Spriteliness

I. Via Teju Cole on twitter, a Harpers article by Frank Bures about "magical penis theft" in Nigeria:

No one is entirely sure when magical penis loss first came to Africa. One early incident was recounted by Dr. Sunday Ilechukwu, a psychiatrist, in a letter some years ago to the Transcultural Psychiatric Review. In 1975, while posted in Kaduna, in the north of Nigeria, Dr. Ilechukwu was sitting in his office when a policeman escorted in two men and asked for a medical assessment. One of the men had accused the other of making his penis disappear. This had caused a major disturbance in the street. As Ilechukwu tells it, the victim stared straight ahead during the examination, after which the doctor pronounced him normal. “Exclaiming,” Ilechukwu wrote, “the patient looked down at his groin for the first time, suggesting that the genitals had just reappeared."

According to Ilechukwu, an epidemic of penis theft swept Nigeria between 1975 and 1977. Then there seemed to be a lull until 1990, when the stealing resurged. “Men could be seen in the streets of Lagos holding on to their genitalia either openly or discreetly with their hand in their pockets,” Ilechukwu wrote. “Women were also seen holding on to their breasts directly or discreetly, by crossing the hands across the chest. . . . Vigilance and anticipatory aggression were thought to be good prophylaxes. This led to further breakdown of law and order.” In a typical incident, someone would suddenly yell: Thief! My genitals are gone! Then a culprit would be identified, apprehended, and, often, killed.

During the past decade and a half, the thievery seems not to have abated. In April 2001, mobs in Nigeria lynched at least twelve suspected penis thieves. In November of that same year, there were at least five similar deaths in neighboring Benin.

(TC has, as you ought to know, been tweeting "small fates" culled from the Lagos news; lately many of these have been, well, shrinking and/or disappearing fates.) Another juicy bit from the Harpers piece:

in 1984 and 1985, some five thousand Chinese villagers in Guangdong province tried desperately to keep their penises outside their bodies using whatever they had handy: string, chopsticks, relatives’ assistance, jewelers’ clamps, and safety pins.

II. A good interview with Devin Johnston -- whose work I've always admired -- about, among other things, warblers:

Lately I've been watching warblers. It's the more esoteric end of birding. They're high up and so small. My friend says it's like the trees are carbonated.

(I am not surprised that Johnston is a fan of Basil Bunting.)

Teju Cole's "Small Fates"

Teju Cole, who wrote the excellent Open City and the intriguing but unfindable Every Day is For the Thief, is tweeting "small fates," which are a variant on Feneon's "three-line novels," based on/culled from(?) Nigerian local news. Here are some that I particularly liked:

• E. Mozie, 28, won’t finish his political science degree at the University of Jos. He stole two phones and is to be hanged.
• Segun, 16, who toppled into the flood waters of Egbe Idimu while answering the call of nature, was pulled out by divers, alive.
• If sneaking into a house to have sex with a neighbor's sleeping wife is wrong, Edunjobi, of Oshodi, doesn't want to be right.
• Hamidu, 19, sent to eliminate Baba Ali, 65, in Ibeju Lekki, killed a chicken while waiting. The old man arrived and was likewise cut open. 
• Love is so restless. When T. Dafe’s girlfriend dumped him in Surulere, he went at her with a pen knife until she was no more.
• The 40 long-dead Edo State pensioners who had kept drawing their pensions will now be left without a source of income.
• Professor A.B. Mamman, after a tiring journey from Abuja to Zaria, lay down on a hotel bed and never woke up.
• One, two, three, four, five. Women sleeping on a restaurant floor in Ikeja. No, dead.
• On Forcados street, Kaduna, where money buys intimacy, someone took strenuous exception, and detonated a bomb.
• In Lagos, Mr Sikiru, 33, and Mrs Awosanya, 38, inspected schools and pocketed bribes, as though they were actual government employees.
• Mr Malik collapsed while on duty at Murtala Muhammad International Airport, which, unluckily, has no doctor, ambulance, or medicine.
• At the gates of the College of Education in Ekiadolor was placed, by his enemies, the freshly-severed head of an unnamed student.
• What God has joined together, Olubukola, in Agege, wants to put asunder, merely because her husband knocked three of her teeth out.
• Mr Henshaw Asuquo, a clergyman, traveled from Eket to his village and, upon arrival, went into his room and hanged himself.
• In Abuja, Mrs Ali, wife of someone who used to be something, put up illegal structures, and started a brawl when they were demolished.
• Micah, 30, of Igbolodun, breast fondler, was for that reason jailed.
• The Minister of Aviation, Princess Ogiemwinyi, arrived in Kano in long-sleeved shirt and jeans, scandalizing moderate Muslims.
• Like Moses, Romulus, and Remus, a baby, newly-born, was found under a parked SUV outside a mosque in Orile-Agege.
• In Ekemgbo three Cameroonian quacks were caught peddling Chinese herbs.
• Mr Okiemute, of the Delta State House of Assembly, entered the chamber dressed as a boy scout. Nevertheless he is sane.
• “Madam, the car has been stolen,” Amaziah, a driver in Lagos said, correctly, as he had stolen it himself with a duplicated key.
• Miffed during a cleanup exercise, a truculent roadside trader in Port Harcourt showed sanitation officials his gun. 

• Arrested by fearless police officers, the four men who robbed a bank in Ikorudu were all themselves fearless police officers.

I am not, btw, convinced by his introduction. It seems to me that the slight archaism, or perhaps the more general instability of register (many of these sound, I assume intentionally, like translations), is doing a lot of the work. (So is the writerliness, of course, the impression that the names and stories are being used like symbols in a mathematical formula, which contrasts nicely with the grisliness of the stories.) A particularly nice example of shifting registers:

Pomp, pageantry, and tears of joy. A ceremony was held for graduates of the entrepreneurial training program at Kirikiri Prison.

Surely a good part of what's going on here, literarily, is the juxtaposition of somewhat dated bombast ("pomp, pageantry...") with late 20th cent. business-speak ("entrepreneurial") and with the local detail. This might owe as much to the dialect as to the writer -- for some reason one thinks of Nigerian English as tending toward the florid; an uncle of mine used to live in Lagos, and claimed that in Nigeria a cold was always a catarrh, but he did not like the place much... -- but it seems to me a large part of why these things work so well.