by Corrine Watson
April 16, 2024
A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo; Tin House; 208 pages; $16.95.
Uche Okonkwo’s debut short-story collection, A Kind of Madness, puts a magnifying glass to human relationships and explores the things that drive them apart. Set in modern Nigeria, these ten stories offer an array of characters working through their own solitary struggles of illness, friendship, or marriage. Throughout the collection, Okonkwo aptly captures the quiet nuances of everyday traumas faced in domestic life through prose that is tender yet devastating.
Okonkwo explores characters seeking out a better future in a way that depicts this desire as a sense of greed, which becomes the character’s downfall. In “The Harvest,” Alfonso is determined to grow his small church and compete with the flashy mega churches without relying on the bells and whistles of faith healing and extravagance. Yet Alfonso’s desire to prove himself places a wedge, not only between himself and his congregation, but also his wife. When Alfonso is faced with his rock bottom, he thinks, “This was the time to acknowledge all the things she'd been trying to tell him, and to tell her the things he needed to say, things he needed to repent for — his silence and resentments, the shadow that his pride and ego had cast over their lives." Even at his lowest point, Alfonso is still incapable of connecting to his wife and notes that “it was so much easier to talk to an unseen God than to the person beside him, made of flesh and blood, like him. But people were capricious, and prayer was a shield." By describing prayer as a shield Okonkwo draws attention to the fact that Alfonso is still protecting himself from harsh realities and his madness is delusion, and throughout the story, she captures the ways in which Alfonso’s ego ostracizes him from the community and life he is so desperate to build.
The collection’s opening story, “Nwunye Belgium,” takes a different perspective on the concept of shattered dreams that is more sympathetic and resonates with hope. After her mother schemes to secure her marriage to a young doctor living in Belgium, Udoka begins to dream of what her life might be with the security of money and the opportunities that might be in store for her outside of her village, while working through the anxieties of marrying a stranger. Yet these dreams are abruptly ended along with the engagement as Udoka is accused of being an unsuitable bride due to madness in her family. As the opening story, the collection’s title begins to become clearer and the madness we’re dealing with is more complex than insanity. It is an interesting choice for Okonkwo to change point of view in the middle of the story to show how Udoka’s almost mother-in-law intentionally makes up a lie about madness to explain a broken engagement to protect her own reputation when her son refuses to be part of an arranged marriage. That sense of injustice allows the character to remain sympathetic as she thinks, “It was madness: her mother's hunger for the kind of salvation that could come only from a man, and Udoka herself, how readily she had surrendered the reigns of her life, letting her mother decide how they, how she, should be saved.” It stands out that the story ends with this epiphany, because unlike Alfonso in “The Harvest,” Udoka recognizes that she has become a bystander in her own story and ends by taking action and returning to school. With this, Okonkwo suggests that there is a freedom that comes from madness, the ability to cast off expectations since in the eyes of the community her reputation couldn’t fall any lower.
The majority of the collection explores the perspectives of children, and while Okonkwo does capture the tropes of loss of innocence, she also captures the ways children are more in tune with harsh realities than they are often given credit for. It stands out that these children are distrusting of adults, but there is always a darker commentary on class and mental health that the author captures with these perspectives. “The Girl Who Lied” illustrates this in the friendship of two classmates. The narrator, Tola, struggles to understand Kemi’s reckless behavior or her need to tell tall-tales to teachers and other students, and she is equally confused when Kemi comes to share her bed. When Kemi is asleep, Tola tries to make sense of this vulnerability. “I stayed awake long after, not understanding my need to decipher the language her body spoke in sleep: one of murmurs, sighs, and grinding of teeth, unguarded and unrehearsed." Trying to piece together her friend’s public persona in comparison to this private moment, Tola begins to understand that Kemi’s desperate desire to be seen is a mask for her deeper emotional needs. “Kemi didn't just want their attention, she seemed to need it, like it was the only thing keeping her from falling into a dark hole." The way Okonkwo captures Tola’s quiet observations of Kemi’s increasingly concerning behavior captures a variety of nuances between class, mental health and the intuition of children, because Tola recognizes that in spite of Kemi’s wealth, gifts from her parents can’t fill the void of emotional neglect that causes her to seek out reckless behavior that escalates to self-harm. Through this story the author not only captures the complexity of young friendships, but draws attention to the perhaps unseen harm caused by emotional neglect.
Structurally, these stories stand out in Okonkwo’s apt choice in point of view. In a complexly layered story like “Animals,” Okonkwo allows the reader to gain insight to the ways a fractured nuclear family is processing the trauma of a police encounter. Through these shifts of perspective, the reader is able to share the character’s private fears, desires, and shame that they are unwilling to share with the other members of the family. Unlike the first-person narration or third person view that is limited to only one main character, it feels like these style choices were intentional. In the exploration of “madness,” Okonkwo takes the perspective of an outsider looking in, piecing together the meaning of other’s actions and their place within an imperfect family, or community. The author’s collection also suggests that these characters struggling with their delusions are perhaps incapable of the kind of satisfying introspection we get from other characters, which is why Alfonso in “The Harvest” was unable to own up to his flaws at the end of his story. But the stories, particularly those led by children, allow the character and the reader to sit with dark lessons of imperfect world.
Okonkwo ends each story with a sense of haunting loneliness, as the characters come to terms with their reality. In the midst of shattered dreams, the silver lining is often hard to find and the tales in A Kind of Madness allow the reader to sit with the characters in those quiet moments, and perhaps the glimmer of hope is that the characters, particularly the children, display a sense of maturity and resilience that will see them to the better future.
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The Disillusioned: Exploring mental health, shattered dreams, and broken relationships in A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Uncovered Lens Eze Joshua from Pexels
Corrine Watson is a freelance writer and editor based in Charlotte, NC. Her work has appeared in Wretched Creations and the Southern Review of Books. Follow her on Twitter @CorrineWatson6.
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