Nigeria’s literary canon in English is a rich and ever-evolving archive, ranging from Chinua Achebe’s cornerstone Things Fall Apart to Buchi Emecheta’s moving lamentations on immigrant life in 1960s London; from Ben Okri’s dreamscapes to the colourful comedy of Lola Shoneyin’s 2010 novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives. This treasure trove is often a point of departure for the nation’s younger writers, with intertextual hat tipping – covert or otherwise – widespread. In the opening of Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s Blessings, which begins in 2006 in Port Harcourt, the influence of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s own coming-of-age debut, Purple Hibiscus, is potent.
Like Adichie’s first novel, Blessings is initially located in a rigidly patriarchal, fiercely normative Nigerian household. There’s a victimised, wearied mother, Uzoamaka, and an intractable, violent father, Anozie, who is hellbent on rooting out supposed deviance and disobedience within his family. A “nebulous sense of doom” is pervasive.
