Arrows of Rain.

Arrows of Rain By Okey Ndibe Heinemann Educational Publishers, October 2000, $15.95, ISBN 0-435-90657-7

"The mouth owes stories the debt of speech.... A voiceless man is as good as dead." This is the profound leitmotif in a commanding debut by Nigerian-born Okey Ndibe. In exploring the issue of silence versus the "telling" and the consequences of both, Ndibe--whose intriguing story is set in the fictitious modern African state of Madia--brings into focus not only a personal perspective, but the ramifications of each choice within a political framework reeking of moral turpitude.

When Bukuru "the madman" becomes a suspect in the drowning of a young woman, it is soon suggested that he also may be responsible for a recent spate of rapes and murders. His case takes on even grander--and graver--proportions when he insists that the country's current head of state raped and murdered a young woman twenty-three years before.

Through the novel's three parts (Mists, Memories, Malaise), Bukuru, a journalist-turned-exile, is forced to face awakened demons from his past--demons who speak of a life marked by failure in, "a succession of silences, evasions, abdications." Now, pitted against the state and compelled to speak out, he entrusts a young reporter, Femi Adero, to document his story. But Femi might be a piece of the puzzle of Bukuru's past; and their climactic confrontation brings the novel to a dramatic close.

Ndibe infuses his work with traditional African values, sayings and beliefs that brilliantly parallel the baseness of a corrupt modern state on the brink of ruin. When, prior to his exile, Bukuru watched Madians celebrate a military coup, "like children welcoming a first rainfall after a long, hard dry season", he is reminded of a story his grandmother had told him about "the ambivalent character of rain, sustainer of the earth's plenitude but also the harbinger of malaise.... It can give life, but its arrows can also cause death." Thus, Arrows of Rain, Bukuru's grandmother's phrase "for rain's malefic face," becomes the novel's central metaphor. Ndibe is a gifted writer and an adept storyteller, who clearly exults in the telling.

Denolyn Carroll is assistant managing editor at Essence magazine, a freelance writer and a lecturer on writing and editing at Pace University, New York.