Finding Your Voice In a Dark Room
The Kaduna Book And Art Festival on its second day amidst registration exercises and literary enthusiasts opened its first panel with a discussion concerning two novels: After The Theft by Edify Yakusak, and Bongel by Maryam Bobi. The discussion which was moderated by Dami Ajayi, dug into the lives of characters as portrayed by each novelist and the motivation behind it. Yakusak’s action-packed novel After The Theft with its cinematic details and thrilling plot lines is a page turner that had the moderator asking how much influence films/movies had on her. Though the simple and innocent answer she gave by saying she watched more movies than she read books registered a hum of disappointment across the room, her ability to depict graphic action scenes were not disapproved. Stating the mindless killings happening in the Southern parts of the state as a pool of inspiration, Yakusak said it was the silence over this great injustice and inhumanity that had propelled her into crafting her characters and finishing the novel.
On the other hand; Maryam Bobi’s Bongel and its socioeconomic preoccupations roused a hot debate on the topics of religion, culture and morality. She argued that 70 percent of dropout school children were not only from penury-stricken homes, but were mostly women. The old cultural idea of parents choosing husbands for their daughters were brought to the fore. Bobi cited a girl she knew as an example. The girl, she narrated, had a man she was affectionately in love with but was being forced to marry a total stranger by her parents. She blamed the misconception of religion and cultural misinterpretation for the setback and the pulling down of women’s rights especially when it came to making statements about their rights of choice.
After The Theft by Edify Yakusak continued to whip up sentiments around the killing of innocent people who didn’t have any idea of what was happening, let alone know if they were being taken advantaged of. She highlighted crisis in Jos, likewise killings in the Middle Belt and Kaduna. And also the neglect of mentally deranged persons. The moderator, Ajayi, who was also a doctor was able to pin social negligence that mentally deranged patients have suffered. He lamented the concentration of psychologists in Lagos other than being evenly distributed across the states, as well as the concept of treating and caring for the mentally challenged.
Dami Ajayi questioned the thin line between fiction and facts in Maryam Bobi’s Bongel. The answer was a trip down memory lane. The author excavated memories of a former classmate in primary five (5) who didn’t return after their break and were told she had been married off. since that time, the author said she personally kept piecing the puzzle together to have a better understanding of what society had become and the place of the girl child and women in general in an evolving society. She cited another incident where a boy was raped in Kontagora but the mild sentence it incurred on the male perpetrator didn’t amount to the magnitude of the committed crime. It is this double standard that she argued against and the need for equal recognition of rights and pride of place for women in a patriarchal setup.
Questions were asked and were duly answered by moderator and the writers on the panel. Critical observations with regards to the use of google at the expenses of real field data were seriously debated on.
Written By Domnic Aboi
