Some years back, I heard someone speaking in an Igbo-inflected English saying, “With proper arrangement, even the devil will see God.” I love the adage even though the context of its use at the time points to the possibility of circumventing laws to one’s personal gains in Nigeria, but what I see from it is the oft-forgiving attribute of God. While the adage suggests God’s mercy for those supposedly destined for eternal damnation, Ever Obi’s title distances some people we presume to be close to God from His mercy. Some Angels Don’t See God is an incredible title given to an incredulous story.
The book comes to readers with family drama, trauma, a love triangle, and tragedy. It’s a reflection on how the past can haunt the present and negatively influence the future, if not properly attended to. At the centre of the novel is the life of a critically acclaimed author, Neta Okoye, dealing with the piles of misery that turn her life into a pit of endless pain.
The journey to the death of her happiness starts when she caught her seven-year-old twin brother, Jeta, playing a “Touch me I Touch you” game with their teenage aunt, Chidinma, their mother’s cousin. The aunt takes advantage of their childhood innocence and convinces them to submit to her as tools for finding answers to her sexual curiosities. A threesome of two kids and a teenager becomes a normal habit in the Okoye family, aided by the trust to leave the kids under the care of Chidinma, their abuser, by their careless parents, who spend their days at work.
When Chidinma left after her wedding, the twins clung to the game and eventually lost their virginities to each other. The book takes us on a journey covering the ramifications of incest in a non-linear storytelling approach reminiscent of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.
Chidinma’s departure to her husband’s home was followed by the enrolment of the twins in a boarding school. Before his demise, Jikora Okoye, the father of the twins, had his concerns over the siblings’ closeness, which appeared unnatural to him, but his fears were dismissed by his wife, Edna Okoye.
When she eventually caught the fourteen-year-old twins pants down, it was too late, and a series of tragedies she was not aware of had already begun. She made a distress call to her husband, but the consequences of the call were Jikora killing himself and another man whilst over speeding his way home.
Neta repents sincerely of the incest, but Jeta will not have it. He wants them to live like the Lannister twins in the HBO series, Game of Thrones; submit to their romantic affection for each other and damn whatever may be the consequences. Jeta’s persistence in having his love for his sister requited gives us the first of the three love triangles in Neta’s life in the story.
In a bid to send a clear message to her brother that their incestuous past is a childish stupidity and will never be repeated, she accepts the love advances of a brilliant boy in their secondary school called Tobe. This move achieves nothing but sowing the seed of animosity between her boyfriend and her twin brother, who is head over heels in love with her. It ends in an unanticipated manslaughter. Against the run of play, the victim is Tobe. Jeta spends a decade in prison for the accidental, though reckless, murder.
Peter, whom we meet in the opening paragraph of the book which celebrates the beauty of childhood under love and care and the protection they jointly offer to children against what the author calls “the truths of the world”, is both a source of happiness and pain in Neta’s adult life in the university. His presence in her life is something akin to one step forward and two steps back. Their love, though true and satisfying, is built on the foundation of betrayal, which often stirs the feeling of guilt in Neta. The love betrays Derek, who is Peter’s friend. Peter has been on the trail of Neta since meeting her at a birthday party. She loves him too, but couldn’t say yes because of his friendship with Derek, whom she was dating at the time.
While playing football, Derek fractures his leg and stays away from school, receiving treatment for six months. He returns and meets his girlfriend dating his friend. This love triangle in Neta’s life, which is the second, also ends disastrously. Unable to handle the loss of Neta to his friend, Derek turns to gun violence and shoots Peter in the chest before shooting himself in the head. The tragedy happens in Neta’s room and before her eyes.
Following Peter’s miraculous survival of the attack, Neta disappears from him without a trace, and he spends six years looking for her.
One of the interesting conversations stirred by this novel is on how a housemaid should be treated. The book gives instances where the maltreatment of housemaids is a clear evil and a reprehensible practice, but conversely, the idea of the book as a whole is surrounded by a wreck occasioned by the trust and good treatment bestowed upon a housemaid by generous and friendly masters. The housemaid issue is really a tricky one.
Another issue brought to light is the struggle to find a balance between career and motherhood for women. Edna Okoye, mother of the twins, is presented to readers in the story as a woman consumed by her banking career, whilst her children suffer abuse under her nose without her ever noticing.
Back in May, speaking as a panelist at the 2024 Kaduna Books and Arts Festival (KABAFEST), the Nigerian lawyer, Maryam Uwais, says one of the most difficult challenges she has faced was how to excel both at work and at motherhood. She mentioned the inadequate feeling of not being a good mother, which stems from staying away from one’s children due to the demands of work.
However, Edna Okoye pays more attention to being a good wife than to being a good mother in this book. One of the things she feels threatened by is the insecurity regarding her husband’s preference for meals prepared by Chidinma over hers.
One aspect of the book that awakens a reflection in me is how Tobe’s ego led him to an early grave. Although, nobody expects the fight with Jeta to end in a tragedy, but Tobe appears to be more motivated by his ego than anything when Jeta challenges him to a fight in what the students call “The Arena”, a refuse pit near the male students’ dormitory turned into a boxing ring where disagreements are settled with the fist.
