A review of A Ladder of Bones by Bunmi Oyinsan; Guernica Editions Inc., Toronto, Canada; 2025; 244pp
There are no easy escapes in this life. One can travel to the very end of the earth only to find one’s doppelganger there. In this age of inescapable migration people travel carrying their lands and spirits with them. The empire must perforce write back, as the world has come to accept in the course of time.
A Ladder of Bones by Bunmi Oyinsan is a comprehensive novel of ideas intervolving time and culture, the contemporary and the roots. It starts out on Victoria Day, or Empire Day in retro, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1997. The police officer Gordon Scott and his partner, Keith Dale, are amazed by the sight of a girl-child who “looked about six, and naked as the day God made her.”
It is crucial to note that “at the IWK Hospital when the paramedic who came with a stretcher to take the girl noticed her two navels and exclaimed.” The news report did not have a picture of the girl, but her description of being from African descent made recent African immigrants to hope she was not one of them. Their wonder is if she could be the so-called “Africadian”.
The mysterious two navels are so upsetting that “Iyin, a Yoruba ex-Nigerian woman… quickly damned the child as the Devil’s spawn.” For the petrified Iyin, the girl is a “daemonic” patient, a “creature” as signs and wonders unfold thusly: “An intimate voice sang Iyin’s old name and the start of her family praise song in flawless Yoruba. In shock, Iyin dropped the plastic tray she was holding and jumped back from the bed. The girl smiled faintly.”
Then the strange girl introduces herself in Yoruba: “It is I, Enilolobo. Was it so long ago since we were together in Ife O’d’aye, where the day dawns? The place where we spoke to the earth in a language it relished?”
The name Enilolobo in Yoruba means “The one who had gone has returned.” Iyin recalls that the name is similar in meaning to her old name, Iyabo, which translates to “Mother has returned.” Against the background of the concept of the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth as per Abiku in Yoruba or Ogbanje in Igbo, Iyin bears the burden of remembrance: “I was born soon after my father’s mother died, and my parents believed that I was her reincarnation… I can’t believe in abiku anymore, but when I was a child, I could remember my past life, but I stopped when I was about seven… The name was a curse, and my parents should never have encouraged such devilry. They gave it to me not only because I was born after my grandmother died, but because they believed that I stayed this time because I am my grandmother who came back. They said I had been born three other times before.”
As if to compound matters, the born-again Iyin was called on phone by her mother who still lived in her village of Saki.
Iyin, short for Iyinoluwa, had grown up in 1980s Nigeria of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) and the IMF regime of General Ibrahim Babangida. Like most enlightened Nigerians of the time, she needed to flee from the country. She failed to get a British or American visa, and was even turned down by Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti embassies before Canada granted her a student visa.
Canada presents the front of the coming together of destinies. Enilolobo explains the mystery of the two navels thus: “This is the road to the old world, and this one is to the new one. I am both. I am the road crossing the river.” She then goes into a reverie of remembering: Fulani farm invaders; Portuguese, Dutch, French, English and American ships; Ibo Landing; Biafra, Zaire, Congo, Liberia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Rwanda… “At some points the doctors couldn’t tell if she was speaking a mishmash of English, Arabic, French, or millennia-dead tongues.”
Bunmi Oyinsan in A Ladder of Bones puts shifting time to effective use to firm together the multi-layered narratology. It was after many months pf futile probing that the police theorized that Enilolobo – Eni, for short – must have been snuck into Canada as there was no missing person’s report on any child matching her description and there was no one looking for her in the provinces. Eni was so protective of her adopted mother, Ira Protowsky, in the weekend of 2005 when Professor Akpa Tira, the son of a prince of Ipeja in Ile Ifa, landed in Halifax en route to presiding over a Modern Language Association confab in Chicago.
