When We Were Fireflies by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim: A Review

 

Abubakar Adam Adamu has blessed the world with a remarkable novel. The human mind has always been fascinated by the premise of returning to life, to fulfil whatever purpose, or lack thereof sometimes; this fascination is closely interlinked with belief in the afterlife. Reincarnation has many versions across cultures around the world. When We Were Fireflies is an examination of the concept through northern Nigerian eyes.

Yarima Lalo, a young man, a painter with his studio on Kolda Street, off Adetokunbo Ademola Crescent, Abuja, on which is located some of the costliest real estate in Nigeria’s capital city, although the novel does not hint at or suggest that. To himself, he has always been an ordinary person, until one Friday “on a hot June day in Abuja…it occurred to him that once, many years before, he had been murdered in the carriage of an old locomotive with the well-worn seaweed-green seats.” With this prepossessing opening, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim pulls the reader into Lalo’s past lives, with death making a constant reappearance.

In the Hollywood movie, The Bucket List, Carter Chambers (played by Morgan Freeman) tells Edward Cole (played by Jack Nicholson) that in the Buddhist concept of reincarnation, a being returns to the world in either an upper or lower station of life, based on how they lived their previous lives. Edward Cole asks rhetorically, “What would a snail do to move up the line? Lay down a perfect trail of slime?” Well, what does Lalo have to do to warrant these returns over three generations? Fall in love with the wrong woman, for the most part, and be at the wrong place at the wrong time — and end up murdered by unsavoury characters. The returning being also has a penchant for reappearing in major northern Nigerian cities across these past lives — Kano, Kafanchan, Jos. Yarima Lalo has vague recollections of these past lives, and as a human is wont to do, he sets out to unravel the full details — the truth — of those lives, vowing to avenge the deaths of those who had killed him in his previous lives. He is accompanied on the journey by Aziza, a divorced-single mother, and Mina, her daughter from her failed marriage.

The novel is also a love, or almost love, story between Aziza and Yarima. Aziza, former banker and now henna parlour owner — or Mai Lalle, to use the Hausa description of the occupation, walks into his painting studio one afternoon and a remarkable relationship is born. At first, she thinks he is mentally unstable when he tells her that he has been dead before, “He speaks about it and I wonder if his family knows he is losing it. He seems like a nice person but I am worried he needs help,” Aziza says to Hajiya Batulu, one of her customers, who would unwittingly lead them to, Indo, Batulu’s mother, a key witness in one of Yarima’s past lives. Aziza supports Yarima as he tries to uncover the past; he supports her as she deals with childhood trauma, and her in-laws trying to wrest Mina from her, so that her mother-in-law, who was missing her soldier son who disappeared during a battle with “the boys”, as the people of Baga in the novel call the Boko Haram insurgents.
The themes also include the insurgency that has ravaged northern Nigeria for more than a decade, and the huge toll it takes on the officers of the Nigerian army who fight the war against the insurgents; two of the leading characters are victims of the war. The religious crises that erupt occasionally and lends an unpredictability to life in usually calm and friendly northern Nigerian cities is also explored in the story.

The novel is a soaring triumph of majestic prose. Ibrahim describes life in Abuja with fine detail, and draws the attention of the reader to those aspects of life in the city that may escape one due to the increasingly bustling nature of the place. The characters muse about life in Nigeria, and maybe everywhere in the world: “We are all fleeing a war. If not in our homes, then in our hearts, in our minds. In everything we pursue, we flee other things.”

I would have given this novel five out of five stars, but one has to score it four due to what I perceive as a shortcoming: the “Americanisation” of the dialogues between the characters. That cadence of daily Nigerian conversation was disrupted by this limitation. Along the way, in the present day, Yarima meets a grandmother with whom he was desperately in love with, in a previous life. He is now young; she is a wrinkled version of her former self, which induced in this reader the evocation of a similar romance in Ibrahim’s award-winning novel Season of Crimson Blossoms. The distinct dialect and cadence of 2010s and 2020s American, or Americanised, teen comes across as they dialogue and reminisce about pre-independent Nigeria, or discuss the results of Yarima’s research into his past on the telephone—I found this off-putting, especially when one considers that they conversed in Hausa, the lingua franca of the region. A little more “timeless” quality should have been infused into their communication, I believe. Although I find this instance to be the most noticeable example, there are several dialogues that come off this way in the novel. There is also the small matter of Yarima’s reproductive inadequacy that was not, in my opinion, sufficiently explored in the novel. Could the insufficiency have been an evolutionary result of some sort, preventing Yarima from being in the position to be summarily despatched to the other world, for another return?

In total, a well-crafted novel based on a fascinating premise.