Title: Writings of Ifeoma Okoye
Author: Ezekiel Fajenyo
Publisher: Concept Publications
year: 2017
pagination: 587
REVIEWER: Henry Akubuiro
Ifeoma May Nwoye is versed in numbers as an accountant. She is also versed in words. Even if she doesn’t write another book, her reputation as a consummate scribbler is gauranteed. Her brilliance hasn’t gone unnoticed to literary critics. Ezekiel Fajenyo, a literary critic, poet, novelist and short story writer, is one of such intellectuals.
The Writings of May Ifeoma Nwoye: A Critical Literary Analysis by Ezekiel Fajenyo is the author’s attempt to unearth the quintessential Nwoye. It’s an exploration of the literary merits of her writings. In eleven chapters, Fajenyo examines the eight published works of the author and illuminates intrinsic qualities that mark them out.
In his introductory remarks, the author furnishes us with personal and academic details about Nwoye, from her nativity in Umunya, Oyi LGA, Anambra State, to her higher educational pursuits at George Washington University and South Eastern University, Washington DC, United States of America, both in Washington, where she earned her first degree in Accounting and Business Administration respectively, She was to become the first PhD produced by the Department of Business Administration, University of Benin, where she also flourished as an accountant, rising to become the bursar.
A one-time VP of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Nwoye, informs the author, has won numerous awards for her creativity, including the 2014 ANA Chevron Prize for Environmental Issues with her novel, Oil Cemetery, aside making the NLNG list for the Nigeria Prize for Literature. Nwoye is also a professor of Business Administration at IBB University, Lapai,
Fajenyo avers that the sense of history which informs Nwoye’s art confers a stamp of realism on it and makes it relevant to contemporary times. She is a writer, according to him, who advances social aims and uses her literature as a force of social change.
In the next chapters, the author deconstructs Nwoye’s writings, focusing on her literary aesthetics, which has made her an influential, female Nigerian writer. Hence, the second chapter is dedicated to Endless Search, a work Nwoye published in 1993. Here, Fajenyo explains that, through familial depictions, Nwoye explores, “in depth and with artistic conviction”, the concept of marriage —its characteristics, people’s response to it, its difficulties and how it should be handled” (p. 41).
In the fourth chapter, the author focuses on Blind Expectations, a short story collection by Nwoye, published in 1997. He writes: “Generally, Nwoye is concerned with multiple themes in her works, elaborately making use of the Nigerian society as her settings for easy access and familiration. Her works are about thorough, undisguised analyses of the society in all its complexity, using very commonplace expressions to convey her message. She clamours for social change in all aspects of our lives” (p. 193).
Through the lens of Fajenyo, the reader is made to understand that Nwoye’s short stories are significantly satiric, treating common themes of general interest, including trouble with academics and their community, poverty, abuse of women, exploitation and greed, political rascality, youth gangsterism, identity crisis in a mish-mashy world, betrayal, hypocrisy and pretense, marital crisis, indebtedness, forgiveness, among others (p. 279).
If you haven’t read Nwoye’s fiction before, Fajenyo takes you a step closer to the pages by providing copious excerpts to buttress a myriad of points being made. He, as well, samples specific literary devices and elements of fiction deployed by the author. These samples are useful for researchers, no doubt.
While the sixth chapter addresses Nwoye’s 2008 offering, A Child of Destiny, which, among others, treats the theme of early marriage in northern Nigeria and education, the seventh chapter takes us to Fetters and Choices where Fajenyo identifies a major theme —international prostitution — propelled by a putrid sense of self-survival largely developed through Itohan, a symbol of greed, selfishness, painlessness, social recklessness, and crippling poverty. On the eight page, you read about the children’s story entitled The Broken Promise.
Fajenyo, in the ninth chapter, treats Oil Cemetery, one of Nwoye’s later known works, where he xrays the story of evil antics and exploitative tendencies of the oil companies operating in Southern Nigeria, working in concert with indigenous contractors who “pollute, despoil and contaminate the land space while exploiting and suppressing the common people.”
When Fajenyo’s The Writings of May Ifeoma Nwoye… climaxes in the eleventh chapter, the reader must have been accostumed with the views of Nwoye pertaining to her writings and life in general, in a detailed interview, as well as what other scholars, writers and journalists think about her. This book will be useful to students of literature and gender studies.