A strange thing has happened to 29-year-old painter Yarima Lalo. He has come to the just-opened Idu train station (in Abuja) to exorcise the ghost of a decrepit train station he’d once seen; “desperate to banish the sad memories of the decaying carriages he had seen years before at the Jos train station,” in his early days as a recruit in the Nigerian Army. Of that past experience, he remembers seeing “wheels fused onto the tracks by rust, gaping cavities of missing doors and windowpanes, loose electrical fittings dangling by wires knocking hauntingly against the panels in the light draft.” As the train in the Idu station comes alive and begins to drive out—“The instant he heard the blaring horns and the rumble of the engine from a distance”—Yarima Lalo gains an uncanny recollection of a time in the past when he was murdered on a train, some five decades ago.
It is the first time in his life he’s seeing a moving train, just as other spectators present. As this resurrects in him memories of a former life in which was killed in, he loses balance and almost tips over on the tracks (“The force of it pulled him towards the platform edge”), where a railway worker holds him by his shirt and pulls him back, not out of care for Lalo’s life, but for the domestic-capitalist attention to his job, chastising latter: “Kai! Who do you think is going to clean up that mess, eh? First time train is running in thirty years in this country and already some soko is trying to soil it with gore.”
On the very first page of this novel, perhaps even unbeknownst to the writer, Ibrahim stamps the subject that subsumes the arc of his novel: time, as seen in the sly comment of the railway worker, of “first time train is running in thirty years.” We’d find, after eating halfway into When We Were Fireflies, that time is what is interrogated. This same time, which Lalo himself ponders, after the brief euphoria from seeing the train: “Lalo felt like a child, heart fluttering as the train turned the bend. But just as soon as that happened, a heaviness settled over him. How could he, and most of the people there, be seeing a moving train for the first time in their lives?” It is a question that, in these early pages of the novel, slightly bears no weight, but whose omen doesn’t escape us.
A certain image about the questions of a New Country emerges at the train station, where Lalo arrives and is “surprised by the crowd . . . all eager to see the train, to experience a first train ride they would tell their friends and lovers about.” It is the same thing we hear in the words of the railway worker: “First time train is running in thirty years in this country . . .” And yet the painful reckoning by Lalo, of the experience of people in the crowd seeing a moving train for the first time in their lives, that Abubakar Adam Ibrahim set out to talk about country in this novel—but this is an easy simplification that minimises the novel’s capacities. Because what follows is the deeply personal story of Yarima Lalo, and an immensely rich philosophical immersion, uncharacteristic of recent Nigerian novels since Anthills of the Savannah.
But Ibrahim’s philosophical immersion in When We Were Fireflies is not of inquiry where the novel is used as a mere tool for the search for meaning or to arrive at any truth. It is storytelling that has already found these answers, having left the occupation of dormant questioning, and propelled by the engaging story of the protagonist who has lived not just one former life, but two. In both lives, he was killed by a rival lover over a woman. At the Idu train station, which initiates the process of bringing back memories of his past lives, he meets another woman, Aziza, a henna stylist, whom he falls in love with.
A chance occurrence makes them meet a second time in his painting studio along the famous Ademola Adetokunbo Crescent, when Aziza is trying to find shelter from an Abuja rain. When she returns another time to his studio to entertain more of his stories, he tells her, “I have been dead before . . . I know this sounds stupid, but it’s not. . . . I don’t know all the details yet. Recently, I have been having a deluge of memories from my previous lives.” “How many?” she asks. “I have been murdered twice. At least. As far as I can tell,” he answers her. By the end of their conversation, he concludes that “Someday, I’m going to find the men who killed me. If they are alive, I will find them, I swear.”
But five decades have passed since his first death. The second, thirty years back. Both deaths, in Kafanchan. Yarima Lalo’s quest to locate the lives he lived during these two periods and to find the men who killed him, to find closure, is where we come afresh with familiar musings, which intrigue, make us contemplate, and offers some kind of solace, too. And Aziza, who comes into his life, is our surrogate to Lalo who we can only meet on the pages of this novel, but whom we wish we can meet in real life, too, as Aziza stands in for us as participant and empath to Lalo’s life, as witness to his histories—and history—in a very pivotal character role that makes sure we are woven into the fabric of this odyssey.
