This Angel Needs A God

Some Angels Don’t See God consists of two parts and 20 chapters, set in the key cities of Aba, Nnewi, Festac, Surulere, and Yaba, and centres on the lives of its two main characters, Neta and Peter. For me, however, it has three divisions and an excitement comparable to riding a waterslide: the starting point being a little fast-paced, reels you towards the middle, where the dynamics of Neta’s incestuous relationship with her twin brother, Jeta, casts a shadow, that crescendoes to the final run.

Its 267 turbulent pages acquaint us with Neta and Peter, two antagonistic characters, who met and fell in love during their university days at Nnamdi Azikiwe University in the wake of broken hearts and lives taken. The first five chapters of the first part are the spermary for the tragedy that eventually overtakes them, and contain musings of a romanticised childhood that drenches the reader in nostalgia. Through Neta, we take a peek into the lives of neglected victims and their struggles. The second part gives us a panoptic view into the inner gears and chambers of the main characters’ relationships, revealing the consequences of the levers that pull them up or down, and their worn joints.

The more one digs into Obi’s novel, the more Some Angels Don’t See God reveals itself as an appallingly beautiful book (or beautifully appalling, depending on how you see it). Behind every erotic moment is an underlying sense of “rot” and decadence, which the author skillfully wields to seduce us. I can’t help but draw parallels between it and Chigozie Obiọma’s The Fishermen, as both books explore the breakdown of sibling relationships. However, while The Fishermen grapples with themes of predestination, Obi’s novel examines an incestuous bond between twins engineered by the inappropriate influence of a pubescent aunt, which could have been avoidable.

Unlike Obiọma’s madman, Abulu, in The Fishermen, Aunt Chidinma of Obi’s SADSG is sane and younger, resembling Abulu only in the unbridledness of her urges. Her presence really “fanned the violence of small flames and rattled the lives of many,” just like Abulu. In Obi’s interview with Africa In Words, he points out the secondary influence of the twins’ parents in their lives, who were “being bad at parenting without knowing it,” which highlights their aunt as a much stronger influence. But I have to point out the foreshadowing of the father’s concern—a man we are barely acquainted with besides his lukewarm attitude towards his intern, Biodun—after he briefly observes the twins’ relationship with each other. However, his show of concern is regarded as “too much worry” by his wife. She bears most of the responsibility for how things turned out, largely because of her eagerness to close the lid on the taboo without ever discussing it with the twins, yet still expecting a different outcome.

As a character, Neta is a lone star, a creation of the troubled affections of those around her: Peter, her twin Jeta, her aunt Chidinma, and even her mother. Her innocence is shattered the day she walks in on Aunt Chidinma sexually exploiting young Jeta. This incident sets off a series of events that ultimately drive her to retreat from the world, overwhelmed by unbearable injuries, including the suicide of her ex and his attempted murder of Peter.

As a banker, Peter is expected to think in absolutes, considering facts and figures with logical consistency; but he is the opposite. He breezes through his early youth carrying the unresolved affections he had for Anita Sweet, his neighbour’s daughter, into his first relationship, looking for a suitable harbour to drop that anchor. We get to see how much of a romantic he is with his subtle and unrestricted embrace of the role of “chance” in meeting Neta. Before this, Peter faced guilt and self-reproach after convincing Senno, a girl infatuated with him, to terminate an unplanned pregnancy. This event, coupled with a violent altercation with her cultist boyfriend, left him swearing off relationships, until Neta shows up. His resolve broken, he goes after her despite knowing of her relationship with Derek— a volatile and unpredictable figure whose presence creates chaos. That is not the only instance we see how weak his will is. It also manifests in his breakup with Winnie, his indecision about his transfer to Ghana, his dream to be the next Saint Obi, and his reunion with Neta. However, we can’t solely blame him when we consider how emotionally dependent his mother became on him after the passing of her husband.

We do not get to know certain characters very much in this novel, but their presence in its crevices is very much felt. Two of these are Amandi and Esther; the multi-vocal, orchestral entities that respectively try to push Peter and Neta towards a less brooding direction.

