08 May 2009 |
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BOOK REVIEW Marriage is a lottery; relationships are freaky By Reuben Abati ______________________________ Bunmi Sofola, Yours Sincerely: The Vanguard Years. Lagos: Betta Quote, 2009, x + 415 pp. ______________________________ _Bunmi Sofola’s Yours Sincerely is probably the longest running newspaper column in Nigeria since 1960; it is over three decades old. During the period it has appeared in different publications including The Punch, Prime People, Vintage People, Options on Sunday and the Vanguard newspapers. In 1999, Ms Sofola had chosen to retire from active journalism to go into full-time insurance brokerage business, she had studied insurance in England and worked as an insurance practitioner in addition to her career in journalism. To mark her retirement as it were, she decided to publish a collection of her writings spanning about 25 years under the title Yours Sincerely. This was her first collection of articles. But she got bored with insurance, and began to miss journalism, confirming the experience of most other journalists who may have also tried to abandon a profession that is probably the most jealous of all professions, and so she contacted Mr Sam Amuka Pemu, publisher of The Vanguard newspapers who willingly gave her the Vanguard platform for the revival of her long-running Yours Sincerely column. The book under review titled Yours Sincerely: The Vanguard Years is a compilation of Ms Sofola’s writings in The Vanguard newspaper in the past seven years, and her second collection of articles under that title. Understandably, the book is dedicated “to you readers who’ve followed my progress over the years. And to my dear Uncle Sam (Mr. Sam Amuka-Pemu OON), a mentor and a thoroughbred journalist” (p. iv). Miss Sofola is indeed very popular with readers: they have known her over the years either as Bunmi Fadase or Bunmi Sofola, or as the name behind the pseudonyms: Dear Auntie Gina, and Cleopatra in Lagos Weekend, Giatho Gathoni in Indigo magazine or as Regina Joseph in Sunday Times, or as a host on television. She is one of the leading contemporary promoters of the relationship genre in Nigerian journalism, more popularly known as romance journalism, and being easily the most durable, an emergent, and rapidly expanding generation of writers in that genre, both male and female owe their inspiration to her example. One of the most basic rules of writing and journalism is that human beings like to read about other human beings, their lives, successes, failures, pains and pleasures, doubts and anxieties, affairs, and occasions, and as they read about others, people see their reflections in a hall of mirrors, they relive their own anxieties, and hopefully, they are entertained, or shocked beyond belief or taught a lesson or two about life, society, Being and Nothingness. It is this simple principle that informs the choice of subject in Bunmi Sofola’s Yours Sincerely column. She brings to it enormous energy and creativity, considering the great volume that she has been able to extract from seven years of writing every Sunday in The Vanguard, in addition to her earlier compilation of articles. Her analysis of human situations and relationships is penetrating, her power of description and the unpretentiousness of her style raise her composition for the most part to the level of literary journalism, but it is the verisimilitude of the writing that makes it all the more engaging. Reading her we are compelled to ask whether she is writing about her own experiences, or of the people around her, and we wonder how a woman of her age could be so knowledgeable and ever so sassy about relationships, but we soon realise that she is writing about us in our daily circumstances, and it is this immediate identification of that haunting truth that continues to make Yours Sincerely so relevant and popular. In the world of relationships that she deals with, there are no sacred themes: she covers nearly every ground – the complex intrigues of romance, adultery, infidelity, betrayal, sex, infertility, the complexity of marriage, the agony of a childless marriage, two-timing lovers, friends who snatch their friends’ boyfriends, men who keep mistresses, older women who keep toy boys and joy boys, women who sleep with their daughter’s husband, men who can’t keep their eyes or hands off the house maid, bosses sleeping with their secretaries, women who sleep with their husbands’ friends, women who sleep with the boss to help their husbands keep the job or earn promotion, the frustrations of a loveless marriage, the excitement of undiscovered infidelity, the embarrassment of being found out, domestic violence, the lure of good sex or material rewards, women and the handsome or ugly men that chase them, abusive wives, fathers and husbands. Sofola is rarely judgemental, although she occasionally offers advice, her preferred style is the narrative style, relying on the plot, the characters, dialogue and the embodied moral of the story to stimulate the reader. There is so much sex in these pages, but she struggles to keep the prurient, always slightly at bay, leaving the rest to the imagination; she constructs a quotidian scenario of courtships and dates, and gifts and the first night and marriage and all the challenges that follow. The form of her narration is that of melodrama; heroes and villains, exits and entrances, but there are no victims in her various descriptions, every one manages to pick up the pieces of their lives and move on: no matter the embarrassment or the level of betrayal, Sofola’s romantic heroes and villains are never helpless things of fate, they always make choices, an indication that the author is herself an optimist, and that in life there are always choices to be made. She is not a feminist either: she is not a bra-waving ideologue raving against men and the evils that they have supposedly inflicted on the womenfolk, rather she portrays both men and women as capable of the most unthinkable things. Her women drink, they chase men, they cheat on men, they are also capable of domestic violence and treachery, she asks in one instance: “who could understand the working of a woman’s mind?” (p. 29). Reading Sofola’s Yours Sincerely, a holistic picture of human beings gradually emerges: wily, dishonest and selfish. In the long run, she is a moralist, she is concerned about the failure of the marriage