Damilare Kuku presents to us this collection of 12 stories in Nearly All The Men in Lagos are Mad, sharing 12 different scenarios of relationships in Lagos, the giving and the taking. If you follow Nigerian movies it is easy to ascribe certain characters you have watched in the movies to the characters in this collection. You can relate to the language easily as well.
The story International Relations paints the picture of the Lagos men referred to in the title of the collection…
”The standard Lagos-Man package comes with lying, cheating, and occasional scamming; alongside stylish kaftans, splashes of Sauvage or Ouds, and fake accents. See, they’ve shown me so much pepper in this short life…”(insert Bimbo Ademoye’s voice here 😂)
…some girls “…have seen the light so bright and so white,” those who have totally given up on the Lagos boys and are trying to find an oyibo,(white men) only to find out they have moved to the same house only with different paint😂
Some of the stories will shock you like Cuck-Up, the story of the husband who asked his wife to sleep with another man for money and now wonders why she has a knife to his penis. I will leave you to read Beard Gang and Independence Day on your own.
Then there is Iggy the gigolo who is in it for something, always. For opportunity, a green card, for money, anything . Always plotting.
In the Anointed Wife, I felt like slapping that woman. At first I thought she was naive, defending her pastor husband who was being accused of having relations with an ashewo. Publicly taking it to the socials when all along she knew the flaws in her pastor husband’s character. Because what will the church and the world say?
Genevieve falls for Odili in Side-Lined and makes the mistake of not asking enough questions. She is spoiled rotten, Odili buys her a house and car. They travel together on his many business trips for her only to discover he is married and that he will protect his marriage at any cost. Sweet Oddy will ask her when she discovers he is married…”I bought you this house for you. What more do you want?” Tjo!
My favorite of the 12 stories is “I Knew.” For me it’s the story that shares the probable psychological reasons why all the 12 relationships didn’t work. Trauma. Childhood trauma. The environment that a child grows in affects how they relate with others. Abusive parenting, violence in the home, absence of one parent or both can permanently scar a child to the extend of them failing to believe in love.
Sadiq is a broken man, having been born from a whirlwind romance his mother had with a visiting foreigner who left his mother pregnant after 3 months.
”…when people ask me why we are not together, I simply say that it was because I was afraid of losing you.”
Sadiq laments when he realises he let a good woman go because of his own insecurities after he realises that it is not easy to get another woman to fix a heart break from a previous relationship. He confesses that even in his dreams he is afraid of losing her, that he holds back and is so scared of big love because…
”…it was too open. Like the outer space, like the ocean, endless, without boundaries; so open I knew getting lost it was a certainty. And I never want to do that – lose myself to anything.”
I expected a tonne of bitterness in these stories but instead discovered how refreshingly humorous and non-sided they are. I laughed and cried with some of of the characters but never did I feel drawn in to hate the supposed villains in the stories. Even in A Lover’s Vendetta, the beginning paragraph…
”If we ever meet again, only one of us will leave the encounter unharmed. If I don’t kill you, I will leave a mark so deep and prominent on your body, people will cross the road for you. Anybody with sense will look at the mark and know that only a worthless person will do something deserving of such a scar. They will be as pitiless with you as you were with me for four years, Dele.”
…does not convince me that Dele is a horrible person. Dele who married Orode knowing how much she wanted children when he knew he couldn’t have kids because of an injury he had as a child.
I cannot hate Dele with the way Damilare treats the character in the story. The same way I couldn’t hate Ugwu in Chimamanda’s Half A Yellow Sun because both their endearing traits outweigh their seemingly villainous selves.
This collection is easy on the heart.
Title: Nearly All The Men in Lagos Are Mad
Author: Damilare Kuku
Published by: Swift Press
Year: 2021
Pages: 246
