April 17, (THEWILL) – The famous Kukuruku Hills have existed for thousands of years long before the first settlers found a home beneath its rocky boulders. Legend has it that Igarra people of yore found solace in the caves scattered here and there in the hills anytime raiders invaded.
The story still goes that the natives made a beeline to the safety of the hills after a town crier forewarned his compatriots of the attackers from out of town. And guess how did the town crier warn the people of Igarra? By blowing on his horn and making the sound kukuruku like a cock crowing. Thus did Kukuruku Hills serve as a sanctuary for generations of dwellers below.
These days there are no communal clashes between Igarra and neighbouring or far-flung communities. Still, others have a found a use for the hills – the creative community. In 2001, Funso Ayejina published his Commonwealth prize-winning collection of short stories, Legend of the Rocky Hills and Other Stories, with the hills as setting in some of them.
Twenty-two years after, another writer has appropriated the legend of the hills to write a book around it. Ms. Edith Onize Aiyede is a realtor by profession. But she always wanted to write.
“I have always wanted to write, to publish,” the author said on Saturday April 9 at Freedom Park Broad Street, Lagos, where her book was publicly presented. “I have always wanted to write what people can read and relate to. Even though I am a realtor, there has always been that innate desire to do this, like ok, you have a number of things and the world needs to see it. So, why not let people see it. Why not do it? When you write as a creative, you don’t know how people are going to receive it. You just have to do the best that you can and hope that, somehow, the effort you put into it yields something that people can connect with it.”
More than the two dozen guests at the presentation seemed to connect with author and book at the presentation as she read passages from it. Pascal Otts of the French Cultural Centre had an open copy. So with Michel Deelen, consulate-general of Netherlands in Lagos. Both also posed with her during the unveiling proper.
Other guests listened under the leafy awning of the towering trees in The Garden, asked questions about the book and then listened some more. What’s more, Ms. Aiyede literally transported Igarra to Lagos via her collection of short stories: the town’s cultural festivals; a locally-woven fabric was draped on a stand; the DJ completed the ambience with home-made music which one or two guests danced to enthusiastically.
Of course such privileges are rare in Lagos. But it was made possible by the author with a book about growing up as a youngster in her natal town. It is remarkable. Autographing a copy for a guest, Ms. Aiyede wrote: “May our stories find their way into the books of history.”
Most guests at the event would readily agree that Aiyede herself has written her way into history. Though Edo state is not short of female novelists, she is the first to have written and published something comprehensive – not history, please – about Igarra.
In her late thirties to early forties, Ms. Aiyede tells her story through the eyes of youngster and not as an adult. It is just perfect because writing as an adult would have resulted in an unbalanced publication. For one, an adult may be prone to unnecessary embellishments. But from the very first story to the last, the author lays it bare for readers, the good and the bad, warts and all.
Take the author’s encounter with a stubborn goat which she recounts in Chapter Two. Of course, anyone who has had a run in with domestic animals in rural areas will readily identify with Aiyede’s story. Undisturbed by predators, goats get to throw their weight around sometimes, merrily scooping mouthfuls of grains left to dry on the ground, grabbing yam tubers when your back is turned. Under such circumstances, confrontations between humans and beast becomes inevitable. The author had more than enough with Aya the evil goat.
On one occasion, looking to revenging a past misdeed by the author, Aya waited until one day she was in the convenience. Assuming the classical bovine charge, the goat rammed the author from behind straight on her mess.
What is remarkable about Kukuruku Girl is the sense of rusticity readers feel all through: the swim in the village river, fetching water from the local spring and encountering reptiles and fish you were forbidden to kill. Some of them were near tragic incidents. As she tells it, the author had gone to swim with some of her friends and relations. Her older sister was almost insultingly washed away by a fast-flowing current.
As expected, there is a chapter devoted to Kukuruku Hills, how she survived adventures there. “I lived the most adventurous part of my childhood away from my parents and siblings,” Ms. Aiyede confesses. “Mud houses were built at the foot of the hills. I remember looking long at them and scared they might fall and crush the buildings and every unlucky being in them. But that never happened, still hasn’t, and probably never will.”
Fascinating as the decrepit structures were to the author, it was the hills that caught and riveted her attention most. In time, friends started calling her “rock monkey” because of the “hide and seek in caves, rock climbing” she was fond of.
This is what Ms. Aiyede has availed readers, a close look at some of the incidents she personally went through in her younger years. As such, it should read as a bio. Instead, the author offers us a rich tapestry of her lived experiences in short, captivating stories.
Being a woman, you could also say she is a myth buster, questioning some of the cultural practices and beliefs common with the people of Igarra. For instance, why are women barred from watching night masquerades but not the ones who display in the daytime? She even probes further: why are adults always right and children wrong even though it is sometimes blindingly obvious that adults themselves really do not know it all?
Those are questions readers are bound to find unsettling in Kukuruku Girl but no answers to. Nearly 200-pages long, the collection comes complete with translations of Igarra words and usages into English, for easy understanding by non-native readers.
Wowed by the publication, a reviewer has described Kukuruku Girl as a “candid delivery of experiences which were fun and tragic at some point while revealing other aspects which were mischievous and humbling.”
Edi Lawani is equally bowled over by Kukuruku Girl, writing in the Foreword thusly: “The essence of her cultural heritage pops out very strongly and this makes the collection of stories take on a historical dimension.”
Are there female role models for Ms. Aiyede? Yes, she replied. Writers Chimamanda Adichie and Sefi Atta. She has read all of Atta’s fiction and she confesses she likes Swallow. As for Adichie, it is her Americanah Aiyede finds enchanting such that she can read it over and over again. More important to her is what she thinks of the author of Purple Hibiscus. “She is premium.”
After a first publication, Ms. Aiyede is not likely to be described as “premium” as far as writing is concerned. Already, she is working on two manuscripts, one fiction and another non-fiction. In the coming years and as her writing matures, someone – a female writer just possibly – may likely use that phrase to describe Ms. Aiyede herself.
Michael Jimoh is a Nigerian journalist with many years experience in print media. He is currently a Special Correspondent with THEWILL.
