❦WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE of a novel that is like a vortex swallowing its own self, that to read it means to interrupt its self-indulgence? This is the relationship Mr. Sidi has created for his to-be readers and his novel, The Incredible Dreams of Garba Dakaskus.
I remember telling Mr. Sidi, when TIDOGD was in its manuscript phase, that it was a writer’s writer novel. We shared anxiety about its acceptance, and its avant-gardist and dizzying structure. (Pleasantly, this hasn’t been the case as it has won fan readership.) I remember that when we tried to briefly discuss it at a book reading in December 2021 at the now-relocated Adam Pages when it was in Wuse 2, myself and Mr. Sidi couldn’t remember some of the characters’ roles even though we recalled their names. As it turned out at that reading I had better retention about the novel than he did.
The novel, The Incredible Dreams of Garba Dakaskus, now that we are talking about it—if Mr. Sidi’s wish for it to become true as a kinetic book—will tell us that it isn’t to be reviewed by any critic or madman who deems themselves worthy. That this task would be best left for the character in it, Bulbul the Parrot, grand vizier to the Caliph of its fictional Baghdad, to review.
Before its publication, I was strolling home on a November evening, last year. As random thoughts assailed my mind, I was suddenly thinking of the term “woman” used by Adam to announce Eve: “I shall call you woman because out of me you came.” Out of me: man. The morphology, I thought at the time, was too convenient. But, of course, this story wasn’t originally told in English: at this thought I wanted to know what could have been the Aramaic word or whatever proto-language there was when this story was told and retold over great years, what the word for “woman” would be. In Tiv, the expression would be, “Me yilau kwase sha ciu ka hen amo u dugh ye.” In this case woman is kwase and man is nomsoor. Meaning “kwase” isn’t morphologically derived from “nomsoor,” thus making Adam’s proclamation in English curiously interesting.
This brought back my years of reading theology and bible commentary, how scholars and clergy dote and pore over etymology and semantics in understanding the true or intended meaning of a word or words used in Scripture. It made me think of the 47 scribes and bible scholars working on the King James Bible, how they laboured and dealt with translating words.
All of this somehow returned me to the novel The Incredible Dreams of Garba Dakaskus; to a passage where the fictional character, Dakaskus, has emerged in the real world to find its author. He ends up at a house where blind children have been conscripted by a syndicate to write books which the outside world waits feverishly to consume, different books all purportedly authored by a Garba Dakaskus. The character hears a dealer in the house saying on the phone: “Look, if Rafaela is not willing to pay for the manuscript as agreed, then so be it. There are other clients who are willing to pay. Can’t you see, Viper? It is the original copy of A Guide to the Secrets of the Alphabet we are talking about.”
How did musing about Adam calling Eve woman lead me to Mr. Sidi’s ambitious novel? It felt like a small answer to being able to connect the novel to anything immediately relatable, to something more than its mysticism. And this is because the novel’s preoccupation is of what words mean or what books mean. Its other questions are What is a book? Why do we write it? Who writes it? What happens to us when we read? (Man’s evolution of the ability to transcribe and read hasn’t been a history of innocence.) What does it make us? Who are we? All this explored with vortex-like precision.
But these are not the questions readers may ask themselves when reading TIDOGD. Personally, I found that the only way out of The Incredible Dreams… doesn’t exist: Abubakar Sidi constructed a very planned maze here that even after a reader emerges from it, she won’t feel satisfied and have to re-enter it once again to begin the punishment of grasping what the smörgåsbord fuck is going in this very winding meta- meta-fictional work, returning to a point zero that only recycles itself. Or maybe it is as such a point that she walks away from it.
The Incredible Dreams… is actually a dream, a literal dream. A literary dream landscape and the stream of consciousness of Garba Dakaskus in possession of a coveted book, A Guide to the Secrets of the Alphabet, known to have magical abilities. A world-renowned assassin hunts for this same book and travels from Europe to Sokoto, to kill Dakaskus and retrieve it through a process of recovering memory from one’s DNA using “tripartite algebra.” Dakaskus, however, has been informed about this assassin and seeks refuge in a special room in an asylum, in his local town of Kware, Sokoto, where he begins to write about the book.
The legend of the book cuts across times in history, and goes places, from Damascus to Baghdad to Cairo, to the archives of the Sokoto Sultanate. As Garba Dakaskus tells us about the book, we learn of a Caliph’s incestuous affair with his sister and how he was eventually deposed. We learn about a monastery of children scholars taught dark magic; adventures of thieves in the old Arabia; a scholar’s journey on an airship and his memoirs; talking parrots and an army of apes; Labaran the King of Lies; and many more. These stories are narrated in an interwoven structure that is both protean and palindromic at the same time, in a style that is Dadaist and surreal—speculative fiction, fantasy, fable, and magical realism altogether. (Some of Sidi’s heroes are the surrealist writer Paul Eluard, and the painter Jackson Pollock.)
The novel is meta-fictional, interrogating the nature of what a book is and its place in humanity, the purpose and pursuit of knowledge, and the mysticism accorded to books as a product of imagination: how does literary imagination form, how does it operate in its primordiality, and what control does it wield in civilisations when in book form? Thus, as Garba Dakaskus begins to write about this book in the asylum, “a curtain of invisible manacles dropped from the ceiling and shackled his mind.” Told from alternating points-of-view, its imagination is unhinged, its settings anywhere and everywhere. What appears is the story of an ancient book—its weight and history—and the tales of those who have sought it or who seek it.
