Ruminations on Place, Fantasy, and Nkereuwem Albert’s The Bone River

“I wanted to capture the essence of the place.” 

Nkereuwem Albert

A review by Jesutomisin Ipinmoye

There are many things to love about The Bone River.

There is the magic system, the sense of a thick and present world bubbling away beneath the fabric of our own world. In Nkereuwem’s Calabar, miracles are the work of Pastors contorting magic in front of a blind congregation, and penises can, in fact, be stolen. By virtue of your initiation and belonging to one of four houses, you become a conduit to magic and mystery seeping out of the earth. You can command the dead, kindle fire from within you, and form familiars out of bone. You can shape it into beasts and seal gods. It is a land of infinite possibility. If you’re creative enough, you can conjure magic in service of peace—or to deceive.

This brings me to the story itself. By the time you put down Nkereuwem’s The Bone River, you would have witnessed how fragile peace can be, while war remains a latent possibility. This in itself should not be a discovery. We are well familiar with the flexibility of politicised narratives, the speculative reality of a truth wielded by authority. Surely, it should not take too much imagination to condense the abstraction of the lie beneath Calabar’s secret peace into a manner of critique about the cities we inhabit or the stories we tell about the blood that soaks our collective memories. After all, there is even greater violence than a certain bastard’s deception that is used every day as a tool to maintain a semblance of “status quo,” a peace with which no one is comfortable. And yet, the discovery of deception, as you read, grabs you. You know things like this happen, and yet, you are shocked. Why wouldn’t you be? It is the job of good fantasy to re-expose us to reality afresh. When you have seen and seen and seen with all your seeing eyes, the world unseen can and should shock you in new ways. 

And then there is a stressful sapphic romance.

Stressful, because I am unfortunately a sucker for simple romances that make you go awwww. That’s boring, but man, when it comes to love, I love boring. It is in this regard that Nkereuwem is after my life. When you travel with Onari “Heych” Henshaw and Afem Aba Ye Duop, you soak in so much of them that you wish that their love was enough to topple kingdoms and overpower all complications. After all, isn’t this what every queer person secretly hopes? Who can deny the desire that love should be enough? And yet, the solidity of a relationship is rooted in the decisions, not merely in feelings. The weight of “I Love You” is in how long it takes to say the words and how desperate the ear waiting to hear them is. The rejection bites harder when you know what is lost. Abasi, it is heartwrenching and beautiful, and I think Nkereuwem deserves to be flogged for it.

Indeed, there are many things to love about The Bone River. And yet, I find myself most drawn to the city where it all happens.

The Bone River is a love letter to Calabar. That much is indisputable. The Nigerian city rises to such a state of presence within the story that I must consider Nkereuwem a romantic. Only a true lover knows the soul of another this way. He went to the University of Calabar to study dental surgery, and his encounters with morbid anatomy and healthcare are evident in the work. Consider Afem and Necromancy. The level of detail with which her dealings with death are described could have been the fruit of scientific research, but it also bears an intimacy that renders some of the prose in many parts unnerving.

I am aware of the conversation that happened between Nkereuwem Nkereuwem and Gabrielle Emem Harry on Old Marian street in Calabar. The very conversation that birthed this book. I’ll save it for the good doctor — this is the one “Dr.” reference he’s allowed me — to share. But, the very story, from the moment I heard it, filled me with envy.

For both of them, Calabar is a city with claws. You see it in the way Nkereuwem writes: it is from the soil and the water of the land that everything pours. Magic comes with deep veneration. Even when the magic is a job, or a duty, or a burden, or a conquest, there is still the acknowledgement of place that flows with it. The writers are at its whims and yet, there is a desire to hold it in regard, a desire to attenuate their relationship with it such that it benefits them. Perhaps even to own it. You get the feeling that the text spiritually lifts Calabar off the map and looks into all parts of it.

Forgive my use of second person there — perhaps this is an emotional sentiment that resonates strongly only with me. But you must understand, I write from a place of dislocation. My next sentence on a blank page comes with a lilt — it can not land. And so work this grounded feels like a heady offering to me. It is a bold attestation of belonging that makes me weep.

In a voice note I prodded Nkereuwem with in preparation for writing this, I asked about this translation of place. Forgive me for taking tips in the name of a review. In his reply, he said he wanted to “capture the essence of the place.” He spoke of work like Chimeka Garrick’s A Broken People’s Playlist, another love letter, but to Port Harcourt. He spoke of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Nsukka. What he spoke of, without words, was the kind of understanding that comes from a place where and when one really lives. 

And when one really lives, what is a surprise? What new thing did Calabar whisper to Nkereuwem Nkereuwem? It is this familiarity that allows Nkereuwem to reproduce Calabar and its headiness with microscopic detail.

I know this is a strange take-away. Understand that I am a person of many dislocations. Home is still a place that I am looking for with both eyes open and both palms outstretched. But that is what fantasy is for; the very act of peeling open a world unseen requires you to know every dwindling trickle of tar and bend of its bay. And so The Bone River came to me at the right time. It came as a reminder that you only move on when you find unseen but solid ground.

In her review of Ben Okri’s seminal novel, The Famished Road, Linda Grant recounted, “When I finished the book and went outside, it was as if all the trees of South London had angels sitting in them.”

It is the power of excellent fantasy, of characters dwelling behind a curtain in our very own worlds, speculating about us as we about them, that allows us to, very briefly, wipe the scales off our own eyes and see the secret peace that holds our foundation. Much like Grant, I finished The Bone River and stepped outside my house, hopeful that I could feel sigils and wards inscribed in the walls of my home, trusting that I could find my unseen world, too.

Bio:

Jesutomisin Ipinmoye is an author and beleaguered lecturer learning to suffer sexily on an island in the Indian Ocean. He is a big fan of the short story and, as such, has publications (in, or upcoming in, Khoreo, Twisted Tongue, Brittle Paper, etc.) and a book (“How to Get Rid of Ants,” Parrésia Publishing) to that effect. You can find him on Substack, where he’s investigating our stuck-ness in time.