Efemena

The narrative weaves into existence the eponymous heroine Efemena Aruegodore who is beautiful, friendly, enterprising and industrious, but also bold, tough, strong and sometimes self-opinionated revealing a somewhat feminist trajectory in her character portraiture. The sexual encounter between Efemena and Jamuike, a court clerk, disruptive of the future as it might be, gestures towards possibilities of self-knowing which can sometimes secrete disparate emotional states, initiate psychological tensions and wreck dreams. It celebrates the reverence of totems like pythons and superstitious/ritual practices compete with Christian piety.It portrays an integral world where traditional religious worship exists side by side with Christian ethos, sometimes compromised by ecclesiastical hypocrisy as seen in the case of Boyoboyo, the psychically challenged who Pastor Henry neglects and he dies in straitened circumstances. On the converse, homosexual young men like Dennis nourish and imbibe alternative sexual habits and orientations, which pervert the normative practice of heterosexuality. The story constructs a universe redolent with contradictions that throw into relief the realities of modernity and its accompanying paradoxes. The narrative pendulate between the coming-of-age of Efemena and the entangled circumstances, which like a sticky web, construct the concrete outlines of the self-identity of the heroine as she enters full womanhood. It also represents an intricate transition from a moment of relative inexperience about the things that are and ought to be and the coming to terms with the realities that confront Efemena. It is the eagle