In Ever Obi’s “Some Angels Don’t See God,” the Past Haunts the Future, Forever
Ever Obi titled his first novel Men Don’t Die. His second novel, Some Angels Don’t See God, continues in this pattern of using idioms as titles which, on the surface, sounds like a denial of established facts. What does it mean when someone says men don’t die, when all men are mortals for whom the question is not whether death will come, but when the visit will be? How can one possibly think of an angel who does not see God, denied the beatific vision, which Edward Pace describes as “the immediate knowledge of God”?
We meet Ever Obi’s protagonist, Chukwunetam (Neta), in Some Angels Don’t See God. She is regarded as an angel and epitome of perfection by her lover, Peter, and by her fans, who know her only through her successful novel. Neta is brilliant and pretty. She is smart and kind. She tries to be perfect and fix any wrong that has been done, including the ones she is not directly responsible for. But Neta is far from being perfect. Her past, her childhood and young adulthood, is filled with some monstrous realities she spends most of her adult life trying to escape, yet which continue to haunt not only her present, but also her future. This future is interlinked with Peter’s, her university lover.
At the novel’s centre is a past incestuous relationship between Neta and her twin brother, Jeta. As seven-year-olds, they were exposed by their cousin, Chidinma (a teenager then), to sex, normalising the incestuous in their easily impressionable minds. This relationship would lead to a series of mayhems, including the loss of lives. While Neta, ever the smarter one, tries to move on and live a life unmoored from the faulty foundations of erotic love laid for them by Chidinma, Jeta is already far gone, believing what he feels for his sister is true love, justified, and not in any way twisted. Jeta’s conviction in the purism of his sexual attraction to his sister and commitment to continue to consummate this love would lead to yet another death and his imprisonment.
Neta, on the other hand, turns to writing as a coping mechanism; literature being her drug and life since childhood. She fictionalises her past in a novel as a way of confronting it. But as Peter will tell her upon their reconnection: someone who wishes to remain hidden does not write a book. Especially not one with a more than modest success, as the book goes ahead to resurrect ghosts from the past. Initially, it looks like this will end differently, that her fate has changed, as love continues to bloom between her and Peter (who bears a bullet scar for her), even after many years of their disconnection. But “the past” as William Faulkner, quoted in the novel’s epigraph, says, “is never dead.” It’s not even past—it continues to haunt the future. Forever.
The narration of Some Angels is nonlinear, especially in its first half. This stylistic choice blurs the distinction between past and future. Obi has mastered compactness and doesn’t overwhelm readers as his sentences have the kind of profundity that slowly unfurls rather than announces itself. Take, for example, the words of a bank customer, Alhaji Bala: “I used to think the most dangerous thing in life was ignorance, but it is not. Making excuses for ignorance is.” Bala thinks the problem has never been the ignorant extremists but the excuses made for their ignorance, which justifies and enables the extremism. In another example, a shop attendant hands Neta’s book over to Peter: “With the generosity of teenage boys passing a joint of weed around, she picked the book and handed it over to him.” This is magnificent in its indirect critique of reading versus substance usage.
But to champ it all, perhaps, is the sentence, “Toy Woman took everything away.” While “everything” here means toys Peter and his siblings had outgrown, the underlying meaning of the sentence is more revelational. In taking away the toys, Toy Woman (Prisca) is a figure who helps the family de-clutter, or cleanse. When cleansing happens, especially in the religious sense, it is to rid the soul, or a system, of impurities, to create space for the admission of the sacred, the sanctified, and the unblemished. After the loss of Peter’s father, Toy Woman remains his mother’s only true friend, in bringing back everything that matters to the widow.
This way, Toy Woman becomes a messianic figure in their lives, especially their mother’s, bringing her stability, support, compassion, companionship, and hope. The revelations at the end of the novel then trace back this stripping of everything (good) to the forbidden love between Peter’s lover, Neta, and her brother, Jeta. The recession of blame can be taken further to Chidinma who introduces them to the incestuous act. The true sentence then is, “Chidinma took everything away.” But even its truth is limited to the degree to which we hold the twins’ parents responsible for the evil that happened under their roof.
