Festus Iyayi
Biography
Nationality: Nigerian. Born: 1947.
Educated in Nigeria; University of Bradford, Yorkshire, Ph.D. 1980. Career:
Economic correspondent for several newspapers in Bendel; industrial training
officer, Bendel State University, Ekpoma. Currently lecturer in business
administration, University of Benin, Benin City. Awards: Association of
Nigerian Authors prize, 1987; Commonwealth Writers prize, 1988.
PUBLICATIONS
Novels
Violence. London, Longman, 1979.
The
Contract.
London, Longman, 1982.
Heroes. London, Longman, 1986.
Short
Stories
Awaiting
Court Martial.
Lagos, Malthouse Press, 1996.
* * *
"…
those who carry the cross for society always get crucified in the end …"
Heroes
Festus
Iyayi's three novels, Violence, The Contract, and Heroes, as well
as his collection of short stories, Awaiting Court Martial, expose the
abject penury and disenfranchisement that constitute the social reality of the
majority of Nigerians. In language that is often vitriolic and stinging, Iyayi's
protagonists potently display his contempt for the rampant corruption that
strangles contemporary Nigeria. Businesspersons, politicians, generals, and
other officials hoard the country's wealth and power at the expense of the
working class. This base depravity of the ruling class manifests itself in
various forms and ultimately trickles down to the ruled class. In each of
Iyayi's novels the real tragedy is that those of the ruled class are either
forced or coerced to absorb their oppressor's abuse. They in turn release their
anger and frustration not upon the deserving ruling class, but amongst
themselves. Iyayi, however, does weave threads of hope within each of his
narratives via truculent calls by the main characters to defy their oppressors
en masse and fight for their civil rights as well as for the future of their
country. Also driving Iyayi's political critique is a profound acceptance of
humanity's fragility and frailty. Especially in Awaiting Court Martial,
Iyayi displays an uncanny ability for capturing the details of his character's
troubled psyches through crisp metaphors and often naturalistic imagery.
Violence
usually connotes physical abuse, but in his first novel, Violence, Iyayi
redefines it as a continual, demoralizing structure that eliminates hope,
pride, self-esteem, health, and the ability to live independently. Having to
always rely on borrowed naira from those who are more fortunate leaves
deep scars of shame and guilt. Iyayi's violence creeps into the corners of the pneuma
of the lower classes, the have-nots, and renders them helpless against the
socio-political machine powered solely by money, corruption, and privilege.
Obofun
and Queen exemplify Nigeria's corrupt, monied class. Obofun makes his millions
by winning coveted building contracts through his connections in the government
and through the relinquishing of percentages of the contracts' total worth to
those who award them. His wife, Queen, sleeps with other men to get what she
wants—namely, supplies, which are otherwise expensive and scarce, for her
hotels. When Idemudia, a typical, destitute laborer, is fortunate enough to
find work, the conditions at the site are deplorable. If he wants to keep his
job and be able to feed himself and his wife, Adisa, then he has to swallow the
maltreatment. If he chooses to fight the system, to organize the workers
against his boss, Queen, and to ask for higher wages and better conditions,
then he risks being fired and subsequent starvation.
One
of the most effective passages in Violence is a series of lines from a
play performed at a local hospital. Iyayi utilizes this poignant and very
effective device to convey his definition of violence. Idemudia witnesses this
play is educated and inspired by the actor who denounces violence and advocates
resistance, and then leads his co-workers in threatening to strike for better
wages and conditions.
Iyayi's
writing continues to be mordacious and gripping in his second novel, The
Contract. The main character, Ogie, returns to Benin after an absence of
four years and is amazed and disgusted at how quickly and completely the city
has decayed. There is filth and chaos everywhere. He learns that the government
awards contracts for building hospitals, roads, and low-cost housing, then
demands percentages for awarding the contract. This practice leaves little or
no money for building the structures the contract was for—resulting in inferior
and often-abandoned projects. The people of Benin live in squalor while a few
wealthy, corrupt officials get fatter. Anything can be bought or sold. Men will
even offer their wives for a favored chance at winning a contract, or lie,
cheat, and even kill for fortunes. Like Idemudia in Violence, Ogie's
abomination of the stark contrasts of wealth and poverty in his hometown is
potently conveyed. He swears he will fight the system of which even his father
is a part. He takes a job at the council and soon finds himself tortuously torn
and confused over right and wrong. He continues to reaffirm decent convictions,
but eventually compromises his values to become "corruption with a human
face." He decides he cannot beat the system entirely, but can take the
money he receives from the contract percentages and invest it in Benin and
local businesses, rather than hoard it in a Swiss bank account.
