“Ṣìgìdì” in Yoruba spirituality is a fetish with magical powers in the form of an effigy made of clay or wood, wielded by its owner as a charm. In Wole Talabi’s novel Shigidi—which is also the name of its central character—Shigidi, an improvement on “Ṣìgìdì,” is an orisa carved from “spirit-clay” by the supreme god Olorun, as a nightmare god who works in the Orisha Spirit Company. This company is in Orun, the Yoruba spirit realm where other orisa, such as Sango (stylised as Shango in Talabi’s novel), Obatala, Eshu-Elegba, Yemoja, and others, operate from. Shigidi’s job is simple. He receives assignments from the company, which are requests from humans still practicing the old Yoruba religion, to cause nightmares to others, and in some cases, kill the victims in the process. At the end of each month, he is rewarded with “pray-pay” used in sustaining his own existence as all other orisas do, too.
He is a god but he’s not allowed the direct pay of prayers believers make to him, except through the company. Something’s not right! Not only so, he wasn’t created admirable; his physique and form always makes him self-loathing. One day, on an assignment, as he weaponises a nightmare to kill his victim, he encounters a demon Nneoma (the succubus Naamah who has taken up a Nigerian identity). The soul of his victim is already trapped by Nneoma, so they fight for it. But as they fight, they both sense something in each other; a sadness and loneliness—when Shigidi looks into her eyes, he finds them glowing “bright as the flames of a forest fire but as he continued to look at them, he started to see it more clearly. There was a turmoil in the depths of those fiery eyes, just as there was in his own eyes every time he saw his reflection.” So, she’s seen it too, Shigidi thinks to himself when Nneoma speaks softly to him.
As a powerful succubus, Nneoma makes a deal with Shigidi and promises to remould him into having a better physique and form if he leaves the Orisha Spirit Company, goes rogue, and become her partner. Together they’d harvest human souls and won’t need to wait on pray-pays, they’d be independent and freelance gods, they’d be free. Shigidi agrees.
We do not expect too much from thrillers; story propels forward and protagonists get closer to their goal as suspense mounts. This is what happens in Shigidi. The two new partners are saved by Olorun, from Shango, the C.E.O of Orisha Spirit Company, when the latter is about to deal a death blow to Shigidi for leaving the company and almost killing his wife who he first sends to kill Shigidi. As a debt, Olorun employs them to pull a heist.
The heist is to retrieve the brass head of Obalufon from the British Museum in London. Nneoma sees it as an easy job for a powerful god as Olorun. But Olorun says according to a “diplomatic arrangement with the British Spirit Bureau” he cannot be caught in foreign territory committing such heist, so he has chosen them who are not bound by such bureaucracy. Even more so, there’s a question of the museum protected by a spiritual security seal by the branch of the Royal British Spirit Bureau called Section Six.
We are awash with such fancies and creations characteristic of the kind of world Talabi creates and introduces us to in the novel. But for the amount of research that went into writing it, it could be true as well. Historical references take us to places like Algeria; a battle in the old Aksumite kingdom in Ethiopia in the early 11th century; references to The Fall of Satan, and so on. All gods mentioned in the novel are actual gods (or based on them) known in myths and spirituality across the world and universe.
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Olorun needs the brass head of Obalufon because he’d deposited some of his essence—“war essence”—in it, when he gifted it to the third Ooni if Ife, Obalufon Alayemore, many, many years ago. He needs it to reinvigorate his abated power to face Shango who he ousts as the C.E.O of the spirit company.
Like us, gods are bound by economics and existentialism. In a meeting the orisa Obatala reads from the agenda: “The first item…, as usual, is the decline in faith,” which equally increases their irrelevance and weakens them. It is the job of the Orisha Spirit Company to sustain belief in the orisas and keep the business running. And it has tried; by the suggestion of an orisa, they’ve exploited Nollywood to convert believers.
But in the helplessness of these orisas, ruthlessly depicted by Talabi’s belittling of them—they bicker, talk too much, are afraid, take human form and suffer pain and embody emotions subjected to the corporeal form; there’s not enough spirituality from worshippers to strengthen them, the world already a spiritually decadent place, so that the few worshippers only seek malicious favours—it is pointless, and we do not see how Olorun will turn the spirit company around. The politics prevail nonetheless, affecting the likes of Shigidi, a lesser god, who is at the front working for his masters.
On his own part, Shigidi, like Nneoma, is on a journey to denouement, or experiences several of them. He is a younger god who becomes stronger by the power of love he has for the succubus and having more faith in himself, unburdened by age or worries of the custodian orisas. His reality is different, not of the old world; nonetheless the new one he’s in is chaotic, decadent, and at a crossroads for spirit beings. For the British Spirit Bureau, Olorun says, “I don’t think they enjoy their work, but they do it very seriously.” But Olorun is a democratic leader—we don’t know of the spirit world in other places and climes—which may account for why his own spirit empire has waned; he admits even to making a mistake by once choosing Shango as C.E.O of the spirit company.
Shigidi’s character development is a key narrative in the novel, having no foibles of the old orisas (though he shares in the understanding of their collective plight), works as an answer to understand the milieu of the gods as even capitalism fails them. It is the archetype of the young knowing their world better than the old.
Talabi’s novel may not be the right place to mine for representation, needless that academics might fawn over it, the story centres the Yoruba gaze of the world perfectly, and by extension centres the Black gaze—all that enthusiasm of Africanfuturism. Talabi also wields the sci-fi/fantasy genre perfectly, he creates his worlds into plausible entities, and his prose cinematic. Where Shigidi fights Gog, a god thrice his size, for example, and pins him down with a neck squeeze, there’s almost no effect as “he squeezed with everything he had but felt like hugging a steel mountain.” For sci-fi- and fantasy-loving teens and young adults, Shigidi might be a gold mine:
His body slowly reconstituted itself, scaffolding around the green core of his spirit-particles into a form that was familiar but not, in a world that was now no longer expansive and abstract and nebulous but as firm as consequences.
He continued to follow the potential that was guiding him until his consciousness hit what appeared to be a barrier of unreality. It seemed thin and elastic and uneven, like a membrane.
Talabi has also created a Yoruba superhero here. Shigidi is that ultimate whiz kid, even as an orisa, mastering too much powers, discovering more of himself and his potentials. The fight scenes, his channeling of powers through spirit matter, and bravura of the orisa as a superhero recalls Black Panther. Shigidi has been listed this year by the Washington Post among the 10 best science fiction and fantasy books. For a novel that took so much time and work to be this accomplished, it is a little unnerving to read its first sentence and be alright: it’s so duress-inducing, so much, to the point of dissuading a certain type of reader to read past it. Otherwise, it is a fine weekend read if you want a break from streaming movies—it’s a cinematic world by itself.♦
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Carl Terver is the author of Glory to the Sky (forthcoming March 2024). He writes on film, literature, and music.