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Summary
Summary
From two-time Caine Prize finalist Elnathan John, a dynamic young voice from Nigeria, Born on a Tuesday is a stirring, starkly rendered first novel about a young boy struggling to find his place in a society that is fracturing along religious and political lines.
In far northwestern Nigeria, Dantala lives among a gang of street boys who sleep under a kuka tree. During the election, the boys are paid by the Small Party to cause trouble. When their attempt to burn down the opposition's local headquarters ends in disaster, Dantala must run for his life, leaving his best friend behind. He makes his way to a mosque that provides him with food, shelter, and guidance. With his quick aptitude and modest nature, Dantala becomes a favored apprentice to the mosque's sheikh. Before long, he is faced with a terrible conflict of loyalties, as one of the sheikh's closest advisors begins to raise his own radical movement. When bloodshed erupts in the city around him, Dantala must decide what kind of Muslim--and what kind of man--he wants to be. Told in Dantala's naïve, searching voice, this astonishing debut explores the ways in which young men are seduced by religious fundamentalism and violence.
Author Notes
Elnathan John is a Nigerian lawyer who quit his job in 2012 to write full-time. In 2013, he was short-listed for the Caine Prize for African Writing for his story "Bayan Layi" and was again named a finalist in 2015. He is a 2015 Civitella Ranieri Fellow, writes a satiric column about politics and life for a Nigerian weekly newspaper, and has had work published in Per Contra , Financial Times , Le Monde Diplomatique , Chimurenga's Chronic , Hazlitt , and the Evergreen Review . He lives in Nigeria's capital city, Abuja.
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Nigerian teen Dantala's world erupts in violence, and an imam offers him shelter as well as education and the emotional and physical support needed to become a man. The terrors of contemporary warfare are real, and strong teen readers will appreciate this literary coming-of-age debut. (http://ow.ly/PN4C305MyAa)-Sarah Hill, Lake Land College, Mattoon, IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
This sweeping debut novel by Caine Prize-finalist John is poignant and compelling. In a rural Nigerian community called Bayan Layi, an inquisitive teen named Dantala has joined a group of homeless youths. He must flee, however, when a political election sparks a riot resulting in the death of one of his friends. Dantala goes on a harrowing journey to find his mother, Umma, in Dogon Icce. He inevitably settles in the northwestern city-state of Sokoto, at a mosque headed by Sheikh Jamal and Malam Abdul-Nur Mohammed. Over seven years, Dantala befriends Abdul-Nur's younger brother, Jibril, and falls in love with the sheikh's daughter, Aisha. External conflicts surround the protagonist as he grows into a thoughtful and conscientious man. Told through a blend of first-person narration and diary pages, John skillfully employs Dantala's probing voice to pose crucial questions and explore collisions between modernity and tradition, Arabic and English, rhetoric and action. The narrative depicts political and spiritual division: the nation's political parties are in heated opposition, and Abdul-Nur's brutal jihadist movement opposes the sheikh's peaceful view of Islam. This turmoil echoes the internal conflicts raging inside Dantala. He wrestles with his identity, sexuality, morality, and faith, while struggling to navigate violent clashes that threaten to destroy all he knows and loves. John has written a stunning, important coming-of-age story. Agent: Toby Mundy, Toby Mundy Associates. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
What's in this world, as it happens, is loss upon massive loss. There is heartbreak and pulverising grief. But there is also beauty and love and friendship. Dantala observes on the way to Sokoto that "the rice farms of Fadama farmers stretch out like a shiny green cloth". At the hospital where Sheikh [Jamal] is convalescing after being shot, he meets a girl whose eyes root him to the spot. "They are bright and look like a deep gully, the type that pulls you and makes you dizzy when you look down into it. Everything has slowed down - it is taking forever for her to walk past." Later, Dantala writes in his notebook, "Aisha is in my heart like a spirit. When I close my eyes I see her. I open my eyes and any girl that is wearing a green hijab looks like her." Dantala does not get a chance to pursue his love for Aisha. He is arrested in the wake of riots and put in prison, where he spends the next nine months. When he returns to his old home, he discovers a note from [Jibril]: that note is proof that in the end, friendship survives everything, even death. "I am lightheaded ... My heart tells me he is OK. Jibril is OK ... I think of all the things I must do: cut my hair, wash with hot water, start writing out my story. Then take a bus and go wherever it is headed." We know that when Dantala gets where that bus is headed, he will do what he does best. Dantala will survive. He will reclaim the innocence lost. A young man discovers corruption, religious extremism and the redemptive power of language on his vivid journey to adulthood At the centre of Elnathan John's insightful debut novel about religious extremism in Nigeria is its eponymous protagonist, Dantala, whose name translates as Born on a Tuesday. Dantala is sent away by his father to attend Qur'anic school. He falls in with a group of street boys; when they are hired by a political party to burn the headquarters of an opposition party, the police get involved and Dantala must flee to save his life. He ends up in Sokoto State, where an imam called Sheikh Jamal takes him under his wing. Here he finds some stability and becomes friends with Jibril, who teaches him English, a language that "sounds soft and easy like one does not need to open one's mouth a lot or use a lot of air or energy" -- unlike Arabic, where "one uses everything, the neck, the jaws, the tongue". Dantala's world is not soft and easy. Horrific things happen: prepubescent boys kill and commit atrocities for political ideologies they do not understand, and mothers depend on alms to feed their children. Hypocrisy abounds; corruption is rife; young men are drawn to religious extremism, there is tension between Shia and the Sunni Muslims, but also redemption in language and style. John writes with an understated elegance and we discover humour and wisdom in the most unexpected of places. When Dantala is involved in a car accident, for example, he goes to a chemist where the owner "is short and his eyeballs look like they are about to fall out ... I can't stop looking at his huge nose, which seems to be divided into three parts. He must be breathing in a lot of air." And when Umma, Dantala's mother, complains of her chest hurting, his grandmother tells her, "You think too much. What is in this world?" What's in this world, as it happens, is loss upon massive loss. There is heartbreak and pulverising grief. But there is also beauty and love and friendship. Dantala observes on the way to Sokoto that "the rice farms of Fadama farmers stretch out like a shiny green cloth". At the hospital where Sheikh Jamal is convalescing after being shot, he meets a girl whose eyes root him to the spot. "They are bright and look like a deep gully, the type that pulls you and makes you dizzy when you look down into it. Everything has slowed down - it is taking forever for her to walk past." Later, Dantala writes in his notebook, "Aisha is in my heart like a spirit. When I close my eyes I see her. I open my eyes and any girl that is wearing a green hijab looks like her." Dantala does not get a chance to pursue his love for Aisha. He is arrested in the wake of riots and put in prison, where he spends the next nine months. When he returns to his old home, he discovers a note from Jibril: that note is proof that in the end, friendship survives everything, even death. "I am lightheaded ... My heart tells me he is OK. Jibril is OK ... I think of all the things I must do: cut my hair, wash with hot water, start writing out my story. Then take a bus and go wherever it is headed." We know that when Dantala gets where that bus is headed, he will do what he does best. Dantala will survive. He will reclaim the innocence lost. In the west we mostly hear of life in northern Nigeria through news reports of Boko Haram atrocities, yet John steers away from making this a novel about Boko Haram. It is as if he wants to demonstrate that northern Nigeria is more than terrorist attacks, steeping the reader in the language and the culture of the Muslim north, where men and women rarely mix. He uses Hausa words without translation, but also shows us Dantala exploring the English language in handwritten sections intercut with the main narrative, in which he defines English words and then applies them to his own situation. The Igbo people have a saying about the little piece of dry meat that fills the mouth. John's book is that meat: a relatively short novel with an extraordinary density, and we, his readers, are grateful. * Chika Unigwe's Night Dancer is published by Jonathan Cape. To order Born on a Tuesday for [pound]7.99 (RRP [pound]9.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. - Chika Unigwe.
Booklist Review
In the far reaches of northwestern Nigeria, Dantala, whose name means born on Tuesday, is one of the homeless teenage boys who sleep under the kula tree, but then an altercation with the police sends him fleeing until he finds sanctuary in a nearby mosque. Dantala, who is Muslim, begins working there under the direction of the kind Sheikh, who is the imam. As he grows up, Dantala becomes Sheikh's deputy. In the meantime, his brothers have become Shiite, enemies of Sheikh's movement. To further complicate things, Sheikh and his chief assistant have gone separate ways, the assistant founding a mujahideen movement. Violence ensues and escalates until Sheikh is murdered, and Dantala's world begins to unravel. Dantala's story is a complex one that almost demands an understanding of Nigerian politics to fully understand. Yet it is surely true that if, as he muses, all Muslim people are not fighting each other then maybe other kafir people will not have the power over us. Nigerian author John's story is an absorbing and sometimes disquieting look inside the contemporary Muslim world.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2016 Booklist
Library Journal Review
As the novel opens, Dantala (whose name means "born on a Tuesday," the book's title, though he is also known as Ahmad) is living on the streets with a group of boys in the Nigerian village where he has been sent by his parents to study the Quran. After a night of violent unrest, Dantala returns home to find his mother mentally ill and the rest of his family either dead or scattered. He finds refuge at a mosque headed by a benevolent sheikh, but a rift grows between Sheikh Jamal's teaching and the more radicalized viewpoint of Malam Abdul-Nur, the mosque's other leader. As he grows up, Dantala must navigate the conflicting moral guidance of his mentors amid a dangerous and violent political and religious climate. This is a coming-of-age story in the tradition of -Huckleberry Finn, as Dantala's moral development is often at odds with what the authorities are telling him is "right." It also is a chilling illustration of how religion is all too often used to control those with little education or financial stability. VERDICT For those who can stomach the passages describing horrifying brutality, this is a moving first novel that invites compassion. The ending, while bleak, offers a glimmer of hope. [See Prepub Alert, 12/14/15.]-Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.