Heroes, Iyayi's third novel, is set
against the background of Nigeria's civil war in the late 1960s. As in his
previous work, Iyayi's style is forceful and bold. Once again, he cries out
against the injustices in Nigeria through well-crafted characters and
electrifying writing.
Osime
is a journalist who supports the vociferous calls for a united Nigeria and
those denouncing the Biafran soldiers and exalting the Federal troops. He sees
the Federal troops as the saving force for Nigeria. But when the Federal troops
shoot and kill his girlfriend's father without cause in cold blood, he begins
to realize that there is more to the war than he had originally thought. Osime
quickly sees that even though the Biafran and Federal troops commit wretched crimes,
the generals and the officers are the real enemies of the people of Nigeria.
The soldiers have learned to become murderers from the military's officers—they
are merely instruments of destruction under the orders of officers who seek
power, territory, and fortune. In its critique of the generals and military
power, therefore, the novel offers a useful analogy for unveiling the hypocrisy
and self-interest that lie hidden behind bourgeoisie ideology. Osime's solution
is the formation of a third army—one that fights the greedy politicians,
businesspersons, and generals. A total revolution, powered by the third army,
could eliminate the corrupt officials reigning at the top of all sectors of
Nigerian society and replace it with rule by those who love the land, work the
land, and therefore respect it and its inhabitants.
Iyayi's
criticism of Nigerian society is relentless in all three novels, but even among
the dire revelations and depressing reality of the polarities of privation and
opulence in Nigeria, he offers an encouraging creed for social change: "A
people are never conquered. Defeated, yes, but never conquered." And some
of the more striking moments of defeat are explored in Awaiting Court
Martial.
The
collection's fifteen stories create a gallery of tortured souls, poignantly
imagined and rendered visibly luminous by Iyayi's piercing psychological
descriptions. As in the novels, the main character's crisis, no matter how
unique or personal, often reflects the political chaos and social
disintegration of the nation at large. For example, the opening story,
"Jeged's Madness," is about a mutually destructive marriage that
ruinously ends when a rich bureaucrat, Mr. Throttle Cheat-Away, offers the
husband advancements only so that he can rape the wife. The title story,
"Awaiting Court Martial," is a dreamlike, first-person confession
made by a once-efficient executioner of the state. The doomed soldier did not
give the order to shoot his latest victim, his brother, who came boisterously
laughing to his own execution. The brother's laughter disarms and ridicules the
effectiveness of the mass execution, transforming the marksmen into boys simply
"spitting at the sun." Uniting the stories are themes also prevalent
in Iyayi's novels: political corruption, interpersonal cruelty, the nightmarish
threats of kidnapping, murder, home invasion, or robberies, psychological
obsessions, the power of dreams and folk values, and the political
responsibility of the artist-intellectual—a few of the narrators seem to be
Iyayi himself.
Current
literary criticism of Iyayi's works has focused on the validity of postcolonial
theories when applied to Iyayi and other non-exile writers (Femi Osofisan), and
the aesthetic intertwining of radical narrative techniques with radical
politics (Fírinne Nì Chréachàin); but perhaps the most popular treatment of
Iyayi deals mainly with his exemplification of characteristics commonly
associated with Chinua Achebe and other renowned authors of the Nigerian canon
as it is articulated by and for Western readers (John Bolland).
—Susie
deVille,
updated
by Michael A. Chaney
Read more: Festus Iyayi Biography - Violence, Nigeria, Contract, and Class - JRank Articles http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4457/Iyayi-Festus.html#ixzz4l0SJcbIp
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