The mention of Peter’s adoption in the novel has a puzzling effect. We expect to see how this information affects the plot, how it adds anything to the story, but nothing else is mentioned about it. It does not kickstart anything grand, neither does it bring any dramatic twist to the story. This is because one of Ever Obi’s side quests in the novel is the normalisation of the adoption of kids. Normalisation, not just in the sense that couples are encouraged to adopt—especially when faced with difficulties bearing children—but also in the sense that the adopted son is seen fully as a son, a biological son.
Another side quest important to Ever Obi is a peek into the writerly and readerly life. There’s an obvious celebration of literature, writers and readers throughout the novel, their triumphs and challenges examined. For example, how adult life and capitalism affect the luxury of reading is presented when Peter meets a female attendant at the pharmacy reading a novel. He reveals to her that he no longer reads and she asks him why.
Peter did not answer the question; he knew her type. She was young, dreamy, and knew nothing about leaving home by 5:00 and returning by midnight every day, having little time to sleep. She could afford to sit around in this tiny shop, with all the time in the world, reading and waiting for customers to come to her. Now, she thought everything was about literature. These little novels did not pay his bills.
The protagonist herself, Neta, becomes a writer after years of consuming literature, books over which she bonded with her father. Many authors’ names and book titles are name-dropped, like a brief introduction to Nigerian authors. Teju Cole, Chika Unigwe, Eghosa Imasuen, A. Igoni Barrett, Chimamanda Adichie, and ancestors like Buchi Emecheta. The alienness of authors’ lives is also examined: Neta’s friend, Esther, has “irrepressible wonder” over how it is a thing for people to “just sit and listen to some nerd on glasses read from a book containing made-up stories.”
As stated earlier, a lot goes on in the novel, many of them criminal and morally reprehensible, but it is to Neta’s suffering and sacrifices our sympathies are more connected to. These challenges and the cruel fate she faces concern mental health, as Neta comes down with depression. Ever Obi uses this to criticise the neglect of therapy, most times, by Nigerians, as reflected by certain characters in the book. We see the role a professional therapist plays in bringing some light into Neta’s life, as they root for her to exercise more agency, in a manner similar to Winnie (Peter’s ex-girlfriend), rather than to remain a victim of the genuine love she has for her twin brother.
Writing awful sex and romance scenes is a staple in literary works that, in 1993, critic Rhoda Koenig, and Auberon Waugh (at that time editor of Literary Review) established Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award to honour “the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel.” Didier Decoin and John Harvey were joint-winners of the prize in 2019 when it was last awarded, for The Office of Gardens and Ponds, and Pax, respectively. When you compare the passages with which they won with Some Angels’ bad sex scene here—“In that standing positing, he attempted to insert his erect penis inside her, but it came off against the wall of her hymen”—it is clear the novel stands no chance of winning the award, but still merits a nomination, as this scene reads like some of the previous nominees who didn’t win.
Besides the weird phrase “standing positing,” which I think is a typo that should read “standing position,” coming off “against the wall of her hymen” is funny when it’s not cringe. The hymen is a thin, elastic membrane rather than a “wall.” To reduce its anatomy therefore to a physical barrier that can be breached is to oversimplify it. Even if we accept that “wall” is figurative, it still paints an irreconcilable picture. I digress.
Neta is that protagonist who always wants to do the right thing, but whom forces beyond her always make her resolution impossible. This complicates the question of the essence of the angel who does not see God. If Neta achieves some perfection in the heart, making her angelic, but still does not see God because of the cruel hand life has dealt her, does her inability to access the “beatific vision” negate her angel-ness? Does her contrition mean nothing in the face of external, human imperfection? Isn’t this farcical?
In the end, when Neta finally extricates herself from the bondage of her brother, Jeta, and his friends, Ever Obi introduces another dimension to this issue of Neta as an angel.
She was not sure what the consequences of her action would be, but she knew where she was headed. Peter had made promises to her, he had assured her that they would weather the storms together. No matter the atrocities of her past, she would always be his angel.
What becomes of Neta and Peter, especially considering that Peter’s childhood crush has entered the picture at this point? If Neta is Peter’s angel, does it mean that Peter is Neta’s God? And, if he is, is the title telling the readers anything about whether Neta and Peter will ever see again? That, dear reader, is the question.
Source: Afapinen