AiW Guest: Tọ́pẹ́-ẸniỌbańkẹ́ Adégòkè.
Odafe Atogun’s début novel, Taduno’s Song (2016), is an extended allegory about a people living through the tangle of social oppression and its attendant anxieties. Through a focus on music, specifically voice and song, it explores the importance of art in creating sites of resistance and places of refuge.
The narrative unfolds through a blend of magical realism characteristic of post-Famished Road Ben Okri; dreamy sentences and striking metaphors illuminate the dark crevices of Nigeria’s history.
The novel’s stylistic avenue becomes clear at the start, as a dystopian vision of the diaspora is delivered by post:
“Studying the handwriting on the envelope, his eyes lit up in recognition. But then a frown crept across his face and he wondered how a letter simply marked TADUNO—no last name, no address, just Taduno—managed to reach him in a nameless foreign town.” (p.1)
The sapping dullness of a remotely lived life is embodied by the restlessness and loneliness of the protagonist, Taduno, who finds himself awakened as the recipient of this letter in this unidentified town – a town which, nevertheless, shares some similarities with other diasporan locations where African migrants temporarily reside. It is a simple, laid-back place into which their economic reality and social anonymity fits.
The correspondent is Taduno’s long-lost lover, Lela, who intimates that social conditions at home are such that he should “build a life elsewhere” (p.3) instead of coming back. The letter, though, has the opposite effect: it shatters whatever sense of peace Taduno has built and forces him to return. It is at this point that the logic of the world Atogun has been building comes into relief, showing itself to be what is best described as ‘Okrian’. Suspending the reader’s preconceived understanding, he constructs another world in its place, more threatening in its unknowns than that which even the letter’s strangeness hints at.
With the arrival of the letter, the difficulties of the titular realities of Taduno’s Song are thrust forward. It positions the reader early on in the novel’s ongoing tensions around self-possession and loss, ownership and anonymity, familiarity and the safety of distance. The confusion Taduno feels in the moment of reading – how does the letter even reach him? – is present for the reader, too, making the intimacies that surround being between here and there, the narrative’s threats and losses, available, while also foreshadowing the ways in which Taduno’s Song and Atogun’s style ask as much of readers as of the characters they follow throughout the portrayal of Taduno’s return and his precarious status as returnee.
The culture from which Taduno was uprooted expects travellers to return with gifts, usually money in a foreign currency, to distribute. For Taduno, who doesn’t have much to show for his time away, a homecoming celebratory rite is more than an inconvenience: it is something to be avoided altogether. Indeed, Taduno’s return is evocative of the manner in which Maren, the narrator of Wole Soyinka’s Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years 1946-65, describes his own return from the diaspora. The refrain in the opening chapter – “Did you have to sneak home like a thief in the night?” (p.3) – is appropriate for Taduno’s journeying. That Taduno chooses to arrive under the cover of darkness is indicative of his psychological dislocation; he slips, unnoticed, through the back door, into the old, detached home where he previously lived for nearly ten years.
But in Atogun’s hands, the familiarity of the theme of return, while itself being a difficult event for Taduno, develops into a different parallel – a more sinister sort of timelessness in the narrative pathway. The covertness of Taduno’s homecoming is echoed by his discovery that nobody remembers him – this despite having been gone for only three months. While his erasure foregrounds the cultural and social risks people take when they attempt to make a life for themselves abroad, it also speaks to the collective ownership of memory, slyly underscoring the nature of Taduno’s time away as an exile – one that is violent and political. That the value of the memories of home that Taduno cherishes is incongruous with his old neighbours’ casts doubt on his sanity:
“You showed up claiming to be somebody we know. We all see you as a man who has lost his identity—in fact, a man who has lost his mind…” (p.24)
What unfolds, in the combination of the narrative plot and the stylistic choices of its allegorical telling, is a feature of the novel’s ambition, and both its strength and weakness. As we follow the plot, which revolves around Taduno’s covert operation to return what has been lost – the love of his life, the love of his music, etc. – the allegory points at the broader message of resistance, the need to balance Taduno’s desire to retrieve his voice and act as the people’s conscience.
We also become aware of the risks of the artist’s position when Taduno becomes the lynchpin for several loved ones’ mistreatment by the regime. For example, he is drawn into the saviour role when he finds out that TK, his former producer, has been subject to vicious attacks and homelessness. Lela also tells him in further correspondence that her disappearance and abduction, by the president no less, is due to her connection to him. Again, his bafflement at how Lela is able to write to him and how her letters reach him, here or abroad, reflects the suspension of conventional logic that the narrative demands.
The representation of state censorship and banning of popular music, the hinting at trumped up charges that silence all forms of counter-hegemonic art, casts Atogun’s critical net wide, recalling the various geographies in which certain authoritarian governments and leaders have used their power mechanisms to declare certain musicians or songs, or even musical expression itself, illegal.
Although we remain in unnamed territories throughout, Atogun’s use of details reveals that the setting of the novel is not entirely fantastic: a letter, dated ‘14th March, 19—’, hints at life in the 90s, a period of several dictatorships in Nigeria. While Taduno’s Song conjures erstwhile military dictatorships, it also captures the dislocation of Nigeria’s intellectual class through the paralysing fear of subjects who dare not speak against the regime. Some real-life characters are personified, including the charming, gap-toothed general, who was dubbed an “evil genius” by the Nigerian intelligentsia of the 90s, and Wole Soyinka, who is implied in Kongi, a character Atogun modelled on the writer.
Unfortunately, Atogun’s attempts to summon a resemblance to Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti and his revolutionary music fall flat; Taduno is without the quirky personality and radicalism that was the hallmark of Kuti. Further, despite the Okrian references, and perhaps inevitable as the allegory progresses, the energy of the narrative peters out: the storyline becomes predictable, some characters remain undeveloped, and in some parts the style approaches overwrought and inelegant territory.
Nonetheless, the message and form of Taduno’s Song is a call to stay true to one’s artistic calling – it shows by analogy how art is a counterpoint of solitude and social resistance, the ways in which it balances the prices of being favoured and remembered. Eventually, Taduno’s secrets are laid bare and he’s put in a precarious position: will he sing the president’s praise or serve his own, more selfish causes?
Between self- and selfless-ness, the novel reinforces the argument that there are limits to the practicality of ‘art for art’s sake’ in a repressive society. Its use of allegory resounds the importance, even and especially under the extremities and pressure of censorship and partisan rule, of keeping this wide open for debate.
Odafe Atogun was born in Nigeria, in the town of Lokoja, where the Rivers Niger and Benue meet. Now a full-time writer, he is married and lives in Abuja (text and image c. of Canongate).
Tọ́pẹ́-ẸniỌbańkẹ́ Adégòkè is a traveller, literary critic and writer from Ibadan, Nigeria. Tọ́pẹ́ is the co-publisher of Fortunate Traveller, a travel journal. He writes for Wawa Book Review, Abuja, and Africa in Words. He enjoys travelling and cooking. @LiteraryGansta is his alter ego on Twitter.
Taduno’s Song is Atogun’s debut novel (with publishers, listed here in the same order of the book cover images included through the review: Ouida Books – main image; Canongate x2, Pantheon, Vintage, Masobe – gallery image). It is widely available.
Wake Me When I’m Gone is the powerful second novel – about grief, love, motherhood and breaking the rules – from one of the most exciting new literary voices in contemporary African writing (Canongate).
Masobe Books published The Cabal, Atogun’s third novel, in January 2023, described by Helon Habila as “Odafe at his finest”.
