THE LIQUID EYE OF A MOON

A young man struggles to support his family in a fractured Nigerian homeland.

Awoke’s debut novel is narrated by Dimkpa, whom we first meet at 14 getting a blunt education about Nigeria’s social and political stratification. His mother is a devoted Catholic while his father is an adherent to Igbo tradition; when the father is bullied out of his promised role as a town elder, Dimkpa learns that his family has been deemed “ohu ma,” or outsiders, by the community. But why? His search for answers (and money to support his family) takes him to Lagos, where an abusive Muslim matron pits the houseboys against each other for sport; to the meeting rooms of Biafran revolutionaries, who are dealing with their own internal strife; to quarries and mines where he and his friends risk their lives; to a university where he might put his passion for writing to use. (The book makes reference to numerous classic African and African American writers, including Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe, Alain Mabanckou, and Ralph Ellison, though Dimkpa has a particular affection for The Catcher in the Rye.) Lyrical interstitial chapters slowly disclose the mystery of Dimkpa’s family status as ohu ma, but the prose is more typically plainspoken. That makes the story clear, but also dulls it somewhat: Awoke plainly aspires to offer a cross-section of contemporary Nigeria and its shortcomings, but it lacks the tart, satiric bite that would match Dimkpa’s sense of injustice. And the strategy of bouncing across milieus means that characters and plot threads are occasionally dropped. Still, the novel has a sturdy spine in Dimkpa, who piles up psychic and physical scars throughout his travels as he realizes that to be loyal to any one tribe is to be complicit in factionalism and violence. “Hatred, it seems, is our heritage,” he laments.

A flawed but admirably ambitious bildungsroman.