Book: Winds Against My Sails
Genre: Novel
Pagination: 205
Writer: Tunde
Ope-Davies
Publishers: Kraft
Books Limited, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria
Reviewer: Banji
Ojewale
Man has come a long way from the days of Aesop,
the ancient Greek storyteller who developed a style of travelling to the animal
world to draw lessons for men and women. History has a bouquet of his jungle
stories and their morals: The ant and the grasshopper (You can shape
your tomorrow today) The boy who cried wolf (It’s the lie you’re used to which
will be remembered, not the truth you only drop once), The fox and the grapes
(One can’t accommodate what’s beyond your reach; you will despise it).
Modern novelists also write to instruct or
entertain us, some from forest life, like Nigeria’s Daniel Fagunwa (Ogboju ode ninu igbo irunmole,
1936) and the Englishman George Orwell (Animal Farm, 1945), with
others strictly seeking inspiration from the world of human beings as Professor
Tunde Ope-Davies has done in his work, Winds
Against My Sails.
Ope-Davies dispenses with creatures of the
thicket to relate his account; but he also proffers great precepts not
virtuously different from those we receive through the writers who commune with
the woods. Either way, the readers are enriched, hugely tutored to change
perceptions as they reap a harvest of predictable and unexpected twists in the
tale.
We have plenty of them in the work of Ope-Davies
(Opeibi), professor in Digital Humanities, Digital Cultures, English and
Discourse Studies at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, beginning with a
tell-tale autobiographical title for a fiction. About the Author back cover
section of the book conceals the dark days of the author’s own headwinds. But
critics wouldn’t consider it unreasonable to look at Professor Wale Jones in
the novel and apply poetic license to unveil him as the alter ego of Opeibi,
himself a heavily garlanded don like his creation.
Jones, the main character, leaves rustic
Jadesore, to embark on what the author calls, Voyage of Life. The name of his
village challenges the ambitious to venture out for breakthroughs eluding them.
Yet, it doesn’t reveal that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
Wale gets the delicacy alright; but it is at the expense of much travail,
trauma and toil.
There are
near-death experiences; there are fatalities; there are several heartbreaks as
well as betrayals; missed opportunities that present no second chances are also
recorded; we equally learn of juvenile escapades that could have shortened the
life of the hero; there is a battle over the choice of a marriage partner; a
time of abandonment by family, friends and loved ones is also shared; we read
of days of hunger when biscuits and mint sweets miserably cater for hunger;
there’s story of an absentee father; when he’s home however, he fails to model
virtue as he engages in nocturnal drinking orgies with friends in the presence
of impressionable children; there are assaults of ill health and threats of
death at childbirth.
To be sure, some of these are occasioned by
poverty. Not all, though. How about the struggles Jones encounter even after
the young man has crossed the threshold, in a manner of speaking, and he begins
to get local and global recognition denied peers and mentors? The winds against
his sail don’t cease in the ivory tower. They are personified by Katakiti, "who had remained at the same rank for years.
To watch Wale, once his student,
rise above him was a bitter pill.’’ There’s also a season of character perfidy
when Wale Jones is accused of being ‘’too friendly with female students’’ and "selling a colleague’s textbook to students, a practice the university had
outlawed.’’ Wale attributes all what
he’s facing to "politics of the system.’’
Rightly, the blurb concludes that Wale’s faith
in God and ‘’an unyielding spirit of perseverance’’ are the steps he mounts to
overcome the winds of adversity.
So, like Karl Marx, the legendary German
co-founder of Scientific Socialism, whose bronze memorial he gazes at in an
unnamed European city, Professor Jones becomes ‘’a man who faced his fires and
emerged remade,’’ ready to change his defective system as Marx attempted to.
Now, in view of an opening poem that predicts
ultimate victory for the voyager "Because He that stillest the noise of the
Seas’’, is with the explorer, it may be tempting to dismiss Professor
Ope-Davies’ Winds Against My Sails as a simplistic literary contraption
primed from the beginning for a happy end, regardless of the protagonist’s
tumultuous killer adventures. That would be an unbalanced ruling that misses
the Olympian plot of Opeibi’s epic. He brings his story under a roof of
sweeping flashbacks, critical commentary, history (ancestral and contemporary),
objective philosophy, Biblical theology, all of which reveals the author’s
catholic mind.
These are ferried by a language rich in fluid
prose. metaphor and semiotics.
Let’s examine for instance Opeibi’s capture of
‘dust’ to take the readers through their own semiotic journeys. as it were. It
first appears as ‘’chalk dust’’ in
Chapter One. Later, he says "Dust rose
like spirits over the playing fields…’’
And when Wale Jones got the new birth in Christ, we saw the dust called
to action again: ‘’…he bent his knees on the dusty ground and gave his life to
Christ.’’
Thus, in the literary construct of Professor
Ope-Davies’ world, there’s a sustained imagery of the lowly dust and chalk,
both of which appear to have sentenced Wale to limitless and hopeless penury.
Once, the lecturer is seen collapsing "at the foot of a chalkboard.’’ But, to get into Divine embrace wherein is
final liberation, Wale must align with "the dusty ground’’ and look up to God
from that lowly position. He must stoop
to conquer.
Is Ope-Davies testing the waters of fiction with
Winds Against My Sails after
a string of acclaimed nonfiction publications, including the biographical Kumuyi: Defender of the Faith, which
he wrote with co-members of the Editorial Board of the Deeper Christian Life
Ministry?
This is a heuristic quest with the possibility
of turning in a new-look Tunde Ope-Davies.
*Ojewale is a writer in Ota, Ogun
State, Nigeria.
