Men Without Ears

by Ifeoma Okoye

164 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Ife · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw him on the path to self-destruction; on the mad chase for naira and ostentation that is so damaging to self. I decided he must be stopped before it was too late but I did not have any idea how to do it.

I first read Men Without Ears when I was maybe 12 and it was probably the first piece of African literature I had ever read. It was the first time I saw a society that I recognized be reflected back so poignantly and the first critique I saw of upper class Nigeria that reflected sentiments latent to me at that time but lucid once Okoye had penned them. For these reasons I am inevitably biased when it comes to a review of this book but I will try my best to also write the review from the perspective of someone to whom this novel does not mean so much as well.

It follows a male protagonist Chigo who has returned from Tanzania to Nigeria, critical, bordering on contemptuous of new Nigerian society and most especially his brother Uloko who has fallen into a lifestyle of conspicuous spending of indebted money that Chigo feels will lead him on the path to destruction.

Ifeoma Okoye, who is one of the first female writers in Nigeria, choosing to write the novel from a male perspective is interesting to me. She so completely sells this voice that the entire novel, even outside of narrative voice, has no feminine sensibilities. The women in the book are background characters who for the most part condone, if not endorse, the men's problematic behaviour. I can't say how this affects the story and what it is trying to say (I don't really think it does) but I can speculate that she probably does this to prove a point. She would probably hate me examining the book through this lens as she has said "I don’t approve of feminists who expect any literary work written by a woman to deal with feminist issues, and who judge every literary work written by a woman by the presence or absence of feminist characters or themes. There are other issues as pressing, as important, and as interesting as feminism, which women writers can explore in their literary works." (The Guardian, 2020).

Narratively, the book reminds me of apocryphal Nigerian folklore where a character that has a severe character flaw is brought to an inexorable negative fate in a way that is supposed to teach the audience a basic morally absolute principle. Here, the moral is that ostentation of wealth and financial irresponsibility are bad. I can see and agree with a critique that this moral is delivered very unsubtly, however, I think part of decolonising literature is maybe dumping assumptions of how lessons are supposed to be delivered in literature. Even though it is established that the events will not end well throughout the book the ending still hit so hard for me.

I personally found the pacing perfect but I can see easily that some might find it a bit actionless. It defies Western story structures in that there is not one main climax of the text but conflict that is sizzling throughout the prose with no resolution and if you are not accustomed to this it may not be for you. The prose is also very unadorned; very little descriptive language and more stream of consciousness type of writing.

All in all, I would definitely recommend it especially to Nigerians who are trying to read more novels about class because I think its treatment here is very interesting.

[Okoye Juliana]

Please, I can't access any of the books here. What could be the problem

[Kelly Aurora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it.
There are lessons in this.