Banji Ojewale
When things fell apart for Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the world also broke into one thousand and one shards, never to return to the old stable order. But in Eunice Obidi’s Set Apart, the dissolution of family and its sacred values isn’t succeeded by unredeemed disintegration, disharmony and dispersions. Rather, the author ushers in a Deus ex machina (God) Who reshuffles the narratives, scenes, and personalities to set apart for His will those bitten, battered, and bruised by society and its oddly arranged institutions.
It’s a tale of ceaseless surprises and twists and turns, after which the burnt emerge from ashes to become the blessed.
Opening her novel with a home knocked down by spousal feuding, Eunice Obidi introduces the protagonist, Funke Adejumobi, a young undergraduate woman who can’t understand how old lovers, her parents, have become strangers, with the husband, James, always the strayed predator from the jungle. The girl “wished she had been born into a different family where domestic violence was non-existent”. If wishes were horses…
Divorce, having served notice through beatings unleashed by James, is inevitable. When it arrives, Funke, an only child and mother are shattered, especially the former.
Following the separation, Funke’s father disappears from the book altogether. When he’s referenced, Funke tells everyone she has never had a father; since his presence in her life is the presence of pain and the absence of paternal love she feels entitled to. She gets the love aplenty from the mother. But Mrs. Adejumobi dies, plunging the girl into new depths of despondency.
At a point, she considers suicide, urged by a “disembodied voice”. She has forsaken the God Who could have counselled against such a step. Although she’s revealed as knowing the Lord from an early age, a concatenation of circumstances sets Funke on a journey away from God. Her mother says: “Funke, you used to be a very good lover of God when you were younger. You were even the one who brought me to Christ. What’s happening to you?”
School grades dip with threatening academic fatality. For some time, she runs into good friends like Remi, Caroline, Michael, Joshua, etc., two of whom return her to Christianity and better school performance. She’s also gifted the kindness of a Dr. Chuma, benign wife of a pastor. Funke has a crush on her son, hoping for a marital consummation.
There’s record of a full-blown rebellion that sees Funke branch from gospel to secular music. She loses recognition as she’s sighted among drunkards and smokers, while honouring invitation to perform at high-society gatherings in Ikoyi.
Once, on a trip to Lagos to be part of a gospel programme, she’s kidnapped by ritualists along with others. Heaven uses Funke to free them and to save souls, including one of the criminals. It occurs after she’s wholly reconciled to God, Who now freely employs the Holy Spirit to give Funke clear instructions in decision-taking.
The Lord does more than make Funke graduate: He leads her to the bliss of marriage, the loss of which blights her parents’ and shoves her to the brink of destruction.
But Heaven wouldn’t allow her to perish. Funke is set apart, in the crumbled fragments around. She’s only allowed a brush with them without harm.
Eunice Obidi’s Set Apart is a proselytising literary venture. It hoists the adventures of a woman and those around her, kindred spirits and hostile ones, to teach that God is at work in our lives, whether we accept or reject His reality. He forsakes none ultimately, except those who maintain their recalcitrant stance to the end.
In her book, the young writer painstakingly posts a prose that is both taut, elastic and adaptable. This free style, perfected by great storytellers, enables Eunice Obidi to achieve a balance between short, median and long sentences. She doesn’t trouble you with snaky kilometre-long constructions; nor is she used to polysyllabic words. There’s, in Set Apart, the primary task of relating a story. It shouldn’t be hindered or slowed down by literary encumbrances.
Now, if you’re thrilled by her prose, you’d have more in the dialogue scenes. Her powers soar in dialogue settings, such as we behold on pages 105-107, 135-137, and 171. Her strength appears to diminish in prose.
Should there be a revised edition in the future, the author and publishers must address slips arising from misplaced or missing quotation marks and lines uncompleted before flushing to other ones.
• Ojewale, a writer, is based in Ota, Ogun State