Book: The Ultimate Tragedy (A Ultima Tragédia)
Author: Abdulai Sila, Jethro Soutar (Translator)
Publication Year: 1995 (2017)
Genre: Fiction
We have already encountered the small, former Portuguese colony of Guinea Bissau when we looked at The Gambia (see: The Gambia). Guinea Bissau is small only in terms of being an African country. It is actually the size of Switzerland.
Abdulai Sila’s 1995 novel, The Ultimate Tragedy, takes place during the colonial era. Ndani, a young girl, becomes a house girl for a Portuguese administrator and his wife. She is said to be marked for tragedy. Over the course of the book’s hundred and eighty odd pages, the tragedy of her life plays out.
The Ultimate Tragedy is itself marked by features we have seen before. The narrative is progressive, moving from one character to the next before finally resolving back to Ndani. There is Dona Linda, Ndani’s mistress, the typical self important European, who can’t pronounce her name and so calls her Daniela. She inevitably seeks to Christianise Ndani and from there set up a Mission school to Christianise the country.
The Regulo, an appointed Guinean chief, is engaged in a vendetta against the Chief of the Post, a Portuguese bureaucrat. His grand plan is to build a house every bit as grand as his rival and take a new, young wife to run the household. Ndani is given to him by Dona Linda after her husband, a serial rapist, forces himself on her. The Regulo’s circle of friends and advisers tell him the girl is cursed, but he marries her nonetheless.
The project is completed, but it is doomed from the start. The Regulo soon abandons the house, while Ndani becomes the lover of the teacher (Teacher) of Dona Linda’s mission school. They have a child and move to a different part of Guinea Bissau where they can escape the glare of suspicious eyes.
However, tragedy soon follows and following a violent dispute with the now former Chief of the Post, who later dies from unrelated injures, the Portuguese authorities convict Teacher on trumped up charges and deport him to São Tomé and Príncipe. Ndani longs for his return, waiting each year at the docks, imaging him returning once a year to listen to her news from the previous twelve months. In the end, even this fantasy is denied to her and all she sees is the image of the pipe smoking man who said her life would be a series of unrelenting tragedies.
Is it the ultimate tragedy? Well that depends on your definition of ‘ultimate’. In English it tends to carry the sense of the greatest or most potent form of something. However, in romance languages, ‘ultimate’ (ultima in Portuguese, última in Spanish etc.) is used to mean the last, latest or most recent example of something. In the context of the novel, it carries the sense of one tragedy after another, as was meant by Djambakus, the man who told Ndani her life would be a series of tragedies.
There is a tendency amongst western commentators to see things like curses, the evil eye or other indigenous folk beliefs as primitive and uncivilised. And yet how are such things any different from the sort of tales found all over Greek myth? Ndani is a tragic character in the same way as Oedipus or Medea. Christianity is predicated on the idea that Jesus Christ had to die in order to absolve humanity of its sins. He too was doomed from birth.
All these stories are equally as silly as one another and yet they are weighted differently in the western mind based on purely arbitrary and subjective value judgements. While we can desire the end of such things as the killing of women accused of being witches, which are still sadly prevalent in much of the developing world, it is easy to forget that some of the biggest economies in the world still cling to beliefs which are equally at odds with the modern world.
Ndani can of course also be seen as an avatar for Guinea Bissau and for West Africa and the former colonies at large. Forced to Christianise and to conform to western ideas of education (see: Zimbabwe). Abused and subjected to punitive punishment (cf. Haiti, a predominantly black country still being punished for daring to abolish slavery two hundred and fifty years ago). Waiting, expectantly at the dock for its long exile to end.
At another level, The Ultimate Tragedy carries the markers of other West African novels. The structure is similar to Search Sweet Country (see: Ghana). The narrative that moves from one point of view character to the next before returning to the beginning. Yet Sila’s uses a more fluid form of the technique, the point of view shifting within chapters, rather than the demarcated borders between them that other authors use like doorways between rooms.
Like The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, there is also the main character moving inevitably towards their unavoidable end. It is not quite The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (see: Dominican Republic) or The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida (see; Singapore) where our character’s tragic ending is revealed in the opening sentence. However, Ndani is shown as helpless from the very beginning in the face of the white man’s world.
I think this is one of those books where I don’t feel I have learned very much about Guinea Bissau as a country. The relationship between the colonisers and the indigenous population is one we have seen countless times in this project and will see many times again, especially as we travel further into Africa.
Portugal itself is a country that remains somewhat of a mystery compared to Spain, France or the Netherlands in regards to its colonial history, despite being the first European country to visit nations and regions across the world (see: Mauritius for instance). The Ultimate Tragedy is a good novel, but perhaps not representative. Reading, for example, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (as I recently did) will tell you far more about Nigeria and the Biafra War than The Ultimate Tragedy will reveal about the history of Guinea Bissau.
The old problem returns that we can’t read five books from every country we encounter on this literary journey. Some, like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, turn out to be the perfect one shot novel. Others, like The Ultimate Tragedy represent their home country simply as ambassadors for good writing. Sometimes that is all we can hope for.
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| Abdulai Sila |
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