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KWENU! Our culture, our future |
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Book Review Oseloka Obaze*
Monday 28 May 2007
Caroline Ilogienboh Hatcher’s Room ~ ‘Men Only’ (ISBN: 978-0-9712781-6-5; Sun Rose Publisher, East Orange NJ, USA, 2006, p.305 Price, $19.99) Available at: (Sun Rose Publisher) http//www.mysite.verizon.net/vze6kiay/
Man-woman palaver is ancient as mankind itself. But in modern societies, such relations tend to take a different and indeed, visceral and dire dimension, when blissful marriages and love affairs turn into insufferable orthodoxy and consequently unravel. For men, passion like power, is frequently an aphrodisiac, which can also be their undoing as we learn quickly and painfully, from Caroline Ilogienboh’s fifth book, Hatcher’s Room ~ ‘Men Only.’ This book is a reminder of those fateful qualifications of men and their feeling by Benjamin Constant. In his 1816 Adolphe, Constant concluded that “Men‘s feelings are obscure and confused; they are composed of a great number and variety of impressions which defy observations; and words, always too crude and too general, may well indicate them but can never define them.”
In Hatcher’s Room seven down-and-out men who are far from being social misfits, but who are inextricably bound by their hard luck, as a remedial measure and escapism, resort to holding weekly rendezvous in a Philadelphia joint and watering hole called Arthur’s Café. It was in that safe haven that they frequently shared their feelings and tales; mostly woeful stories and experiences of their lives with women, erstwhile lovers and now estranged spouses, while drowning their sorrows in booze and hearty laughter.
The lives of the seven men are irretrievably and fatefully intertwined. But Hatcher’s Room is neither your “Joy Club” nor “Potluck Club”. Instead, the characters in this book are an aggregation of desolate and upturned lives – of a group of men sorely soured by society dealing them a bad hand after the women in their lives had dealt them more sinister hands. The Hatcher’s Room grouping represented more than a “support club” or “therapy group”. In essence, the men were a mosaic of individually traumatized people, some with “story too humiliating to share”, who had arrived at the painful realization that they were not alone in the challenges they faced and the succor and shelter they sought from each other and from the harsh realities of everyday living. As it turned out, Hatcher’s Room was for them, the only place they could “openly censure women and not feel guilty about it”. It was also a sanctuary: “We come there to talk in a way most men don’t express themselves.” These were also men at odds with the society by virtue of their gender, as exemplified by “If it was one of us, someone would be throwing the book at us”.
In Hatcher’s Room, Caroline Ilogienboh is daring, dramatic and waggish, but fair in her unvarnished representation of persons and idiosyncrasies and more so, in her handling of the emotive all-time issues of male-female relations. She has, therefore, written a deeply fascinating book that affirms the time-honoured cliché that “misery loves company”, and that “opposites attract”, without losing sight of the place and salience of direct dialogue in any dispute. Hatcher’s Room mirrors without apologies and with unfettered candor and insight, the challenges of the society, the costly price of matrimonial and interpersonal relations gone awry; and the profound and eternal dichotomy in the ways men and women visualize, assess, understand and interpret their feelings, their communications and overall relationships. In this instance, hate had produced “a gathering born out of misery, disappointments, resentments, anger or whatever ugly mix of life had dumped on the men’s paths”.
With the virtuosity of an insider and knowledge only attributable to an attentive social worker, Caroline Ilogienboh paints an engrossing picture of seven not-so uncommon lives. These are seven men of various backgrounds, race and social standing, who share the commonality of being separated or divorced. Soon, their already altered lives are vicariously ruptured and taken over by the society through the legal system’s intrusions and unbending determination of their spouses and a chance adversary, to punish and humiliate them while still making them pay mortgages, child support and other forms of ancillary charges.
In the backroom of Arthur’s Café, the collective frustrations of these men and their unreserved ennui becomes their bond, and their camaraderie, the only acceptable and comforting salve. If they shared any other joy outside their companionship, it was the undisguised disdain they had developed for women. The anger is so profound, that the line between such painful reaction and a predisposition to misogyny is visibly blurred. But then, as they confessed later and circumstances proved they did not hate women, but merely what some scorned women can do to a man with the license from the larger society.
The labyrinthine, well-conceived and effortlessly delivered story line in Hatcher’s Room takes a fateful and clearly unheralded turn, when a moment of respite, during which the men were wallowing in self- pity is disrupted and shattered by an intrusion from Lauren Brown, a feisty family court lawyer and Simone, a journalist with a bloodhound’s instinct and a pitbull’s demeanor. The men’s reaction is visceral and obdurate. They eject both women from Hatcher’s Room in the most humiliating and confrontational way, unaware that both women had issues of their own with men of their ilk. The encounter sets the stage for the book’s denouement, complete with plots of scornful revenge that borders on pride and prejudice and the seeking of the proverbial “pound of flesh”.