Lalo’s existence is constructed within a quasi-cosmology. He can see ethereal or spirit children (girls) with “moonstone complexion,” who call him an “absconder” for returning to live a second and third life. But mostly, they call him an “Unblind” because he isn’t supposed to see them, but he can. The children pull carts where they collect fireflies (supposed souls of the dead) they release on the “nights of the fireflies,” which one of them takes Lalo one night to witness at a roundabout. And they are curious to know why Lalo didn’t become a firefly in his previous lives but has come back to live again.
In both his former lives, Lalo was robbed of being with the women he loved and was killed by the men who wanted the women for themselves. When Lalo meets Indo from his first life of fifty years ago, who’s already a grandmother in his present life, he confesses that, “One thing I know for certain is that in all my lives, all three of them, the only time I truly lived was with you by my side. I have never felt this alive in my life.” We feel his pain, if that love is the same the woman herself describes as:
A love so deep you could stack all the oceans of the world, one atop the other, and it would still not be deep and if you put them side by side, they would still not wrap themselves around the expanse of this love. Half a century later, I still don’t think I have scratched the surface of this love . . . In a hundred years from now, when they dig up my bones, they will find the markings of this love on them. I swear to God.
Such ferocious love. It becomes clear that Lalo is driven by or awakened by a primal instinct, as we all are, thinking we are in pursuit of something great but which is lost, which our daily existence forces us to find meaning; the forever elusive destination that feeds our passions, for which when we cannot satiate or tame we feel incomplete by. This is why even if Lalo is aware of the memories of his past lives, he imagines they only return (as in the case of meeting Indo) because he’d always had “the inherent inkling . . . of being beholden to someone somewhere . . . that even if he didn’t know it then, he couldn’t really live and love without their permission,” to become complete.
To understand the inability to be complete, therefore, is to acknowledge loss. Because to exist is to constantly chip away parts of ourselves that can never be regained. The lack of this understanding brings Lalo in contact with his real conflict, as his knowledge of his return to two later lives creates an illusion to him that what is ungraspable is, after all, graspable. But this is a burden. Which is why Indo whom he left fifty years ago when he was murdered on that train, having lived more years unbroken by reincarnations, has this to tell him, “that the only thing we are invulnerable to is time. It gets every one of us. And it beats us all.” It is why when he makes the journey to Kafanchan, where he lived a second life and was betrayed by Turai, his lover in that life, that he finds a Kafanchan affected by time in ways unamendable by him. (Like Turai, a once true belle, reduced to a life of gruesome monotony, now Hajiya Turai, one leg scourged by elephantiasis, which keeps her planted beside the door of her motor park restaurant.)
The storylets and characters in When We Were Fireflies are so accomplished that this review cannot accommodate touching all without running into many thousand words. (The confrontation between Lalo and Turai in her restaurant, for instance, is an adept instrumentation of the power of fiction imitating life.) And it is a testament to the greatness of this novel. They must be followed closely for the reader to arrive at the true grasp of the novel’s power; a great reread novel. However, I found the episode of Lalo’s return to Kafanchan, to interrogate his former life, a more heightened part of the book where Ibrahim plugged his pièce de résistance, as Kafanchan emerges as a metaphor for mourning.
A bitter place to return to, after reincarnation, is where your lover who marries your brother will later accuse you of raping her so that your brother then kills you. But when the story is told, it is that you died in a cornfield as a result of a religious crisis that happened in the city on the same day that fratricide was committed, and your corpse is never found. This is the Kafanchan Lalo returns to. In the morning of the day he finally confronts his former-life lover, Lalo takes a walk to his secondary school where that love began.
He walked away until he turned a corner then stopped and closed his eyes, trying to read something in the air, to catch a whiff of times gone by—a life long lived, long expired, yet one whose memories linger in the shimmering darkness of his mind. In the morning breeze, there was a husky whisper. The voice of the earth, this earth, calling his name. This patch of earth into which twice his blood had emptied.
