Su'eddie Vershima Agema - Awaiting

The opening sentences of the first paragraph of Su'eddie Vershima Agema's short story, Awaiting, convinces us that our protagonist Oche is a hard man, accustomed to the workings of a court room from the viewpoint of a criminal, and ambivalent as to how it will all turn out. He thinks,

The final hearing in any case was inevitable. It was either you were discharged and acquitted or convicted. So, what was the fuss?

This matter-of-fact acceptance tells us a lot about Oche, but we soon find out that it is all a lie. All of it, even the courtroom language. Oche is in fact waiting with a bunch of sullen, anxious men, to hear news of their pregnant wives, to find out whether the child and wife is alive, or if they are not. Agema is quite clever to open his story this way, because we become immediately engaged when we learn we have been 'fooled'. We expected a hard-nosed criminal, and instead we have a husband and father attempting to steel himself against the agony of waiting for potentially terrible news. Straight away, sympathy. Straight away, engagement. Straight away, we wonder – what will happen?

The doctor enters, and gives good news to a waiting father. Agema writes,

Oche smiled. Then, the waiting started all over again. He looked at his watch. The time was two in the afternoon. He had been here for six hours already. He turned to two of the three other remaining men who shivered. “Calm down, my brothers.” He tried to ease them. They looked at him from their seat as he smiled reassuringly at them.

Agema introduces us to a man confident in his skin, adept at exuding this confidence to others, and accustomed to leading. But as the day progresses and, one by one, the other men learn of the happy fate of their wife and child, and he learns nothing, he begins to worry.

Oche came back to meet an empty room. The sweating now became intense accompanied with a level of tension that he had never thought possible. The praying started without any deliberate effort. All the prayers and special devotions that had long been unused came flooding out in torrents.

His thoughts turn inward. Now, Oche has forgotten about the other men, who have all gone now anyway, and instead worries about himself and, somewhat obliquely, his country. He thinks,

The high rate of maternal deaths and infant mortality was something that no one could overlook. Most of the hospitals needed upgrading, and the staff better training. He had always wondered why this issue was on the Millennium Development Goals list. The money could be diverted into something more worthwhile, he had always argued...however, as he waited for his wife, his stance changed.

Agema's criticism of the Nigerian government is subtle but pointed, and it echoes in tone much of the criticism toward government handling of healthcare found elsewhere around the world, and most noticeably in America. It's always a useless problem to consider, until suddenly it becomes your problem, and then you understand the importance of providing greater resources toward things like women's health, maternity wards, and of course, hospitals in general.

Whether Oche's wife successfully delivers their child I shall leave it up to the reader to discover, but at the very least, things do not always turn out how you would expect. Agema doesn't provide a twist to his story – which is nice – but instead it develops in an unexpected way, one that shows both the goodness of people in a crisis, and the ineffectual nature of a stubborn government concerned with bureaucracy at the expense of humanity.

The best part of the story is the opening sequence, when Agema skilfully pulls the rug out from under our feet, and thus removes our sense of easy expectation, and the middle, when Oche's tension rises and his thoughts wonder. Less successful is the end, which dissolves into gratitude, happiness, and somewhat clumsy dialogue. I suspect the reason for this is that negative emotion is easier to describe, or at least, we have more words at our disposal with which to create the impression of a certain frame of mind. Happiness, though, simply is, which makes it a slipperier fish altogether. Agema doesn't quite pull it off, but the beginning and middle parts of the short story are certainly well done. Awaiting is, however, quite a nice story, and when it works, it works brilliantly well, which suggests to me that stories in the months and years to come should iron-out these deficiencies. Most important, what's here, now, in Awaiting, is still very good, and its selection among the stories in Sentinel Nigeria bode well for the quality control of the online magazine.

Awaiting by Su'eddie Vershima Agema is a short story published in Issue 3 of Sentinel Nigeria, an online magazine which is "set to galvanise the Nigerian literary environment through discussions, lectures, symposia, debates, critiques and publication of the very best in contemporary Nigerian writing."

Links

Agema's Wordpress blog
Agema's Sentinel Nigeria blog
Note that these blogs have a significant overlap of content to them