BOOK REVIEW: We are all Àlejòs: Lessons on Time and Responsibility from a Novella

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On Friday, eight students sitting at the Etisalat Lounge, Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos, answered a question I had for them. Where would they go if they could return to a defining point in Nigerian history? What emotion would prompt their desire to time travel? What would they do differently from what our forebears had done? Confidence wished to travel back to whatever point in Nigerian history when the buds of colourism began to spring up. She spoke of wanting to actively oppose the statements, ideas, and behavioural or systemic nuances that exalted whiteness in the mind of Nigerian women and painted their dark skin as undesirable. For Ilemona, travelling by road to Kogi from Lagos at a time when ethnic cleansings disguised under “herdsmen and farmer clashes” were non-existent would seem a good idea.

For both of them and every other person I spoke to, anger, disillusion, and deep questioning caused them to want to probe into the fabric of our Nigerian past and fix its warp and weft.  I was pleasantly surprised at their deep, thoughtful responses. Now, their answers should not have surprised me. Youth are continually at the forefront of protests, community-building projects, climate activism, and social work in Africa, especially Nigeria. For ‘visitors’ new to this world, they seem to be superheroes devotedly seeking utilitarian good.

Wole Olayinka’s brilliant afrofuturistic and magically-realistic novella touches on this belief. Àlejò: Crossing Times draws on time travel to disambiguate the idea of human duty in protecting humankind. Ilerioluwa Ariyo is teleported back in time, before the modern day, by Esu— the god of mischief— while walking to her aunt’s shop. She switches time with an eight-year-old boy, Bantale. Ileri arrives Olotoso, where a woman she believes to be her long-lost grandmother is said to have appeared years before, never to return. She must contend with hostile people and situations that try to tie her to the past without knowing why Esu chose her for this mission. It would seem that a prerequisite for her world’s survival in the distant future exists only in this age when she crops up, and she must brave the odds to travel back home with it in the balance of time.

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In the book, the lines between predestination and utilitarian goods intersect. Esu, an element of the Yoruba supernatural, represents the religious and traditional belief in fate being determined by deities. He sends Ileri’s grandmother, who fails the mission, by quickly adjusting to Olotoso and making blood ties in that time. Determinedly, he teleports Ileri to remedy the situation. Failing to preserve the lives of the majority through her decisions would mean forgetting her purpose. The resemblance of this scenario to what many Generation–Z Nigerians are quoted to refer to as “the failure of millennials” is uncanny. They consider the millennials of the early 1980s to the mid-1990s complacent, setting the new generation up for failure by constantly adjusting to corrupt and inept Nigerian governments. Thus, for the Nigerian youth, a sense of duty in succeeding where their predecessors have ‘failed’ characterises the protests and political and climate action movements that have swept Nigeria since 2019. In a way, they are all àlejòs like Ileri— unrelenting in their pursuit of escape and answers about the purpose of their existence in today’s Nigeria.

Time is in a delicate balance; I ponder this as I scroll through the pages of my preview copy of Àlejò. Throughout the book, Wole Olayinka causes us to consider transcience–a trope in our world literature— from a different perspective. He asks, “How lasting are the effects of our collective action in a world already plagued by many social, environmental, and political crises? Do they live beyond us to plague the next generation? Are we only mortals preparing a new world and maintaining a delicate balance in time through our ‘immortal’ actions? Is our failure to fix our country the stimulus for the birth of a new generation time and time again?”

The truth remains. Our planet is at a tipping point. There is no time travel, no Planet B, and no other chance to fix our collective future. So, we must awaken to our responsibility to save the next generation one good act at a time. I consider Alejo: Crossing Times a wake-up alarm. We’d be foolish to snooze.

ABOUT THE BOOK REVIEWER:

Ude, Ugo Anna is an essayist who comments on African history, language, and cultural heritage. Her critical scrutiny embraces the visual arts and literature, and her perspective considers how African creatives grapple with political and social realities in their oeuvres. Attuned to intersectionality, she is particularly interested in how these artists and writers’ lived experiences may influence their expression. Outside writing, she runs a book drive and works on documentary film productions as a researcher and project manager. Ugo studies English at the University of Lagos.

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