To put it immediately: After this novel you have to first watch a few videos in which penguins with Schmeses piss over the ice or parrots fooling cats. As mood enhancer. Because it's brutal to follow this protagonist for years, for which an Andy Brehme-style "Haste shit on the shoe, hate shit on the shoe" would be the purest euphemism. But then again: finally a tragic anti-hero that you really do not just like.
Nonso, a young poultry farmer in Nigeria, gets the whole load off in "The Crying of the Birds". He is humiliated, betrayed, except, seriously injured, his face disfigured, convicted, ends up in jail, the list is endless.
What a fall. When we meet him in the beginning, he is in good spirits. Nonso has just bought fresh chickens on the market and a bright white cock that makes him so happy that he is moved to tears. On the way home he rescues a woman who wants to fall off a bridge. A few days later he falls in love with Karacho. It could always go on like this.
Instead, he accidentally loses the great cock, the new love does not appear after the first night. And even though he happens to meet the bridge-woman Ndali, who wants to marry into a great love, wants to marry: the adversity already hangs in the cracks like little moth eggs, just waiting to hatch and lay new eggs that everything is shrouded in an all-decomposing moth-rattle.
Jason Keith / Piper
Author Chigozie Obioma
But Nonso opens up like Icarus, carried by love, wanting high. Because Ndali comes from another universe, studies pharmacy, comes from one of the city's most important families, refuses to speak with him Igbo. Nonso wants to think big for her sake. Also study in Cyprus to find a good job. He puts everything on the line - and loses everything. Material, idealistic, emotional.
Overtime parable about responsibility
Chigozie Obioma seems to us after his debut "The Dark River" again figures and fates, which are hard to bear in their power. Now you could take "The Crying of the Birds" and explain how much we learn about Nigeria's postcolonial constitution, the exclusion of the Igbo, a country where the Biafra war for independence is as prevalent as prejudice, discrimination, the past. It's all in this story, yes.
But to emphasize that would be to impose a niche generic stamp on the novel instead of celebrating the universal that would be highlighted in any Anglo-Saxon story. How much Obioma has to tell is already obvious: early 30s, two novels written, both nominated for the Booker Prize. Do you have to do it first?
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His great narrative skill is revealed in the perfidy he additionally installs: We all get told of a 700-year-old Chi, his guardian spirit. Ironically. How bitter to have a watcher, as befitted the cosmology of the Igbo, a chi that directs the fate of his protégés - and so miserably fails. Who now, in our today, testifies before the gods - better: to talk out - over the past seven years in which he has not done his job. But hesitated, just did not look, was too stupid, so that under his custody Nonso swirled deeper and deeper. Downwards always, never upwards. Nearly.
Thanks also to the Igbo reincarnation superstructure, the whole thing swings to a timeless parable about responsibility - and self-responsibility. On the question of how much blame one assigns to the circumstances, the fundamental injustice, the deeds of others. And how to isolate one's soul against the wickedness of the world. Instead of starting to carry on the evil like Nonso, with the mistaken belief that it would get rid of it.
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14.10.2019, 11:21 clock
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DISPLAY
Chigozie Obioma
The crying of the birds: Roman
Publishing company:
Piper
Pages:
512
Price:
EUR 24,00
Translated by:
Nicolai von Schweder-Schreiner
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"Orchestra of Minorities," is the name of the book, a reference to a line in which Nonso looks at his beloved chickens, the hawk has just poached, above all sounds the "weeping of the oppressed". His father, Nonso said, "always said the chickens knew they could not do anything but cry and make that sound, Ukuuukuu! Ukuuukuu!". Like a shrug, "It's just like that."
It is also a story of tragedy when one loses the ability to see all the good that comes back to him. The people who shake hands with him. Who organize an apartment for him. At his side are when he stands without a penny. Make up for what they screwed up. People, yes: men who legitimize their actions as martyrdom, we have enough. If one of the well-meaning and well-intentioned victim becomes the perpetrator: that is not tragedy. That's a decision.