Descent into Abyss: A Review of Isidore Agbanero’s A Peep in the Dark

By Chuks Oluigbo

Imprint: (Owerri: Osprey Publication Centre, 2010)

Presented in ten chapters and in 108 pages, including a glossary of vernacular words, A Peep in the Dark is a story of man’s descent into abyss. Man, in search of security, often takes the wrong path and ends up in chains. That is the fate of Jonathan, our central character, a medical student in an unnamed Nigerian university. Faced with an uncertain future after he lost his father, Mazi Ibeh, who incidentally is the breadwinner of the family and the sponsor of his education, Jonathan approaches the head of his department, Prof Njoku. His aim: to defer his admission until he is able to raise money to pay his fees. The fallout of that move is his chance meeting with the stunningly beautiful Monica who would eventually become his sponsor and wife as well as instrumental to his future sojourn in the United States of America and the United Kingdom via a scholarship programme. But not before their inner quest for guarantee had pushed the couple to enact a blood oath. But it is not only Jonathan and Monica that take this path of dishonour. There is Kunle and Shola, and there is Jude and Nanny. And when the hour of test comes, it is the same Jonathan who initiated the idea of a blood oath that first violates the oath.

Jonathan makes an unprecedented result in the College of Medical and Health Technology in the United States and is offered a job which he promptly rejects and rather proceeds to the United Kingdom for a three-month practical training. His plans are well laid out and he does not want any disruption: “he would complete the training, return to his country and rest in the arms of the woman who had made all these things possible”. (p.70). Noble plans, one would say. But does he stick to them? The last week of his sojourn in the UK changes everything. He completes his training and gets his results. He has two options: leave the UK immediately or stay the remaining one week. He chooses the second, and in that final lap, he runs into Nanny, a bitchy Nigerian girl, the only black among the new intakes, and in the ensuing love tango, Jonathan gets lost, and rather than go back to his wife and mother in Nigeria, takes up a job in the UK and co-habits with Nanny, Monica’s antithesis: callous, materialistic, indolent, uncaring, lackadaisical.

In this way, the author raises the question of choice. Does man have control over his choices, over the path he eventually takes? It is an open-ended question. Jonathan has a choice to return to Nigeria after his training in the UK, but he chooses to stay back. He has a choice not to mingle with Nanny, knowing fully the likely consequences of that mingling. As the author puts it, “he was aware that this new girl was a distraction”, (p.72). Yet he chooses to mingle. Those wrong choices heighten the conflicts until his sudden realisation that he needs to find Monica, his true love and the woman who made her.

Jonathan and Nanny are frustrated by childlessness, with each blaming him or herself for the problem, more especially with medical science showing they have no reproductive problem. They arrive in Nigeria after five years of sojourn in the UK and settle in the quiet city of Calabar. Meanwhile, Jonathan’s search for Monica yields no positive result. Unknown to him, she is already married to another man, Jude Eze, and the marriage in turn suffers childlessness. He goes to the village to discover that his mother is dead. The only one left in the homestead is his uncle, Ochendo. Jonathan, Nanny, Jude and Monica would eventually come face to face with their past, and thus the root cause of their childlessness, at a seminar for childless couples in Calabar. In the ensuing drama, the reader gets to know that Jude was Nanny’s husband before she fled Nigeria. And just like Monica and Jonathan, Nanny and Jude are also under blood oath, with childlessness as punishment for violation of the oath. Both men take back their real wives. In simple terms, the past is a burden which every man carries. Only those who can confront and exorcise the ghost of their past are able to face the future more meaningfully.  

Conflict of cultures, the thematic pre-occupation of many an African novel since Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, is clearly evident in A Peep in the Dark. The modern educated African is caught between his traditional beliefs and the Western culture represented by Christianity. In this case, Jonathan stands out clearly. Though a baptised Christian, he is unable to heed Rev Shaft’s warning that converts should neither take part in the Owu festival nor eat or associate with heathens. He wonders “how he could possibly refuse to participate in a festival which his father was one of its leaders” or “do without the roasted yam and chicken which his father usually brought home from ozo council meetings”. And he often doubts the white man’s religion and the belief that there were three persons in one god. There is also a sharp contrast between the communal existence of the African (Jonathan’s roots) and the reckless individualism of the American (where he goes to study). In his sober moment while in the US, Jonathan longs for home, and thus re-affirms the age-old wisdom that there is no place like home. The author captures this nostalgia in fine poetry: “He thought of home, the land of the rising sun where the old and the young are bound together in a communal spirit, his place of birth, his taproot, a place where dark skin was something to be proud of”. (p.66).