Of which he comes across Baba Railway’s house which used to be close to the school, which had a beautiful façade students used as a background to snap photographs, where he and his lover once stood in front and had their only photograph:
Before him, the ruins of a familiar building. Roof licked off by flames, top of walls, where the rafters had been, were trimmed with black soot. Pieces of broken windowpanes littered the veranda that had once been lined with bushes of Pride of Barbados. Lalo closed his eyes. . . . He could see the pieces of the windows rising and merging, becoming whole again, the fire unlicking the walls, the rains and the times unwashing the cream paint on the walls and the blue on the windowsills.
And when he finds the house he once lived in,
The compound looked smaller than Lalo remembered. The rooms had now all had metal doors. The one in which they had kept sisal bags of farm produce and sometimes tied up Mamma’s goats and sheep in now had been built up with a proper cover, where they had once just slid a wooden panel over the gaping hole. He pointed out this room to the man who followed him around. Pointed out his parent’s rooms and the room Bawa [his brother in that life] and Turai had occupied. And the other room, when he pointed at it, he realised he remembered nothing of it.
Lalo has lost too much. Reincarnating in another time to live again is too much a bargain. With every revelation of the amount of his loss, the more existence appears to be an ephemeral experience. And yet, through Lalo’s eyes—his ethereal amalgam of existence—we see that which evades us, where Ibrahim crafts a story about the in-betweenness of life, the penumbral spaces our consciousness cannot inhabit and is limited to partake in, yet which invades our wakefulness: just how much do we need to know to navigate life? It must be painful for Lalo to witness the futility of things with his reincarnated eyes. The house he traces his loss to has transformed into something else, possessing an ability to evolve and become a thing beyond his fleeting existence, so that even an orange tree he planted in the compound, those many years ago, to mourn the love (Turai) he lost, has abandoned him.
And so, Ibrahim tells us, or reminds us, of our smallness, of our atomicity in the game of time, and celebrates mortality as the consolation to existence, our worries and dissatisfaction. This is why Lalo’s several returns from death, to be alive again, is not enviable to us, but a torture, which gives us no answers to anything. Thus, in the end, Lalo forgives the offenders from his past lives when he sees how time has happened to them; Turai whose beauty fades and who lives an unfulfilled life, and Alhaji Basiru, the man who murdered him on the train, who’s become a senile waste.
Ibrahim dauntingly reins in this insight. By using the photograph Lalo’s first-life lover, Indo, gives to him as the only survival of that past love, it poses to us what something as simple as a photograph is able to preserve that we cannot. Hinting at a fearful truth we do not acknowledge in our short existence, that quite often, the things without any real life or agency outlast humans within time and space, daring even to have the promise of renewal, thus, their persistence to be a more important part of existence we can ever aspire to. So that against everything we only beat on like boats against currents, as Fitzgerald once observed, or be doomed as in these lines from Rilke’s “Second Elegy”: “Look: trees do exist; the houses / that we live in still stand. We alone / fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind. / And all things conspire to keep silent about us.”
We can therefore see how Kafanchan is a symbol in this novel. As mentioned earlier, to mourn; a mourning Ibrahim employs to finally arrive at what his novel is really about. Kafanchan: where Lalo was first murdered on a train eloping with his lover, leaving behind Jos where that love happened; Jos of horse racecourses where Lalo (“Babayo” in that life) fell in love with horses and horse racing, where his father carried him on his shoulders to watch the horses. But which in his present life Lalo finds, that where the racecourse used to be has been developed into something else, erasing that history entirely, and the sport. The nostalgia and the pain of loss Lalo feels for Jos, having left it behind in that life, and Kafanchan perishing that dream, arouses a strong sense of what we, as Nigerians, have lost, too. This enterprise of memory; this probing of it Ibrahim is so invested in, which brings us to a place of catharsis with Lalo, returns us to the beginning of the novel—
Everything starts—the returned memory of Lalo’s murder in a past life and our journey into this wonderful story—with Lalo joining the military. He was at that train station in Idu because he’d joined the military where he saw the Jos train station as a recruit, whose haunting memory he comes to the new station to correct, in search of therapy in the new spirit the station evokes. For his PTSD, pain, tragedies he’s suffered, and the burden of memory from his stint in Maiduguri; all these indirectly revealing to us that this is actually a novel on what has befallen Nigeria for a very long time; all roads leading to the insurgency in the northeast. But we had to take a long walk, traversing with Lalo, before coming back to it, Ibrahim planting a strong sense of an ending.
