Broken Lives and Other Stories (review)

The foreword of this volume, by Emmanuel N. Obiechina, is particularly helpful inasmuch as it provides the neophyte with the necessary background to understand Nigerian history from its independence on 1 October 1960, through its civil war of July 1967, to January 1970, when Biafra returned to Nigeria. The reader is reminded that this was the "bloodiest war of the twentieth century" (with 1–3 million deaths, mostly from famine) and that the British and American governments intervened to "prevent supplies of food and medicine from reaching the starving children of rebel Biafra" (xi).

In Broken Lives and Other Stories, Anthonia C. Kalu, professor of black studies at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, offers ten short stories on this crucial moment of history. The fifth story, "Broken Lives," seems to hold a symbolic and central position in the collection: it is situated at the pivotal and ironic moment when the civil war in Nigeria is finally finished; this is a moment that could elicit a certain cheer and, yet, lives continue to be broken: men continue to be shot and women continue to be raped by the so-called soldiers of "peace." As the author states in her preface, "A war never provides the means to end war," and thus the central story of Broken Lives points to the human cost that remains at the center of wars won or lost.

Because the author chose to follow the chronological order of historical events, the first four stories prepare the materialization of the fifth story. These relate the final moments of colonization, the end of a world, and the war ("Independence," "The Last Push," "Angelus," and "Camwood"). In the next story, "Broken Lives," the course of history is changing, but lives continue to be destroyed. The following stories depict the aftermath of the war ("Children's Day" and "Ogbanje's Father"), the birth of humanitarian organizations such as Médecins sans frontières ("Relief Duty"), and the efforts made by women in particular to resume purification rituals to cure the wounds ("Osondu"). The last story, "The Gift," gives more profound meaning and depth to the title of the fifth story ("Broken Lives"), since it represents an ode to the Motherland, to its vernacular language, to the narrator as a young girl whose name, Onyinye, means gift. The message of optimism of this last tale is inscribed in the vernacular language—Ekene dili chukwu (The young shall grow)—and thus linguistically reclaims indigenous rights and entitlements. Optimistically, the last words of this last story are "peace and plenty."

Retrospectively, one can see how Anthonia C. Kalu constructed her collection of stories around the theme of deconstruction (broken lives) and of reconstruction (the gift). Each story therefore represents a piece of an entire mosaic, and each must be read as part of a continuum within a wider picture. The author respects all the rules of the short-story genre: the stories are kept brief (twenty pages at the most), elliptical, suggestive, and emblematic. However, because the ten stories represent a whole, the sense of progression from the first story to the last guarantees the unity of the collection and gives it an epic proportion. Kalu thus reasserts that one of the ultimate functions of these stories is to serve as testimony and memory.

One of the most striking aspects of the preface to Broken Lives and Other Stories is the radical involvement of the author as a woman and daughter of the same land that she attempts to seize in her short stories. The autobiographical information in the preface is particularly welcome, for it exhibits the biographical and genealogical link between storytelling, the author, and the land:

I was already aware of the possibilities of story when the war started. Storytelling was standard fare in the evening at home as I was growing up. . . . However, as the war progressed and the restrictions on our lives increased, sitting in a story-circle...