As the sun rises in Edo.

 by DAN AMOR.

Within the entire gamut or canon of Ernest Hemingway’s works – some seven novels, 50-odd short stories, a play, and several volumes of non-fiction - The Sun Also Rises is something of a curious exception. Published in 1926 while Hemingway was still in his 20s and relatively unknown, it was his first serious attempt at a novel; yet, in spite of the fact that it was to be followed by such overwhelming commercial successes as A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952), most critics agree that The Sun Also Rises is his one most wholly satisfying book.

Here, Hemingway indelibly fixed the narrative tone for his famous understated ironic prose style. And here, he also made his first marked forays into an exploration of those themes that were to become his brand-mark as a writer and which were to occupy him throughout his career.

The pragmatic ideal of “grace under pressure,” the working out of the ‘Hemingway code’: the concept of “style” as a moral and ethical virtue, and the blunt belief or determination that some form of individual heroism was still possible in the increasingly mechanised and bureaucratic world of the 20th century: these characteristic Hemingway notions deeply informed the structure of The Sun Also Rises.

Yet, at the same time, while The Sun Also Rises is characteristically Hemingway, it is radically different from Hemingway’s typical fictions. Indeed, it may be precisely in the area of its differences that it attains its special quality and pertinence as a major American novel. For there are subtleties of tone and meaning in The Sun Also Rises which suggest a profounder confrontation with the ambiguities of the modern “experience” than Hemingway was ever to sustain again. The Sun Also Rises is a novel about loss.

But this, among Hemingway’s novels, begins with the loss as a “given,” as a fatal limitation on open possibilities and opportunities. As in the best of the Nick Adam stories, The Sun Also Rises is concerned with that moral space which remains for man’s occupancy after necessity has affected its inexorable curtailment on his freedom. And the concentrated passion which gives this novel its tautness of structure and its authority of statement is its exploration of that diminished measure of dignity and endurance which a man may still strive for even while he is a captive in the nets of bleak fatality.

It is against this backdrop that we must celebrate fittingly the rising of the sun in Edo State in Nigeria with the confirmation of Adams Oshiomhole as governor at a time when election riggers are ever ready to rig.

When one considers the gallery of the popular Hemingway heroes — and how difficult it is to refrain from imposing Hemingway’s own photogenic features on those of his heroic characters – the composite image can almost be stereotyped in Hollywood terms. The Hemingway “hero” is first and foremost a vigorously athletic figure.

He is a man who eats and drinks with natural gusto, a generally successful lover-boy who, paradoxically, is innocent of lust; a man professionally dedicated to a physically oriented métier, a hunter-fisherman-soldier who battles against fate with the native resources of his own skill, endurance, and courage in order to wrest a small victory in a long war which he knows he can possibly win. But the development in Edo State has become an effort in human actuality.

Like a typical Hemingway setting, the original background of the battle has affected the final tone. Oshiomhole’s feelings for the condition of his people after miserable years of misrule by his predecessors drew upon a number of sources: they were partly social, partly political, and perhaps, most of all, emotional. He saw that Edo State, hitherto the food-basket of Nigeria, was diminished to a settlement of numerous tenant families with barely any roads, no water and no food for the teeming masses. He saw that the state could not generate revenue of its own but relied entirely on stipends from Abuja, which was even put in the drain pipe by its presiding deity and master of the Hitleric moustache.

As a man with an implacable passion for his people, Oshiomhole shuddered and vowed to redeem his people from the jaws of human sharks intent on emasculating the people to total extinction in their inordinate drive for capitalist venturesomeness. He fought relentlessly, combed every nook and cranny of the state to drive home his philosophy and programmes. The people, who had been left almost breathless like a fish on a dry sandy beach panting, loved him and voted overwhelmingly for him. 

The landslide victory of the Action Congress of Nigeria in the July 12 election, against all odds, was therefore a turning point in the history of Edo State, as the people turned out in their millions to identify with their hero, vote for him and to celebrate their victory. Today, much of the importance of Adams Oshiomhole as governor of Edo State does not lie in who he is but in what he represents to the Nigerian imagination.

 Of course, we’ve had two or three governors of the radical left, ideologically speaking. But Oshiomhole is one with a difference. Like the Biblical David, he has already declared that there is no time for vengeance, for vengeance is the Lord’s.  As the saying goes, the morning shows the day!

Given his antecedent as President of the Nigerian Labour Congress during the last Obasanjo years, and his programme for the people of Edo State, the sun is rising in that ancient kingdom. Like a typical Hemingway hero, Adams Oshiomhole knows, however, that one has to live by one’s own convictions. One must finally march to the beat of one’s drum. It is reality in Nigeria as the sun rises in Edo State. Let this feat be replicated in all the states in 2015.