The incredible, if not incredulous, roams free here. At a point where the novel begins to pick up in sense, a character, Sheikh, nicknamed the Viper, has squandered his inheritance; he’s sobered up and gained access to his Higher Soul, following an advice “to make more effort to master the technique of peripheral wings.”
But in the mastery of his skill of meditation what he sees each time is the “image of an irresistible femme fatale pole-dancing,” an image that becomes the “persistent underlying background” during his meditations. What we are seeing here is a celebration of the Sufist deviant, of which the author is a student. The Viper pursues this fever and quenches it with a “voluptuous black damsel in a brothel in New Harlem.” Moments later he is awakened by knocks at the door and a postman who delivers a brown envelope to him. He finds a phone number in the parcel, dials it, and receives an automated message informing him of being a member of the Rubicon, with a corresponding address.
He locates the address where he is taken to a room billowing with layers of smoke; his heartbeat increases and he passes out.
His thoughts faded into a hallucinatory oblivion. He saw himself in a valley with an interlocking network of mountains in the distance. Dark curtains of fog slowly enveloped the valley. The Viper trudged up the mountains while countless shadows of the souls of ghosts followed behind him. As the apparent leader of this unholy congregation, he was neither charismatic nor inspiring, but he led them along. When they reached the first mountain, half of the shadows dissolved into fog. The other half stood where they were, unwilling to move any further. The Viper turned and looked at them. He uttered something under his breath and their faces stirred with a luminous glow. The Viper turned around and walked into a mountain.
Inside the mountain, he saw a lone dome seemingly made of cloth. The Viper parted the dome and found a shell. He opened the shell and found an old sage floating mid-air in meditation. He engaged the sage in a silent conversation. Saturated with the soulful murmurings emanating from the sage, the Viper closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he found himself lying in a room in New Harlem, surrounded by rose-scented fragrance. A knock on the door got him out of bed. It was a postman bearing a brown envelope. He opened the envelope to find an old, tattered manuscript titled The Catalogue of Dreams.
He closed the door and sat on his bed, opened the manuscript, and began to read.
We see that the Viper is back in the hotel room in New Harlem where he first received a parcel that directed him to the Rubicon where he’d earlier passed out; once again to receive a parcel from the same postman. (Palindromic, remember?) This time the parcel contains the book The Catalogue of Dreams. What follows as the Viper begins to read the catalogue of dreams is a kind of entry into a trance as he reads about an Al-Maqsidi (here, Mr. Sidi inserts himself in his novel as a character) who is on a boat trip with Labaran the King of Lies, discussing the mesmerising multi-dimensionality of life. At the end of the boat voyage, Labaran leaves Al-Maqsidi at a phantasmagorical landscape of three huts that materialise from thin air.
Al-Maqsidi walks to the huts and in one of them finds cylindrical casks “lined up in a haphazard arrangement.” He thinks the casks are yarns which could be made into strands of stories. “The casks remind him of an anecdote, about a congregation of robbers who hide in jars, from the tales of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. He sees the casks as forty strands of lies and he, the Ali Baba that will weave them into a coherent tale.” Note that we have left the Viper, but following his reading of The Catalogue of Dreams, and now meeting Al-Maqsidi. If we go on, we are thrust into the stories Al-Maqsidi begins to see as he opens one of the casks, where inside is a “luminous hologram with different angles of visualisations.” Of the stories of Gazga. Zahila and an enlightened Caliph. And much more. Spinning, spinning, so that the novel never wraps up any story it begins, giving so end-sense, though it is what the reader anticipates. This way, Mr. Sidi’s novel has been compared to Abubakar Imam’s Magana Jari Ce, which has a similar pattern of a continual narrative flow.
Another very fond memory of reading The Incredible Dreams is encountering Al-Sudani, a merchant who sails on an airship and enters a time travel portal through a storm, to 400 years into the future, where he finds a memoir written by his son who answers the same name of Al-Sudani, claiming to have boarded an airship to find his father who had left on a voyage and never returned. In such moments Sidi reminds us of his mastery of storytelling, that he is not always persuasive about literary shamanism.
The Incredible Dreams of Garba Dakaskus is an extremely interesting novel with tributaries of tales that find themselves at many confluence points, dispersing and meeting again, and again. It is a book about the pursuit of ideas, a book of immense and winding thrill, a book of the enthusiasm of thought and literary imagination. Still, it is a great headache to read. But Mr. Sidi wields a charismatic persona. One waits to see what will come of the novel in the coming years; will it spark a new avant-gardist tradition in Nigerian fiction?
For those who may still ask, who is Garba Dakaskus?—turn to Professor Tahir’s mini-treatise within the novel. The answer to that question, if there’s any, is an acknowledgement of the pure literary shamanism we have been fooled by to read this novel. There’s no secret here. It’s a dream, straightforwardly. And how do you comprehend a dream’s logic? We are Garba Dakaskus: man the phenomenal, the eternal, the central character woven into the story of the incredible dream called life.♦
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Carl Terver is the author of Glory to the Sky (forthcoming August 2024). He writes on film, literature, and music, and is the founding editor of Afapinen. 𝕏