In another way, A Peep in the Dark portrays certain aspects of Igbo traditional beliefs and practices like re-incarnation, the concern for male child, the need for enquiries before marriage, the belief in Ogbanje spirit, the efficacy of oaths, and so on. When Mazi Ibeh, Jonathan’s father, is on a sick bed, Dibia Omanzu is brought in to take care of him. But when he is unable to perform, Omanzu turns around to blame the sickness on Ibeh’s sending Jonathan to school. Again, Okenze, one of the three men that Jonathan encounters on his way home from school to see his sick father, tells Okenze: “If not that both of us are re-incarnations of the same chi, I would have invoked Amadioha’s thunder to strike you dead this minute”. The Owu masquerade, believed to be spirits of ancestors which emerge from the anthills every year, is another aspect of Igbo culture that the novel highlights. The sacred python, believed to be a god to be revered and never to be killed, is also mentioned. Then there are certain aspects of widowhood practices among the Igbo, as in Nnedimma’s case. Omanzu accuses Nnedimma of complicity in Mazi Ibeh’s death because she allegedly pressured Ibeh into sending Jonathan to school. To prove her innocence, she is made to drink the water used to bathe her husband’s corpse, her hair is shaved with broken bottles, and she is excommunicated from the rest of the community throughout the one year mourning period.

Life in a typical Nigerian university is also highlighted: the observance of rag day, the meeting of the Keggite Club, the romantic relationships, the student demonstration led by the rascally son of the Vice Chancellor, the notorious Loaded Stevo, the eventual closure of the university, the attendant rise in crime in the state, the negotiations between the academic union and the government which seemed to yield no result because the negotiators often abandoned the key issues to trade blames.

A Peep in the Dark again treats the theme of change and the inevitability of death. Nature is in a constant state of flux. Nothing ever remains the same. Characters grow from young to old. On his return home, Jonathan also notices that “the very old had passed on and in their stead a new generation had sprung, the hitherto unborn with their new, unfamiliar faces. The old had grown older and the young too had advanced in age”. Death too is part of the change process, and every man moves ultimately to his death. Ibeh dies. Nnedimma dies. Nzekwu dies. Justice Williams dies. And so on.

The book is also about disappointments and reconciliations, repentance and forgiveness. The couples, in spite of all the wrongdoings against one another, still find a space in their hearts to forgive, re-unite and forge a new beginning. There is no misdeed too big to forgive, and forgiveness is truly divine.

Technically, the author makes ample use of the flashback device to take us back and forth throughout the development of the plot, but we do not get lost. His thorough grasp of the device keeps us abreast of situations until the final point when all differences are reconciled.

On the reverse side, there are a few errors in the book, typographical in the main. We blame this on the printer’s devil, as usual, especially since they are negligible and do not affect the free flow of the beautiful prose that the author has presented to us. Again, there are some impossible coincidences, especially in the last part of the novel where the couples meet. The manner of their meeting and the way they exchange their wives would have been more dramatic. With a little more patience and craft, that final point, which is the high point of the story, would have held readers spell-bound. Unfortunately, the author seemed too much in a haste to conclude.

The beauty of A Peep in the Dark lies in the subtle manner in which the author shakes the foundations of certain traditional beliefs and practices without being judgmental. Unfortunately again, the author does not prescribe solutions. If we follow Achebe’s assertion that ‘art for art’s sake is deodorised bullshit’, then we must blame the author for forgetting that it is also part of his job to chart a way forward for the erring society. He merely chronicles societal ills without lifting a finger to solve them. Again, if we subscribe to the idea of crime and punishment (which is the title of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel on the same theme), that is, that every evil act deserves a commensurate punishment, then it must be said that the punishment Jonathan and the other key players get is too mild for their many wrongdoings. Beyond these, we must commend the author for a job well done. A Peep in the Dark is indeed a great effort in creative literature.