Harmattan Season
By Tochi Onyebuchi
Tor Publishing Group (Macmillan)
“Fortune always left whatever room I walked into, which is why I don’t leave my place much these days. … I don’t need much. I certainly don’t need trouble. But that’s the thing about living in a town, living with other people. Need finds you. And I guess you can say it’s need that’s banging on my door in the middle of the night. The neighbors are loud enough that I don’t hear it at first. Just another peal of thunder in the storm. But then the thuds get sharper. They get that particular wood-threatening crack to them. People don’t knock like that. Trouble does.”
So begins New Haven author Tochi Onyebuchi’s most recently published novel, Harmattan Season. It’s written in a clipped, mystery style reminiscent of James M. Cain or James Ellroy. But it goes far beyond the dead body, extending into larger issues of political intrigue.
The story, which takes place in an unnamed West African city, encompasses layered intricacies of individuals bottled in with colonialism, racism, oppression, accountability, and mass murder. It has the neo-noir feel of L.A. Confidential and Chinatown but with race and social justice at the forefront.
Onyebuchi navigates courage and change in the complicated racial, political economies facing Harmattan season. That’s the West African time of year with dust storms when “[t]he sand covers the footprints of what came before.” The book explores the complexities of self-identity, with background histories and guilt — including the narrator’s and possibly as a reader — your own.
The narrator Boubacar or (Bouba) is a down-on-his-luck detective, avoiding bill collectors. Yet he’s drawn into a danger of a bleeding girl, who in the moonlight asks him to hide her. With seemingly no financial payoff, he relentlessly pursues the case. His reward is not finding a whodunit ending but opening a door into his visceral insides (literally) and his soul.
The mystery of the girl (including the unexpected revelation as to why she came to him) is only the beginning. As a deux-fois (mixed-race person) with his mother native dugulen and father French, Bouba exists in both the worlds of the oppressed and the occupier. His curiosity leads to more than one Mafia-like beating, friendship with a “street urchin” kid, and eventually to the real estate mogul Honoré Mirabeau de L’Isle Adam harboring political motivations. Follow the money.
The storyline shows the realistic compromises of power brokers and those who profit or survive during war, the prices paid, and how lines drawn and people are not always black and white. It ends with upcoming elections of the incumbent Savadogo running against a young, idealistic, charismatic challenger Murutilen, who’s demanding change.
The book immediately pulls readers into another land and culture. For those lacking familiarity with West Africa, the story creates both a sense of adventure and dislocation, using only names without anglicized versions like Moussa, Zanga, Aissata and Kadiatou. Terms such as “mogofagala” and “jatigewalekela” do not come with a nonfiction glossary. Instead Onyebuchi brings the reader on a journey to catch up and catch on to the clothing (djellaba and turbans) and customs, such as the significance in sharing a pot of tea and smoking a shisha pipe. There’s also a Casa Blanca-flavored twist, but from another perspective. (Don’t worry. It’s certainly not the Nazis.)
Harmattan Season adds science fiction and magic, as characters can learn to float mid-air. Onyebuchi’s previous book Goliath took place in a climate fiction dystopia. In this previous conversation with me, the author spoke of how science fiction allows writers a vehicle to tell stories that nonfiction cannot. For Onyebuchi, who has an MFA in dramatic writing from New York University, a JD from Columbia Law School, and master’s degree in global economic law from Science Po in France, science fiction is never merely a tale of adventure. It drives home a point.
Although in 1977 France ended its occupation of African countries, in Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.” Today’s headlines continue to cover news of occupation, repressive governments, profiteering, and layers of complexities in accountability laden with history. You cannot escape your past — as a nation or an individual. Mass murder demands change.
In the US, even with anti-immigration sentiments peaking, the novel steadfastly and bravely plugs into the richness of Onyebuchi’s background. As a Nigerian-American, he shares a graceful cultural fluency. His expansion of American literature with an intellectual exchange speaks out as a gentle yet clear reminder of the value our country still recognizes in our melting pot of nations.
