Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday - Review

I finally grabbed a copy of Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday after two or three years of publication from a bookshop at Gwammaja, opposite National Orthopedic Hospital Dala.

I have been anxious to read the book since its release in 2015, and after reading the short story several times that appeared in the first chapter. It piqued my curiosity. It is not set in a nebulous elsewhere, so it is easy for me identifying the events, cues and unstated motives of the characters aided by intimate understanding of the workings of their mind.

I as well read several reviews to get clue of the controversy surrounding the book. So I approached the text with an added layer of caution and scrutiny of the suspicious other.

I became scared soon after reading some pages and saw Dantala’s struggle, perils and the huddles he went through, his inner struggle with sexual fantasies, fear and loss of love. Dantala is literally on his own. Hundred thousands kids are out there like him fighting dangerous forces in the streets.

If he is not thinking and worrying about home, his brothers and a sister and how they are neglected and maltreated by the males of their society, he is strategizing ways of survival in the Sheik’s mosque and trying to balance his loyalty to the two clerics.

The torture in the cells of the Nigerian government is acutely captured that you could literally feel the pain. From Dantala’s ordeal in the hand of security men we get to understand that shooting a captive in detention cell is actually an act of kindness. So sad, sad that after his release, after the torture, hunger and thirst, Dantala finally loses his mind and his love!

Pain and anger for our society is in every chapter of the book, buried in humor and  expressed in the innocent, probing questioning voice of the narrator. Small issues people take for granted are brought under close examination and depicted as very complicated; bra, a common female wear turned out to be very complicated thing that Dantala wondered who came with that idea.

The novel is just bold and not sacrilegious as you can sense from occasional grumblings. But you can link people’s fear to the fact of who the writer is. Abubakar Adam’s Hajiya Binta is disgusting, if not more, than Elnathan’s characters. Of course the book will be okay even without some “scenes” but Elnathan is a rebel who writes deviant arts.

He might choose to be very blatant and brutal, but even where he kicked at social norms, convention and sensibility he did largely in mild and subtle ways. For good and sober reasoning he showed that you hardly can solve your problem if you don’t know the source of it. How people hinge everything on God, and since it is God, they make no effort at improving their lot. In this society you find people who believe poverty is a sign of piety.

Elnathan has taken pity of the community, and in messianic patronage attempts to teach how life should be. That aside, what Elnathan attempts to convey is plain and clear: The society should raise the quality of their thinking and approach life in sensible and realistic ways. He worries really that people have no idea how and where the rain started beating them.

Several people vented similar anger at one point or other of their career before they softened, some straight into despair, after reaching some point of realization.  It is easy to understand why some people are playing “race traitors” daily. Which is good, because, without shocking challenge and rude criticism to our established belief, no matter how absurd – I guess the challengers know that – there would be no agency of informed and matured views that are conscious of other views. That sends us back into rigorous scholarship for well-grounded, knowledgeable and more substantiated argument.  

The subtext of Elnathan’s creative effort and other public commenters who worry about the condition of our society is to spur the community into action and do something if they are really angry!