The flashback to Sierra Leone in 1997 sees Siaka imagining about their ancestors’ grand arrival in Freetown, and David fantasizing about descending “from the Nova Scotians who built Freetown on the former site of the first Granville Town, which had been destroyed in 1789.” Siaka who had thought his own life was forfeit when he lost his brother Bobo in 1997 became one of the 13 boys handed over in 2000 to UNICEF as part of a pacifying parley between his RUF commandant and the United Nations. They lodged Siaka and the other boys at a Freetown rehab centre.
Getting to Canada, by 2005, Siaka grew in awareness “on the serene, maple-tree-lined crescent in Richmond Hill, carpeted by yellow, red, and tan leaves signalling the onset of the dying season…”
Getting back in time to Liberia of 1992, the case of Melvin is given the highlight: “That night in 1992 began like any in shot-up, bomb-cratered Monrovia. To Melvin’s nine-year-old mind, normal was seeing trucks packed with fatigue-uniformed or denim-and-leather-clad men wielding guns and sometimes firing into the air as their trucks roared past the window of his parents’ semi-detached duplex.” Later, in USA of 2000, Melvin witnesses hate first-hand: “In Detroit, Melvin’s life remained complicated by the teasing he received from peers in the inner-city school. It bruised his spirit. It did not make a difference whether he was targeted by African-Americans, Chicano-Americans, Caucasian-Americans, Latino-Americans, Arab-Americans, or Asian-Americans.” In 2005, Melvin’s USA story comes full circle thus: “Melvin’s tears finally ran out on a surprisingly light and airy spring day. It was several years after his prison release. He was standing in line at the Office of Immigration and Assay, awaiting his turn to face an officer. Carmen, three months pregnant, wrapped her left arm around his waist as if to chain him to her.”
In the second part of Oyinsan’s A Ladder of Bones entitled “Migration: Journey To A Place Where Dreams Go To Die”, Iona feels the terror of 1990 Jamaica as Selina her grandmother “had been body-bagged and removed.”
In the case of Clyde, “a man who had read all he could find written by and about Nkrumah, Lumumba, Mandela, Du Bois, Luther King Jr, Malcolm X had returned to Canada after twelve years. It was, however, not Clyde Pearse who returned but El Haj Malik.”
For Timothy, in the third part of A Ladder of Bones bearing the title “Home Place: A Habitat That Is Carried In One’s Soul”, rotation in the heat of work is grossly rigged in 2005 Canada.”
The fourth section entitled “Can Dry Bones Live Again?” posits Iona in Halifax in 2008 as evacuating the discipline of political science after completing her first degree at the University of Toronto. Dismissing modern philosophers and political theorists as “gross naivete”, she asserts: “Without Hegel, there would have been no Hitler.”
Visiting Ile Ifa from Canada, Iona Pearse beholds “the shoestring press and equally beggared Ile Ifa eggheads.” In the face of a decaying Nigeria, “The Canadian entourage also did not realize that another log of misshapen wood was the corpse of a seven-year-old boy, who was tortured to death after being denounced as a witch by his stepmother.”
The Epilogue poses the loaded question: “What is peace without equality?” The tragedy gets deep into the bone marrow: “A few days after Enilolobo died, Iyin let herself into her apartment at Warden and Finch.”
Death had killed the marriage to the firebrand Toronto Pentecostal church pastor, Tosin.
The love of the mother is all the rage as the image of a boy rescued from a boat comes on screen, and “Iyin gasped when the image of the boy came up because she could swear it was the face of the girl who had made her abandon her job and flee Halifax… When the camera tilted, revealing the boy’s stomach, Iyin screamed. The boy had two navels.”
The boy, as though ready for war, barks out his name: “My name is Toluwanile Jagunlabi.”
Iyin then tells her mother: “Maami, it’s not just the two navels. That is the same face of the girl! That is the exact face of the girl who said her name was Enilolobo!”
Her mother offers this reply: “The boy that I just saw does not come in peace.”
Bunmi Oyinsan thus takes us back to a heavier beginning in A Ladder of Bones through the abiding force of her storytelling. She is a creative tour de force who deserves consummate attention across geographies.