Book Review: *Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away* by Christie Watson

• Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away by Christie Watson
• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Other Press (May 10, 2011)
• ISBN-13: 978-1590514665

Back-of-the-book blurb: When their mother catches their father with another woman, twelve year-old Blessing and her fourteen-year-old brother, Ezikiel, are forced to leave their comfortable home in Lagos for a village in the Niger Delta, to live with their mother’s family. Without running water or electricity, Warri is at first a nightmare for Blessing. Her mother is gone all day and works suspiciously late into the night to pay the children’s school fees. Her brother, once a promising student, seems to be falling increasingly under the influence of the local group of violent teenage boys calling themselves Freedom Fighters. Her grandfather, a kind if misguided man, is trying on Islam as his new religion of choice, and is even considering the possibility of bringing in a second wife.
But Blessing’s grandmother, wise and practical, soon becomes a beloved mentor, teaching Blessing the ways of the midwife in rural Nigeria. Blessing is exposed to the horrors of genital mutilation and the devastation wrought on the environment by British and American oil companies. As Warri comes to feel like home, Blessing becomes increasingly aware of the threats to its safety, both from its unshakable but dangerous traditions and the relentless carelessness of the modern world.

She Is Too Fond of Books’ review: As I read Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away, I was aware of feeling grateful to the author for writing this novel and taking me out of my comfy reading chair and into a world so far removed from, yet just as real as, mine.  When the book opens, Blessing lives with her parents and older brother, Ezikiel, in  ”executive apartments” in Lagos, aware of, yet not really interacting with the beggars and itinerant peddlers she sees on the streets.  This relatively easy existence changes when her mother, Timi, catches her father in bed with another woman.  Father moves out, taking his financial support with him; in a matter of weeks, Blessing and Ezikiel move with Timi to her family’s compound near Warri in the Niger Delta.

This is a family she has never met, living in conditions that she has never experienced. The compound houses her mother’s parents (Grandma and Alhaji), Youseff (the family’s driver) and his wives and children. Hygiene is of a completely different standard – Blessing realizes that she took flush toilets and fresh water from the tap for granted; now she uses outhouses, totes fresh water from a community (yet “for profit”) well, and bathes in water that has been used by other family members. Food – what little there is of it – is grown, caught, or bartered; no more market shopping. To add to the complications, Ezikiel has asthma and a life-threatening allergy to nuts; it is very difficult to obtain the palm oil (rather than groundnut oil) that his system can tolerate.

Those are physical challenges/discomforts caused by poverty that Blessing faces. To these we add political and religious confusion.  Blessing struggles to understand Alhaji’s fairly recent conversion to Islam (and the possibility that he may take a second wife, in hopes that she will produce a son). She witnesses mobile patrols who carry foreign oil company executives to and from their jobs, sirens blaring and lights flashing.  These “white devils” profit from the “black gold” in the oil pipelines. So-called Freedom Fighters use violence to protect what they understand to be the property of the people of Nigeria (despite any bargains between governments and the private sector).

But wait … there’s more … I’m not going to tell you any more about the plot, though! All the above happens in the first fifty pages or so, and is the wonderful set-up to Blessing’s story as Christie Watson tells it.  And, although these characters and the particulars of their situation are fiction, they could be true.  That’s what struck me again and again – these types of events are happening now, as I drive in my “swagger wagon” to the grocery store, or to pick a child up from school where he has the benefit of taxpayer-funded high quality education, or as we take a weekend trip because we have the luxuries of recreational time, money, freedom, and safety.

Watson’s characters are fully realized, from the boys in gun boats whom we meet only in passing, to Blessing, who narrates the novel with a voice that matures as she does – observing, learning, suffering, and persevering.

I marked many passages as I read – taken both by the fluidity of Watson’s prose and the setting/plot she crafted. These two excerpts show how Watson writes Blessing’s thoughts to illustrate her feelings of distance from Timi; the first, observing other children and their mothers (p 121):

I hovered nearby like a butterfly around the hibiscus, watching the small bamboo and cane houses clinging to the other side of the road, and the women in front of them, washing big-bellied children in plastic bowls. The children cried but let themselves by scrubbed. Oil and rattan palm trees stood next to the mango trees, near the houses. When the women had finished scrubbing, they lifted the children from the bowls high into the air in order that they could reach up and take a fruit. In Lagos we had taken fruit from the fruit bowl, after asking Mama. I wondered what it would feel like to have Mama lift me to a tree.

and here, during a scare at the compound (p 180):

I had never seen fear on Mama’s face. It made my muscles become tight, as though I was about to jump. I held on to her hand as long as possible, until she realized, dried her eyes, and flicked me away.

Blessing’s Grandma is a wise woman, who tells the children stories in the evenings as they sit on the veranda and suck sugarcane.  The nuggets from these stories are gleaned from Nigerian folklore, which Christie Watson includes in the Acknowledgments:

“An owl is the wisest of all birds because the more it sees the less it talks.”

“An oil lamp feels proud to give its light even though it wears itself away.”

“An anthill that is destined to become a giant anthill will become one no matter how many times it is destroyed by elephants.”

Watson does not lecture about politics, poverty, or the practice of female circumcision.  She does, however, offer resources for additional information at the back of the book, where she pays homage to the real people of the Niger Delta, the “Big Heart.”

Truly, Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away is beautifully told. It is impossible to read it and not be moved; trust me.