Samkos Plaza: A Tale of Misfits

If there is a place most unsuitable for writing, it is Samkos Plaza. Riddled with the unending drone of motor engines and the cries of marketers, the park made me feel noisy inside and drained my mind of creativity.

My walk there was like one on a wasteland, and the air reeked of weed smoke and faeces dumped in caked mud. The heat suggested the park is nestling amidst a thousand suns, and the ground was parched.

Yet, if there is a place most suitable for sourcing story ideas, it is also Samkos Plaza. Located in Awka in the southeastern Nigeria, and owned by a former police commissioner who has a flair for deflating the tyres of vehicles occupying his parking space, Samkos Plaza tells the story of a park swarming with misfits, although it serves mainly as a bus station for mass transits from various parts of the country.

These misfits, ranging from questionable beggars to a queer park manager, are what won my attention.

At first, I pitied the beggars, but when I caught a blind one punching the buttons of a phone and a cripple smoking weed, I could not contain my shock. In addition, a woman among them is known to curse people who ignore her cries, and another was publicly battered by her husband after he caught her begging while returning from his frequent trip.

Then there are the local marketers whose brutal air and untruthfulness has earned the name ‘Agboro’, meaning ‘con artist’. Employed by the various mass transits in the park, they would do anything to ensure passengers boarded their buses. They would crowd around one; struggle for one’s bag and sometimes damage it in the course; and even literally heft one onto a bus.

At the end of their daily hassling, they join the weed dealers and smokers in numerous nooks, drawing on and puffing out the smoke of weed. One might wonder why this weed-smoking gang are allowed to deal freely in the park, despite the fact that the landlord was a police commissioner. Soon, however, I discovered the dealers pay rent and that police officers even patronise them.

Each time I try to pull my eyes away from the misconduct, the sight of children hawking confronts me. It seems law enforcers here treat child abuse even more casually than weed smoking. These children hover around moving vehicles, dressed in rags and carrying, on their heads, all sorts of items – breadfruit, stickers, assorted bottled drinks, etc. Merged, they are a walking market, and three dying in a motor accident while hawking did not daunt their zeal.

Every day, it appears, there is a new mad person in the park. The men rove about face down, looking for the stubs of weed to smoke; and they exhibit some sort of intelligence. A female one, in particular, would not accept a free meal that does not include meat, a soft drink, and water – no wonder she is pregnant; and her impregnator: is he saner or madder?

Other misfits are the wheelbarrow pushers who, though always haggard and dirty, earn more than an average writer and the park manager who chants every morning, breaking cola nut and offering the ground some in prayer to the gods, that they may favour him against his competitors on that day.

In all, one could set a story in Samkos Plaza and it becomes a bestseller. You should see the pigeons.

 

The Unfading Heiress (Soul Switch Trilogy, #1)

In a land where death transcends time and space, a Ghostly War is being raged against the living. Late King Eldorman has the power to end this war, but he wants justice for his beautiful murdered daughter Arengel.

However, Arengel’s destiny lies once again with the living, when she falls in love with Adel, a lowly Earmburgian. Finally, the prophecy of The Man with the Red Aureole will come to pass, but Arengel needs an earthly body to fulfil it.

The journey that Adel must take to help Arengel will not only test his strengths to the limit but also that of his close friendship with Jeofren, a fellow Earmburgian. It is a race against time through dark and magical landscapes, and even when the task seems fruitless, Adel must see it through to the end.

The Unfading Heiress is ultimately a story of ghostly love, human greed, friendship and honour set amid a raging war between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead.

Ancient Masquerades versus Modern Masquerades

Ancient Masquerades versus Modern Masquerades

I remember my father and other older relations telling me fascinating tales about spirits (masquerades) of the olden days. The stories, while filled with some abominable practices, spoke highly of the mysteries, excitement, and respect the spirit fraternity commanded.

Now, I’m aggrieved at the lawlessness that governs the fraternity.

In the olden days, the candidates for Iba Mmuo (initiation into the spirit) were chosen and were mostly innocent children; now any scum in the streets can join the fraternity, and you wonder how the rules had all but disappeared.

I remember masquerades were forbidden from whipping women and children. Then, they could only scare those who didn’t stay indoors during Masquerade Parades into their homes, but not whip. Now, however, men join the fraternity, if only to seek out and flog, sometimes even rape, women who rejected their advances.

I also remember that when a masquerade whips a man, the man has the right to flog back, thus engaging the masquerade in a usually no-win whipping challenge. I say ‘no-win’ because these masquerades were trained to endure pain. Therefore, it is usually best to walk away.

