By Oko Owoicho
E. M. Forster begins his book Aspects of the Novel with an illustration of what a novel means to different people. He chose the last person whom he acknowledges as himself and for him: “Yes — oh dear yes —the novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist.” This definition pattern might seem simple, but telling a story is not often as simple as we think. Telling a story is about coherence, a journey into different minds and souls, and the movement of events. I like to think of Dr Prince Nduka Alum’s Behind the Doors of Fate as the movement of a story, and importantly, into a terrain that I believe to be still evolving in Nigerian literature, and that is male authors handling female protagonists, whom they often show to be down on one knee.
The novel shows the trajectory of women and the normative system of patriarchy and how it fashions women’s lives. It’s the story of a woman—importantly, we can say a woman in her prime—who against the odds tries to build a future in a patriarchal society where women are seen as commodities to be exchanged for a few favours for the sake of the family. Adaeze, a fifteen-year-old, is to be given out in marriage against her wish and her mother’s. But as things are in a phallocentric system where power rests with the man, nobody could object to the father’s decision, “Papa was that man whom you must obey” (2). Adaeze’s mother, and so was her mother before her, was married off early, and a similar pattern falls on Adaeze whose father would not budge despite the pleas from the young girl. When her mother, called Mamao, sat her down, the narrator notes that:
The vicious circle of giving out girls in marriage because of poverty seemed to have become a family curse about to hit its third generation. She recalled the tale of her mother, who could not go to school, and how her father believed the missionaries had come to their village to defile the land. More so, they built the mission school on a land crookedly carved out from the evil forest against the will of the then Chief Priest, who had cursed anyone who stepped on that forest. She recounted how her mother ended up betrothed in marriage at twelve to a man who already had three wives and grown-up kids older than her.
Three generations passed through the ache of being married off at early age because of poverty, but what is interesting about the perspective taken in Behind the Doors of Fate is that it does not follow the poverty porn of Western gender pedagogy, which lacks the dialectics of gender and class, thereby making third-world culture the base of patriarchy. Our protagonist notes, “I used to hear people say poverty is a curse, but I didn’t know it could trickle down to this level.” The novel includes the question of class binary and how it affects and influences gender. The three generations of women mentioned are of the lower class, and this offers a proper perspective on how class is a main driver of gender bias. Adaeze remembers Promise, her mother’s friend who works in the city and is married to a ‘big man’ because she went to school while Mamao, from a poor background, could not achieve any of the things her friend achieved. So Adaeze tells us: “If her parents had allowed her to attend school, my mother believed she, too, could have attained the same standard Auntie Promise achieved and would never have ended up in my father’s house” (2).
The novel is a bildungsroman that shows the progress of Adaeze after she marries Eddy what she calls “this horse-trading tagged marriage,” but is set out even in the unknown street of Lagos to become the kind of woman she always wanted. It’s a journey with obstacles because she was leaving into a world with only uncertainties. To compound issues, she has not resolved the pain and conflict of marrying against her wish, yet the first thing that introduces her to Eddy is that he is a playboy—with women in both Onitsha and Lagos. Adaeze is welcomed to Onitsha with a fight from someone older than her. When they get to the hotel where they are to pass the night, “a lady from nowhere rushed him and snatched it [the key] from his hands. “Is this the bush meat you went to the village to buy? Eddy, you are a shameless idiot. Is she not underage? Just look at her” (22). This is followed by another call from someone in Lagos who claims to be pregnant for Eddy.
Despite these challenges, Adaeze knows she cannot return to her village. She is determined to find a way around her life but encounters another shocker to know that Eddy is not as wealthy as he was made to seem to her father. The boy’s quarter apartment and cockroaches roaming the room on their arrival send a signal, but she places her mind on the future. What makes the story more interesting is that, as Adaeze learns, when destiny speaks in the void of uncertainty, a path evolves. Eddy becomes the rhythm in the voice of destiny. He offers Adaeze the kind of life she always wanted, and the novel advances this philosophy—a human’s life journey ultimately relies on destiny. Alum’s novel is a testament to winning, and how in the face of life challenges, laughter and light find us at the end.
Oko Owoicho is a critic and award-winning poet. He is the founder of Benue Poetry Troupe and Team Lead for Afrika-Writes.