But it is a fine and adeptly executed diversion. The amateur hand often fails in humanising stories of trauma by simply placing the film before our eyes. And because he does this, he sooner runs out of material and has to rehash even more bathos, reeling an incredibly tortuous, cringefest for the mind. Or simply: bad literature. How can the subject of the waste and death in the northeast be treated in a novel with the care, respect, and love it deserves? Ibrahim succeeds with When We Were Fireflies using the diversion of immersing us in Lalo’s life. As Sebald notes, “There’s no point in exaggerating that which is already horrific. And from that, by extrapolation, one could conclude that, perhaps, in order for one to get the full measure of the horrific, one needs to remind the reader of beatific moments of life.”
Ibrahim leaves this detail for the end of the novel, in the last chapter. We have reached the end; Lalo has found the answers he sought. Yet we begin to read, quite invasively, that Lalo has to go to Maiduguri (the name appearing recurrently, six times in the last part of the novel!). To Maiduguri; what for? This last blow delivered to us is that during his time in the Nigerian Army, Lalo was among the unit that tracked down Mohammed Yusuf, then leader of the insurgency. And that during the raid, Lalo had shot a 15-year-old boy out of reflex, fearing the boy was one of the insurgents.
Ibrahim makes us register the violence of things, its intermingling and interference in almost everything. In a striking scene and by way of indirection, in another apt use of metaphor, he brings this to focus, painting a picture of the situation in the northeast, through a sight Lalo comes across on his journey up north:
The road ahead of him was straight, laid out across the Sahel like a pencil line on carton-brown paper. In the corner of his yes, great grey trunks of baobabs zipped past, one of them murdered by lightning strikes, stood out, snapped in two, broken, blackened branches inviting travellers to bear witness to the crime.
We cannot miss the muse thoroughly at work here. We cannot miss the violence and destructiveness in the language here; the sharp, biting descriptions of onomatopoeic weight, in “snapped in two,” “broken,” “blackened branches inviting . . . crime.” This crime, the violence. Thus, the 15-year-old felled prematurely, wasted. Like the lives of many boys and young men wasted in the northeast to the banality of violence. Not forgetting the many, many abducted women and girls. The Chibok Girls. The massacre at Baga. Buni Yadi. Unreported massacres and raids; unknown mass graves. The grief-stricken situation in that part of the country. Devastation. Somehow the novel suggests that the men who kill Lalo in his former lives are a product of this unattended violence that is Project Nigeria; violence that looks for every means, every outlet to manifest itself, be it SARS, religious crisis, the disregard for human life, blood baying, all the troubles in the world. That it is disastrous for a country to war within itself and make its men, supposed leaders, to be the victims of the violence erected in the northeast, whose scars will stay with us for a very long time.
Thus, “when we were fireflies” as a title hints at what Ibrahim constructs as a metaphor of the possibility of humans to maintain their innocence, but which task has become impossible, being the reason why we destroy ourselves. We can only look back to—or conjure—a time when we didn’t destroy one another, perhaps, existing as mere fireflies. And that, moreover, what the country needs, just like TJ Benson’s The Madhouse suggests, is therapy from its past, for it to heal and to move forward. And that Lalo’s remembrance of trauma—of things lost (Lalo interpreted as Nigeria who has also lost a lot, when all it wants, we want, is to be loved)—is a criticism of the country’s pact with amnesia.
When We Were Fireflies triumphs in subtle designs. Deeply moving; with moments of plentiful little beauties, and moments of catharsis. It is an immensely careful novel in exploration of human truth, however relative, surmounting the sum of our ordinary existence. A stellar performance. This is the Great Nigerian Novel, and Ibrahim has written it. At least in this first quarter of the twenty-first century, on its way to be regarded a classic. It is a gift. It is a love note to our generation. Following the mastery of prose in Dreams and Assorted Nightmares, where Ibrahim was something of a writing dervish, it erects a pivotal point in Nigerian fiction.♦
Carl Terver has a BA in English from Benue State University, Makurdi, and writes about film, literature, and music. He is the founding editor of Afapinen.
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