Obi Nwakanma
30 November 2008
CHIKE Momah's latest novel, The Stream Never Dries Up is an intriguing story. At the first glance it might seem to be a story about the redemptive power of love.
The novel certainly explores this theme volubly. But at the core of that narrative is a most interesting search: it is the novelist's attempt to come to terms with the nature of what we now call a diaspora; that community of people who have settled outside of Nigeria and are attempting to situate themselves within the reality of their new locations.
It is a straight forward potboiler of a story around the life of Nwafor Obiako, a middle aged Nigerian immigrant in New Jersey who returns home to Nigeria, persuaded by his relations - especially his uncle and his mother - to take a bride among his people. His relatives arrange a meeting, and then a marriage between him and the winsome Chigozie Nwokoye.
Though the courtship is conducted by proxy in the time worn ways of the traditional Igbo in these matters, it is love at first sight for Nwafor and Chigozie, although we get the authorial hints about the nervousness and uncertainties that attend such "arranged" relationships at the initial stages.
The traditional marriage happens, followed by a court registry marriage, and Nwafor Obiako returns to the United States to arrange and wait for his new bride to join him.
The real story of this novel indeed begins with Chigozie's arrival to her new life with Nwafor Obiako in New Jersey, thrown into the circle of his close friends, the African-American Erwin Clark, and Nwafor Obiako's high school classmate and childhood friend, the lawyer, Ben Ugonna, and of course the Igbo Union of New Jersey. Among her many talents, Chigozie is an accomplished pianist: she plays for entertainment and for therapy.
Her wish for a piano is met, for one of the surprises that await her on arriving her new, conjugal home in New Jersey is that Nwafor installed a handsome baby grand piano in a music room for her pleasure. In time Chigozie begins to take music classes and soon joins a church choir, and her soaring musical instincts are momentarily assuaged by these acts of participation. Life seemed to move equably.
Chigozie's resettlement in the Nigerian diasporic community in New Jersey seemed to progress without incident, except for the occasional anxiety mostly on Nwafor's part to begin a family and sire a son soon enough since he was getting on in years. Indeed his friend, the lawyer Ben Ugonna, reputedly artless on occasions let the matter out one evening when he said, "You're not getting any younger.
I've been looking, and in the - what? - two months or so that Chigozie's been here, I see no signs of anything. Are you, by any chance, using those stupid things - you know - we used to call them 'french letters' at home?"
But Chigozie is not prepared to begin to have children until she has completed her musical training and by which time she would have put to some pace a career in music, and she tells Nwafor Obiako so, who reassures her about his own preparedness to wait.
Things continue on such a peaceful note until the chance meeting one evening at a nightclub of Sylvester, Chigozie's long lost cousin. As they reunite, the complexity of this relationship begins to unfold and impact upon their lives and structures the wider implications of the novel.
Sylvester, something of a dandy is as far as this novel goes, almost a typological character - one framed to assert narrative conflict, but even more so, to reflect on the other side of the reality - the tragic aspect of the Nigerian immigrant experience. Sylvester is bright and ambitious, and has much promise.
But he succumbs to a drug addiction habit that ultimately leads to his tragedy. But on this chance meeting with her cousin at the Chocolate Resort, the nightclub in New Brunswick, New Jersey owned by the Lebanese Khalid Ahmed, Chigozie begins to construct a new relationship based on her longing for affinity.
There is the potential for suggestive reading here: does Chigozie's fervent attachment to Sylvester veil a more profound sexual question or anxiety?
Does she express a longing for a different kind of agency absent from her relationship with Nwafor Obiako? Is there something subtly subversive, underlaid by the novelist's art, which the story tasks us to understand but which it does not name?
These questions are necessary for in Chigozie's sudden dedication and commitment to her newfound cousin, we sense an almost unseemly obsession, possibly exaggerated by the novelist to give significance to the entire meaning of the story.
But that contact is made and offers a fulcrum to the evolution of events in this novel, for soon, Sylvester not only convinces Chigozie to audition for a part as the pianist for the "Chocolate Sextet," but becomes a quite dangerous and regular feature in her life. Chigozie auditions and gets the part of the pianist in the resident club band, and she plays as part of the live band in the Igbo Union event, and her musical life blossoms. Soon enough she gets pregnant, and there is joy all round.
Meanwhile, Sylvester gets in trouble and is threatened by the hit men of the seamy and dangerous drug underworld with whom he does business; he gets thrown out of his apartment by his landlord, and has nowhere else to go but to the home of Chigozie and Nwafor Obiako who accommodate him briefly. But soon enough Nwafor Obiako who is fearful of the potentials of Sylvester's dangerous involvement with the drug underworld puts his feet down in spite of Chigozie's pleas, and throws him out of their house.
This set the tone of the last moments of the story for not long after Sylvester is thrown out, Nwafor Obiako gets a call from the police who inform him that Sylvester had been murdered, apparently by the gangsters of the drug underworld. It now falls upon him, being by marriage to his cousin, Sylvester's closet relation, to go to the hospital with Chigozie, decide about organ donation, and about removing him from life support, and make the ultimate funeral arrangement of transporting his corpse to Nigeria for burial according to the wishes of his family.
These, Nwafor Obiako does, with quite honorable selflessness in spite of the accusatory stances of his wife Chigozie who insists that Sylvester would not have been killed if Nwafor had not driven him out.
She was in such state of antipathy when Nwafor accidentally hits her, and she is taken to the emergency room for fear of a possible loss of the child she is carrying. A social worker tries to convince her to go to a shelter for battered women, a suggestion she wisely rejects.
Meanwhile as a compromise, Nwafor Obiako arranges a lavish church wedding, and in the midst of the merriment, during the wedding reception, Nwafor Obiako gets a visit from the past: an old girlfriend of his, Deirdre, arrives to his consternation, and informs him that he has a five year-old son from their past relationship. She shows Nwafor his lovely son, and this novel takes its truly major twist from here, and sets the stage for the final moments and the resolution of the novel. The Steam Never Dries Up is an entertaining story.
But it never gives us much more interpretive realms, aside possibly at the psychological level, for the characters seem mostly normal; possibly even unmemorable; not richly layered. Indeed, though I suspect that this is not Mr. Momah's intention, the main characters in this story, Nwafor Obiako and Chigozie seem to mark a potentially antinomic aspect of the reality that the novelist wishes to convey:
one of a loving and dedicated new Igbo manhood, and the other of a talented, bold but equally compassionate new Igbo woman.
But what emerges, as we read the characters closely is that Obiako comes out something of an indecisive, vulnerable, middle-aged weakling; something the Nigerians would call a "woman wrapper," while Chigozie comes out to be a shrewd, manipulating woman, who takes ungracious advantages of her husband's genuine desire to make her happy.
But the story accomplishes an important thing: it is a very close and searing look into the complexities of Nigeria's growing diasporic community, and the factors that have come to shape and are currently defining it. Christian Chike Momah is a valuable voice of that diaspora.
He was educated at the Government College Umuahia and the University College Ibadan, in the same class as his best friend, the famous novelist Chinua Achebe. Momah worked in pioneering roles as Assistant Librarian of the University College Ibadan, and was the first Nigerian Deputy librarian of the University of Lagos from which he resigned in 1965, following the Eni Njoku-Biobaku incident.
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