Ever Obi’s prose is deeply musical, alive with the layered cadences of a highlife tune brought to life by drums, trumpets, and electric piano, often heavy with metaphors and similes. In describing the expertise of Debola, Neta’s therapist, he is as a “flamboyant magician”; a mosquito Peter kills is a “minuscule carcass of the pernicious fly”; when Peter’s relationship with his friends, Amandi and Derek, starts breaking apart, his love for Neta becomes a “wedge.” Plot-wise, the line between fiction and reality blurs and bleeds into each other, so much that reading it feels like watching a film about a filmmaker making films. It has many humorous moments, and also feels like it is a handbook for budding writers, duly represented by the curious character of Arese.

As we read on, we steadily look for the best-fitted scapegoat for the horrors that have happened, as Neta seems to be just an unfortunate player who somehow ends up in the middle. Her twin, Jeta, grows up with an unshackled faith in their bond, believing that with more work, they would go back to the way things were before. What we get, however, is that Some Angels Don’t See God beams its moral light on the harmful ways in which some children are raised, ultimately disrupting family.

While the tension between Neta, Jeta, Peter, and other characters might not be for everyone’s stomach, their thoughts and flaws are pendulums that swing in our minds, awakening encounters we’ve had growing up. A fellow reader said it was as if Ever Obi tried his best not to soil the characters of all the older men in the book, either killing them off (like Jikora) or diminishing their presence to the background (like Mr. Sweet), thus, relinquishing the role of active parenting to women, as was the case with Ikenna’s mother in The Fishermen.

Revisiting Obiọma’s masterpiece once more, we must recall the central figure of Ikenna and his countdown to damnation. Alone in his room after evicting his brother, he ruminates on the prophecy and the bond with his sibling fishers, trapped in a cycle of guilt and foreboding. Similarly, Jeta, who is in prison nursing his obsession for his sister, suffers the same fate. They both end up without redemption from the demons that possess them, even after their confinement. The greatest irony is Jeta’s belief that the devil’s handiwork lies behind his sins. He says:

None of this was your fault, Neta. It was the devil’s handwork. Tobe should not have died. In school then, boys fought all the time, some even with weapons. I don’t understand how a fistfight led to someone’s death. Can’t you see the devil’s hand in it?

In earlier scenes, as the twins seek forgiveness from Edna, their mother, Jeta also says: “This was the devil’s handwork!” But how can we fault him when his mother, in typical manner, exonerates him after finding out the atrocity that happened under her roof, by asking Neta, “So you’re no longer a virgin? You allowed your brother touch you?”

We see, therefore, that the true victim in this story is Neta—of Aunt Chidinma’s youthful transgressions, of Jeta’s immaturity and lust, of her mother’s negligence, and even of Peter’s cowardice and loneliness. Though her character is built as a rather aloof writer seeking connections to her surroundings, her suffering is undeniable. (Also, the deployment of the parrot, T.T, is a remarkable sleight-of-hand in the story which makes us feel the intimation of its speechlessness in keeping Neta company.)

Despite the false promises of healing that draw us into this book, the narrative also offers richly developed character portraits. Figures like Biodun, the ever-present Aunt Prisca, the kindly Sweets, and the Charming Anita who leaves Peter desolate and craving love much like Humbert Humbert’s nostalgia for Annabel Leigh in Nabokov’s Lolita, after her tragic death. We encounter more facets of the characters’ relationships, like Neta’s agent Demi Moore; the recalcitrant Leo and Larry (Jeta’s prison friends) who partake in raping Neta in her own home. Other key moments—there are a lot, making this one of the most relatable books in recent times—include the few times Neta’s depression is addressed by Dr. Debola; the Sisyphean punishment of being abused; and the journey towards resolving those horrors; each delicately intertwined. The attempt to resolve her trauma, specifically, could be seen as the gateway to the outpouring that results in the creation of Neta’s book The Angel You Know: “I don’t know why but I feel that you’re part of this story . . .”

Nevertheless, as we approach the novel’s end, another question lodges in our mind: can someone be guilty of a crime they are not aware of? Some Angels Don’t See God is a book that delves into a disturbing part of domestic life, showing us the tender points of the difficult relationships among its main characters; a novel that draws our imagination into an abyss of complex and relentless truths.

Source: Afapinen