Review by Booklist Review
Searching war-scarred Biafra for traces of his uncle, a writer grapples with gaps in his family's history and his own bifurcated identity. Returning to Igboland after seven years in New York, novelist and critic Iduma resolves to reconnect with his origins by telling the story of his lost uncle. Said to have been a wrestler, street-smart and loyal, the uncle, who was Iduma's namesake, enlisted in the Biafran Army and never returned. Could his steps be traced? It seems that 50 years of "gaps and silences and airbrushings" stifle Iduma's search. It doesn't help that Iduma has an unfamiliar accent and too often ends up talking not to the witnesses he seeks but to locals who find him. Attempts at sleuthing are reduced to exercises in probability, speculation, and wishful intuition. The bunker where Iduma's uncle may or may not have died remains padlocked, forever off-limits. But Iduma's efforts are not unrewarded. His contemplative, poetic search brings him closer to his wife Ayobami and reminds him that his life remains inseparable from the history of his homeland.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Art critic and journalist Iduma (A Stranger's Pose) delivers an immersive memoir about his uncle and namesake, who disappeared during the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s. Iduma, an Igbo who was born and raised in Nigeria, wades through murky family history following his father's death in 2018, drawing on family interviews, visits to war sites, and academic research to piece together his uncle's last days and reveal the connection between his death and the political upheaval in Nigeria at the time. Iduma's uncle, who enlisted in the Biafran Army just before the war started, was killed after providing cover for his comrades. As Iduma grapples with his own grief, mirrored by his father's losses, including the death of Iduma's mother when he was a child, he wonders "how to transfer a man's consciousness to those he leaves behind." Throughout, Iduma reflects on the power of family to both unite and divide, and as he weaves his background into Nigeria's historical tapestry, he acknowledges how his heritage is reflected in his uncle's story ("to be Igbo in Nigeria is to be a victim," he concludes), eventually finding peace in his uncle's choice to sacrifice himself for others. Iduma's unraveling of the past is bound to leave readers eager to uncover their own family secrets. Agent: Alison Lewis, Frances Goldin. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Understanding a family's past during wartime is at the heart of Iduma's (A Stranger's Pose) languid but haunting new memoir. A noted art critic and author, Iduma returned to Nigeria to find information about his namesake: an uncle who died during the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s. Along the way, he reunited with family members and learned more about the civil war that resulted after years of British colonialism. This book is most effective when Iduma focuses on post-colonial Nigerian history and his family's role in the fighting. The pace slows when he details his day-to-day observations of modern Nigeria and his own upbringing. Iduma has fashioned a memoir that combines family stories, travelogue, and a lesson in Nigerian history with his personal narrative as a married art critic living in New York City. VERDICT Those interested in personal stories about Nigeria will likely enjoy this book.--Leah K. Huey
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A pensive quest for the truths of a civil war in the author's homeland of Nigeria. On July 6, 1967, "after a year and a half of cataclysms," Nigeria collapsed in a civil war based on ethnic divisions among the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo peoples that had long simmered under decades of British colonialism. The Igbo, Iduma's people, occupied the region called Biafra, which calved off as a self-styled independent republic, causing the central government to declare war--which it called a "police action"--in order to keep Nigeria whole. After a genocidal conflict that lasted more than two years, Biafra was reassimilated into Nigeria. Born in 1989, Iduma grew up in a country where memories of the conflict were silenced. As he writes of his cohort, "we are a generation that has to lift itself from the hushes and gaps of the history of the war." After living in New York for years, he returned to Nigeria to seek answers to his many questions, not least the fate of an uncle who disappeared during the war. How did the other young men of his family survive? The author concludes that they must have been protected by warlordlike military officers who threw some soldiers into battle as cannon fodder while keeping themselves far from the fighting. One refrain that Iduma's father often voiced of his brother, he learns, was a simple question: "What if one day he returned from nowhere?" The chances of that remain slender, but, after all, other Biafrans lived in exile for years in places such as the nearby Ivory Coast before returning. In all events, Iduma is scarcely alone: A third of Biafran families, he reckons, "could speak of someone who did not return." Though his own findings are far from definitive, the author delivers a poignant story rescued from those silences and lacunae. A powerful contribution to modern Nigerian history, particularly significant in an age of ethnic conflict around the world. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
