Review of ​A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo

​A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo is a collection of stories featuring women in Nigeria who are driven to extremes by the people around them. The whole collection was astounding, and almost every single story was amazing. The first story, ‘Nwunye Belgium’, is about a woman whose mother is in search of a husband for her and when she isn’t able to find a good suitor, her friend suggests her son, a doctor working in Belgium, to marry. And even though she is seeing another man, her mother convinces her to stop seeing him because he isn’t wealthy. Because this is a small town, it becomes talk that she will be marrying a very wealthy doctor and will be taken out of Nigeria into Belgium. However, as time unravels, the status of the friend’s son is shown to be a lie. That while at one point her son did pursue work in Belgium, she actually doesn’t have contact with her son anymore. That the friend made up her son being a bachelor so that she could have a higher status in the town. And now, the woman is marred and ridiculed because she’d stopped seeing her actual love in return for a fake suitor. Another story, ‘Animals’, is about a boy Nedu and his family that bought a chicken to slaughter for dinner. But the mother is unable to kill it, even though she’s done all the work in the family. Nedu becomes so attached to the chicken that they give it a name via a ceremony that the father is encouraging while the mother looks down on it. In fact, she realizes that without her, the family would be dysfunctional and is frustrated that the one thing that a ‘man’ is supposed to do (i.e. kill the chicken) is made to be her job. The father, after a while prepares himself to kill the chicken, and when Nedu pleads them not to, they see that the chicken has been cut from its leash and runs away from them. The sister films the whole thing as the family runs around the town to get the chicken. Finally, when the family catches the chicken, the father kills it and Nedu becomes so distraught that he won’t eat dinner. Eventually he does, but he eats around the cooked chicken parts. A third story to highlight is ‘Eden’ in which a brother and sister rummage through their father’s collection of tapes and find his pornography. They watch together both mesmerized and terrified of the consequences. So much so that one day when the power goes out and they can’t pull the tape from the VCR, they are on edge until their father finds out what they’d been watching. From this, he freaks out and beats the son who admits to watching it, and covers for the sister. After some time, the brother gets into more trouble, and to show that she can be just as strong as him, she admits to her father that she also watched the tape. Her father beats her as well.
 
I’ve dogeared basically every story in Okonkwo’s collection because they’re truly so astounding in the depth and propulsion that they’re all hits. These feel like quintessential stories of religion, mental illness, family pain and drama. And each story opens up a world that felt so specific and full of emotion that I can only be left in awe. An unrivaled read.
 
Final Rating: 5/5