The modern masquerade, on the other hand, despises a whipping challenge so much that there has been an incident where a masquerade angrily stuck a knife into his challenger’s stomach.

However, as the modern masquerade got even more careless and ruthless, society began to lose her respect and admiration for it. There has been cases where an angered community set a masquerade on fire.

Now, even the Nigerian Law has joined. A man was once acquitted on a murder charge after his lawyer argued that the masquerade he killed was already dead, according to Igbo tradition, which calls masquerades spirits.

Iba Mmuo: The Ordeal of Becoming a Masquerade in Juju Land

Iba Mmuo, meaning ‘initiation into the spirit’, is mostly practiced in Igbo land in south-eastern Nigeria, the term ‘spirit’, in – and only in – this particular instance, implying ‘masquerade’. Not that masquerades are spirits, but Igbo folk prefer to delude themselves with the lie to preserve the mysteries and excitement surrounding the culture prior to the arrival of the British in the country.

Who is a Candidate?

The candidates for Iba Mmuo are boys between five and ten years old. The initiation might sound interesting at the moment so much that one might contemplate having his child enrolled, but considering the ordeal these children pass through, one would discover that Africa in not such a great place for children to grow up in. The candidates do not volunteer, anyway; they are chosen.

The processes Involved in the Initiation:

1. The Visitation
The spirits (masquerades) leave their shrine on the scheduled midnight to visit the homes of the chosen. Once the town criers announce their arrival, folk turn off the lights in their homes and send their wives and children into their houses, as women and children are forbidden from seeing masquerades at night.

Then the spirits begin to bellow the names of the chosen one after the other. The fathers of the beckoned usually gladly hand the children over and the spirits then convey them to the shrine where they begin their three-day initiation.

2. The Initiation – Day One
Before the lights are lit, the spirits force the children to lie face down on the floor of the shrine. They yell with eerie voices that the children, at their ages and without proper preparation, are too young to see the faces of spirits and will die if they so much as have a glimpse.

However, this is merely a means of separating the brave from the cowards – by frightening them. The so-called spirits would go on, making creepy sounds with their mouths.

Those of the children who become so afraid that they shiver and cry out are sent out of the shrine. But then, their parents, to avoid the shame of their boys been dubbed weaklings, buy the children back into the initiation.

3. The Initiation – Day Two
The next midnight, the masquerades teach the children signs, languages, chants, and their ways. They tell the children that it is a spider that a masquerade holds between its lips to produce its strange sounds. But then, it’s actually papaya pipes laced with wool or webs that masquerades wield.

In addition, this is where the children learn most of their villages’ traditions.

4. The Initiation – Day Three
This is the most inhumane part. The spirits pair the children in twos and, giving them whips, force them to engage themselves in bloody whipping challenges. The ones who fall or cry are sent home, while the others are made spirits (masquerades) in the end.

One might wonder why put the children through such a bad experience simply to make them masquerades. Up next, I will post about Masquerades and Modernisation, and there you will discover how Nigerian masquerades run their affairs – what these children become.

Handling the Disappointment of Rejections

Along the road to becoming a successful novelist, every writer bumps into a set of unavoidable potholes, one of the most devastating being rejections.

Of course, those depressing replies will always come – worse, in dozens. It doesn’t matter how many months or years it took you to write and polish your manuscript. And sometimes it doesn’t even matter how good and refined you are. If you doubt that, ask J. K. Rowling. You’d be daunted by the number of rejections she received before the sun smiled on her first Harry Potter book.

But how do you handle the disappointment?

Yesterday, I was reading up on tropical rain forests. Do you know why they have little undergrowth, despite their luxuriance? That’s because there is competition among the trees. Each tree longs for sunlight – photosynthesis. They hope. They aspire. Just like writers.

But then, when one falls on the chainsaw of one of those advocates of desertification, all that would be left of its years of growth is a stump. More like an aspiring writer who persevered for months or even years and hammered out a good story, only for his hopes to be hacked down by shedloads of rejections.

Should he/she linger in the disappointment?

The good news is most trees – the tough ones – wouldn’t. And for their stumps to push forth shoots anew, they need fertile soil, rain, and sunlight.

So when your manuscript is pelted with rejections, be mindful that your imagination is still fertile; that you have the sun – better still, the stars – to look up to; that with more experience and information, you can water your story ideas until they are better stories that would gnaw at editors’ attention.

So, quit beating yourself up. Query more agencies and publishers. And most of all, keep writing. And you may yet stand tall like one of the buttress-rooted giants of the tropical rain forests.