A startling new voice on postcolonial disintegration

Sanya Osha’s ’Naked Light and the Blind Eye’ published by Future Fiction London purports to be a human angle portrayal of the deplorable conditions that are currently prevailing in the Niger Delta.

In many ways, it succeeds in demonstrating the brutality of African military dictatorships. In a more concrete political sense, the meaning of a failed state is explored and analysed.

‘Naked Light and Blind Eye’ follows the slow and inevitable disintegration of a postcolonial society as economic systems, local communities and families crumbled under the weight of grotesque management policies and obsolete communal beliefs.

In the novel, the familiar modernity and familiar dialectics is played out, but with subtle poetic tones. The heavy book of ideology is not hung above our heads waiting to crash on us. Instead, we are handed scenes depicting postcolonial scarcity, rudimentary commodity fetish and the power of mythology in developing contexts. Sanya Osha does very well in the handling of these themes.

I am particularly concerned about the political implications of the issues dealt with in the novel. The transitions from a tribal culture to modernity are well-rehearsed in the annals of modern African literature. But the handling of this popular theme is not often arresting in other works with similar preoccupations. Unquestionably, it is a political theme since it deals directly with decolonisation but Osha manages to breathe new life into an over-flogged subject. What happens when our political and economic systems fail at the grassroots level? Sanya Osha’s ‘Naked Light and Blind Eye’ has many of the answers.

I am sometimes also somewhat baffled by the numerous stylistic ploys of the work. But on the whole it is a rich and powerful work.

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* Sanya Osha’s Naked Light and the Blind Eye is published by Future Fiction London (ISBN-10: 0982792816).
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