institution, the collapse of the family as the most basic social unit where values are formed and imbibed, and the population of society with an increasing number of psychological and emotional wrecks –prisoners of passion. She introduces us to a number of concepts including “open marriage” (p.6)- where the two partners appear free to date outsiders, “wedding cancellation policy” (p,160) – an insurance proposal to protect the bride or groom against the betrayal of the party who refuses to show up on wedding day; “toy boys, joy boys,” (p. 265) “off-the-shelf-sex” (p. 274); “LAT -Living Apart Together” (p,80), “contract marriage” (p. 81). Her main concerns would seem to be covered by a number of telling declarations. In the piece titled “There is more to a marriage than a fanciful wedding”, she observes for example, as follows: “After spending tons of money in spectacular media-focused marriages, it is disheartening when such marriages eventually hit the rocks! Young couples today seem not to give a hoot about making their marriages work. And their rich parents are no help either. With their parents ring of ‘Don’t forget you will always have your room waiting’ in their ears, most brides are eager to take their parents’ offer as soon as they can! At the whiff of any perceived problems, they are packed and ready to go!”(p. 3) In “What Does Open Marriage Really mean?”, she says “Trust is the real cornerstone of marriage and today’s attitude to marriage shows it is the issue of trust we must tackle if we are to understand what fidelity means. Relationships between men and women have changed dramatically over the past 30 years. According to a psychologist, we raised an entire generation of young men and women who do not ‘cleave’ to a single individual before marriage and who balk at ‘cleaving’ afterwards. For these young people, the promise to ‘cleave only’ went out of the window with the promise to ‘obey’. Look at most marriage pamphlets today to discover that these words have actually been deleted from the marriage vows.” (p. 7). However, Sofola is not so much obsessed with generational differences as with the universal theme of the birth and death of love and relationships and the consequences. In “A Tale of Two Nigerian Marriages”, she says“Marriage is definitely a lottery – a lot of us pick bad numbers but for a few, the jackpot is often mind-buggling! (sic)”(p. 22).. Her more specific definition of theme is to be found in “Loving with eyes wide open”: “the plain fact is that the world is not fair and we shouldn’t expect the people in it to be. Sadly, we’ve all turned into a nation of users, no thanks to our geriatric politicians, and it is time we realized things are going to get worse! If you’re not aware for instance, that for financial reasons a lot of men and women cow-tow to some indisputably nasty partners just for what they could get out of such a liaison, then take a second look. All those ‘and they lived happily ever after’ story book endings are just the fertile imagination of authors. The reality is much more painful”. (p. 34). It is the picture of this painful reality that Bunmi Sofola paints so graphically through episodes and situations. The book is divided for convenience purposes into Parts- One, Two, Three under the following titles: “Shades of Marriages the (sic) blow the mind”, “Bitter Sweet Road to Divorce”; “As the wedding vows crumble”; Flagrant betrayals and adulterous (sic) relationships”; Vanity Shame and Tragedy of Passion”; “A Mixed Grill”; “The Holiday Bash”; “Managing the Family”. The various articles are not news-based, nor are they necessarily thematic commentaries; a few exceptions in this respect include “Why Domestic Violence is on the increase”, (p. 100); “Why Marry in Church when you are not a church-goer?” (p. 134); “Oh No, Not another wedding!” (p. 114); “Are today’s politicians encouraging a nation of dupes?” (p. 286), “The weekend, Nigeria wept” (p. 289), “Stella Obasanjo – a year after, and why everyday is a gift”; (p. 291) “Bola Kuforiji-Olubi – the incurable romantic at 70!” (p. 292); “There is more to Christmas than Expensive Presents” (p. 369); “What’s so special about the new year?” (p. 372), and “St. Valentine’s Day Special” (p.. 387) . In all the other articles, including the readers’ reactions, it is to be taken for granted, that the names used are not real names, these are single, archetypal labels: Sanni, Amina, Phil, Solomon, Ade,. Christy, Lukman, Chichi, Roy, Juyin, Azu etc. shaped as the accounts are in the nature of true-life confessions. Reactions to Sofola’s writing would be determined by the reader’s own moral compass. Her flavour is different from that of late Pastor Bimbo Odukoya who also wrote extensively on marriage, relationships and human passion (as in these books- Marriage: Real People, Real Problems, Real Solutions; Woman: Fight for your marriage; Communication in Relationships; Sex and the Single Life; and How to Choose a Life Partner: 165 Questions to ask). Sofola is an avant-garde woman without inhibitions, not an evangelist seeking to save troubled souls; but in some instances, she really goes over the top as in “How far would you go to help your man keep the job?” (p. 86). “Just far are you prepared to go to be a virgin?” (p. 340) - a piece on vaginal rejuvenation (1) - and “How to turn your man into a gourmet lover” (p. 390). In other circumstances however, she offers good advice on office romance and filial relationships especially between parents and their children and among siblings. The only danger with the vivid histrionics in Sofola’s portraits is that less discerning readers may be tempted to adopt them as solutions in their own circumstances. And she could be accused of being a dirty, old auntie who led them astray whereas they are victims of their own passions. But all through, this is an engaging collection. It is not difficult to see why newspapers encourage this genre - to brighten up the pages and provide readers with greater variety. Sofola’s brand of column writing provides a refreshing departure from the usual exertions over serious problems of growth and development, natural and man-made disasters, the economy, and the shortcomings of the political and business elite. Her writings touch men and women alike where it matters most in the privacy of their lives. They deal with universal themes that are bound to remain relevant.
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