastically light: somehow Le Clezio makes the novel read like a journal of dreams, like a mythical story with very real characters. We read the dream and we become as sad and as angry as if we were reading a scathing indictment of colonialism. Because, of course, we are. We are reading a history of Africa.
We are also reading the story of Fintan’s coming of age. He arrives in Onitsha as a boy but changes through his friendships with an African boy, Bony, the mysterious Oya (descendant of the Egyptians), and the horrible but sad figure of Sabine Rodes, and also through his uneasy relationship with his father. But mostly Fintan is changed by the landscape of the country, the gnarled and tough mango tree in his front yard, the muscular Niger river and its islands of mystery, and the long, low fields of grain that ride up against dark mountains. He is changed by his observations of the praying mantis and the termites, and the falcon, all imbued with god-like powers, powers he succumbs to and understands.
Onitsha is a sad novel, I sit here now with my eyes wet and heavy. Fintan and his family cannot save Africa from the leeches of colonialism. Fintan’s father searches for the remnants of the Africans that came down the Niger in search of place where they could survive; it is a place that came to be called Biafra. Could they have lived in communion with other nations and other peoples? Fintan and his family wished it could have been but the European colonizers and later the oil companies wanted dominion. And dominion can never sustain, but only destroy. A country is destroyed, its people killed and scattered, and a family of dreamers, broken.
