Obinna Udenwe’s The Widow Who Died With Flowers in Her Mouth and the Surrealistic Depictions of The Human Condition
In the six years between the publication of Obinna Udenwe’s novels, “Satans and Shaitans” and “Colours of Hatred” which won the Chinua Achebe Prize for Literature, he was writing and publishing a lot of short stories. In this time, Udenwe became popular for his short stories, many of which have a lamentable and scandalous quality to the stories they told. After a successful outing which his second novel, “Colours of Hatred” Udenwe is out with a collection of short stories, titled, “The Widow Who Died with Flowers in Her Mouth”.
Read my review of Colours of Hatred Here
Obinna Udenwe’s The Widow who Died With Flowers in Her Mouth is a collection of eleven short stories of varying length, and the one quality they share between each other is their surrealism. Udenwe’s stories confound the readers and leave them a bit unsettled. His protagonists are often people doing non-conventional things in their quest to either make meaning of life, or people trying to cope with life in ways that are perhaps scandalous, or even escape the prison they have been confined to by the crisis of their existence. A man publicly executes himself by sitting on a stick pointing upward; a young and endowed woman returns from the city and all the married men in the village lose their heads over her; a woman returns from jail after many years and in the ruins of what is left of her former life, she goes crazy and sets herself on fire; a man’s wife abandons him after reading Zadie Smith’s Autograph Man and so on. Many of the stories leave you puzzled. If you happen to care enough about the characters, like I did about Emilia, then it could be a little devastating.
Udenwe’s writing is highly imaginative and the reader, depending on how they relate to his stories, are called to partake in his imagination. The stories are quite impressive in how they unveil uncommon scenarios. The stories are capable of raising eye-brows, and eventually, there is a lot worth talking about concerning the characters in the book. In-between the melodramatic nature of the book, some of the stories express more literary ideas like the deep-seated loneliness of their characters, how they are able to drive their victims to the edge, like the man in “The Redemption of Father Gertrick”; he is destined to be lazy and lacks the capacity to rise up to the societal standards of a man, he performs badly in bed, and then one day his wife leaves him after reading Zadie Smith’s Autograph Man. He spends the rest of the story roaming in search of his wife. The ending of “It has to do with Emilia!” is about one of the best things in the short story collection. It attains that achievement which leaves the reader wondering what really could have happened; a perfect cliff-hanger. I am also drawn to how the story, “Melancholy” illustrates how the human mind can be set in destructive motion by the turbulence in lonely melancholy.
Yet there are stories in this collection that drag too long. There are a few stories in the collection including the title story which are about 40–50 pages long. And that is unflinching audacity for a Nigerian writer of short stories. The very long stories in this book could have benefitted from the tightening skills of a more ruthless editor. The title story for example, drags too long, and feels like two stories merged into one, without a proper connection between them being drawn. I can imagine how better the stories if split could have been read, perhaps, as the 4th and 7th stories in the collection, each with a slightly divergent tangent.
With The Widow Who Died With Flowers in Her Mouth, Obinna Udenwe might have created a new subgenre of surrealistic short stories with the aim to portray some aspects of the human condition in a bizarre spectacle, but with an unflinching narrative. The stories in the collection could have been raw materials for comedy since some of them are farcical in nature, but Udenwe’s writing seems to be leaning towards the literary. And so the stories here even though marginal and surreal are different from comic fiction the same way magical realism is different from adventure — because of how it maintains close contact with reality.
The Widow Who Died With Flowers in Her mouth is an important addition to one of our most prominent storytellers in recent times. Obinna Udenwe deserves attention for how he continues to churn our stories which bridge the gap between reality and the imaginative. Read him.
Obinna Udenwe’s The Widow Who Died With Flowers in Her Mouth is available for sale here.