The unfolding tense situation is further compounded, when well beyond rejection and the men being put out, the polarizing issue of kidnap and other human foibles, including lust, sex, pornography, passion are injected into the fray. In one moment of utter madness and ludicrous assumption, the men, obviously blinded by their collective rage accuses Ms. Brown of orchestrating the kidnap of the daughter of one of their pals, Dr. Mike Vatiano, just to get back at them. Deserted by their collective commonsense, they gloss over the fact that Ms. Brown was sworn to uphold the law not to break it. In response to their allegation, Ms. Brown strikes back like a cobra, with such vehemence and fury, that even her blossoming relationship with Detective Theo Johnson is put in jeopardy, when she allies with a conniving woman who had raped a drunken Theo Johnson during his college days and later on tried to foist Devin, the product of the illicit and non-consensual liaison on him.
The underpinning of the story is that though the men were in failed relations, they were grossly incapable of grasping their respective roles or contributions towards that state of failure or its resolution. Their respective reaction and perception is understandably one-dimensional in every aspect. After all, as Theo Johnson had reflected, though “the justice system was supposed to be fair, he had been dealt a bad card.” His feeling was a shared consensus. Consequently, it would take close encounters of different kinds - troubled children, depressions, a trade-off sexual liaison with an ex, pornographic depravity and the revelation that a raped inebriated man had produced a progeny -- for each man to come to terms with reality and begin the march toward grasping that their individual salvation rested with those they loathed most. One by one, the men come to realize that the remedy they sought from each other and “the key to their serenity lay in the hands of the very women they had rejected”. But the solutions are far off and not too easy in coming, certainly, not before various macabre scenes from Ilogienboh’s extremely fertile mind are played out on the pages of the book and in very proactive and provocative ways.
Sex sells. And salubrious sex can be a page turner. Ilogienboh does not disappoint and indeed, proves extremely versatile in this regard, by turning depraved anger into ravaging aphrodisiac to produce some exhilarating sex scenes. When Theo Johnson and Lauren Brown eventually agreed to a conjugal interface, it turns into magic beyond the ordinary. What should have amounted to “sleeping with the enemy”, evolves into one of the most engrossing sexual encounters one can behold. The scenes and emotions in the script are powerful and graphic enough to cause the reader’s hormones to rage along with the book’s raw passion.
In Hatcher’s Room, Ilogienboh also delves into social commentary as well as the review of societal norms and values. She uses the story line to explore the challenges of counter-culture dissonance; especially the negative impact of culture shock on those transplanted from other climes, who, in deference to the culture of their motherland, resist assimilation into the liberal but seemingly suffocating American culture. The attending conflict engendered by such counter-culture challenges is palpable in the book. The relationship between Akin Badesola’s and his wife Lola typified such challenges. “A daughter’s failure was a mother’s failure. And the mentality of the society she came from did not believe that an abusive husband was a good reason to end a marriage”. For Akin, dealing with Lola was nightmare in its most insidious form. But he was convincingly more worried about the slanted system that unwittingly gave her impetus and undue advantage. The feeling was so pervasive that “he was filled with trepidation; he didn’t want to deal with the American legal system in any form”. As he had concluded “moving to America had not been rewarding as he had thought.”
Hatcher’s Room is a tantalizing tale of lives grafted together by destiny and dissected by human foibles. Ilogienboh has in kaleidoscope form, written an introspective and deeply revealing book that only an insider, intimately conversant with the intrigues and the convoluted inner working of the legal and statutory domestic relations process could have ventured and done so ably. Essentially, Hatcher’s Room is about life in general and particularly, about the familiar but uncharted terrain of domestic problems that persistently bedevil many American families. Perhaps only an alien will fail to recognize from Ilogienboh’s story line, the likeness of an individual or family they know who has followed a similar trajectory in the interplay of their domestic relations. All said, Caroline Ilogienboh has written a very interesting, well-crafted and provocatively humorous book on a topical contemporary issue.
------------ Mr. Oseloka Obaze, an aspiring writer, is a founding member of the Kwenu.com Book Review Forum, which is dedicated to the promotion of books with Igbo and Afrocentric themes. He is also a supporting Member of the African Writers Endowment (AWE). From 1999 to 2005 he served on the editorial board of INYEAKA, the journal of Songhai Charities, Inc., a New Jersey community-based charity founded and run by Nigerians based in New York Tri-state area in the United States, first as its founding Publisher and later as the Editor-At-Large. He is also on the editorial board of The Amaka Gazette, the journal of the Christ the King College, Onitsha Alumni Association in America. His collection of poems, “Regarscent Past: A Collection of Poems” was among the top three finalists in the poetry category in the African Writers Endowment Publishing Grant Program for 2004. His novel, “Happy Eulogy” will be published in 2007. He reviews books and arts strictly as a hobby. © Copyright 28 May 2007. |
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