When Neta tries to dissuade him from fighting because of her, he refuses to back out, citing the potential ridicule that awaits him should he duck a fight he publicly agreed to.
This brings to my attention the wider losses we could have avoided in life if only we hadn’t listened to the cheers of our ego. Again, the decision to send the twins to a boarding school can be traced back to the career of their parents, which offered limited time to keep surveillance over them when Chidinma married. Perhaps, if only the parents had the chance to watch over the kids, Jeta would not have killed Tobe in a fight after taking him down by the neck.
Despite having a mother devoted to God and religion, Peter doesn’t believe in God since the day his friend, Amandi, disappears from the university without a trace, like Kainene in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun after his diagnosis with HIV. Peter sees God as a nonchalant being who doesn’t protect those who believe in him. The prism of Peter’s view of God, on the contrary, is what makes the afterlife logical in my eyes. For me, life is a carnival of injustice that can only be leveled by God’s judgement on the day of recompense.
With a childhood and adolescence marred by incest and tragedy, Neta’s adulthood only presents greater problems, and so she finds an escape in solitude and literature. Ever Obi crafts a good love letter to literature in this book by highlighting its role in maintaining sanity among depressed people like Neta. Her success as a writer opens the door for Peter to return to her life after shutting it for six years. She left with the expectation of opening a new page in her life by running from her past. She blames herself for the incest, the death of her father, the death of Tobe, the conviction of Jeta, and the suicide of Derek. She takes all the blame until the day her therapist convinces her that others, too, are responsible for their actions.
Richard Ali, whilst speaking in a panel discussion at KABAFEST 2024, argues that though it has always been seriously denied, the debuts of novelists are mostly their autobiographies and memoirs disguised as fiction. Ever Obi confirms this argument in this novel by showing that the central plot in Neta’s critically acclaimed novel, The Angel You Know, is a real-life account of herself in the love triangle involving Derek and Peter. Though this isn’t Obi’s debut, reading this from him really gets me wondering which part of Some Angels Don’t See God is a real-life account and which part is the author’s imagination?
Obi also makes a case for the argument that on the other side of melancholy is a creative productivity. He joins the company of those who have argued that anger and frustration do lead one to write better. On page 249, he writes:
“In her lifelong romance with writing, she had come to realise that a broken heart always meant that she would write and express her feelings better. Her stories were always personal to her, so she wrote them from her heart. And whenever her heart was broken, it was also open; like a fresh wound, it bled words. Literature did not make her forget, but it kept her sane.”
Peter’s final separation from Neta is both difficult and convenient for him. The emptiness in his boring life instantly vacates after linking up with her during one of her book chats. Their love returns spontaneously, and he takes her to his mother as part of his preparation to marry her. This brings us to the part of the plot twist in the book that I don’t find believable. The recognition of Neta by Peter’s mother’s friend, Toy Woman, as a familiar face because she has two encounters with Edna Okoye, Neta’s mother, a decade earlier, is an extraordinary memory that appears perfectly illogical to me. The realisation that Neta is an Okoye, daughter of a man who killed Peter’s father and subjects them to hardship, largely depending on the generosity of the Sweets, their family friends, to make ends meet, ignites his mother’s opposition to the relationship.
The novel explores the downside of both having a career for a woman and not having one. Peter has a caring mother whose lack of a job and career plunges their family into financial struggles following the death of his father. Neta, on the other hand, has a mother consumed by her career. The death of her father doesn’t alter anything in her life related to provisions, but she suffers abuse propelled by her mother’s lack of care. Life is indeed complex.
Acting on the advice of her therapist, Neta confesses her incestuous past to Peter.
Amid the chaos of handling his mother’s opposition to marrying Neta and the revelation of her past to him, Peter’s childhood love, Anita Sweets, returns from the US after fifteen years there. He turns to her and ends his chapter with Neta, who desperately wants him. The third love triangle in the book.
Jeta’s release from prison marks the beginning of a fresh problem for Neta to deal with. She accommodates him in her apartment, which he soon turns into a prison for her. He refuses to work and move to another place despite his sister’s offer to pay for the rent. He is still adamant about his love for her and his desire to continue the incest. He would stay home all day with the two friends he made from the prison and do nothing other than smoke and eat her food.
Neta stops cooking as a strategy to get her twin brother to return to reason and responsibility, to work as a man and get his life back on track. Ever Obi begins the closure of this book with a drama before unleashing on readers a haunting trauma. Neta returns home to feed her parrot only to discover that it has been slaughtered, cooked, and eaten by Jeta and his friends. When she complains, their response infuriates her. She asks Jeta to leave her apartment. This creates an altercation that culminates in him and his friends taking turns on her. This part of the book breaks me severely.
Neta’s initial plan after the gang rape on her is to pack and leave the apartment for her brother and his friends to yet again run from her problem. But seeing rat poison under her bed offers her the cue on what to do next. Narcotics are really bad for humans. If not smokers of Indian hemp, who accepts a food without a suspicion from the woman he beat and raped the previous day?
I appreciate the book for educating me on PEP (Post-Exposure Prophylaxis), the emergency medication taken after potential exposure to HIV to prevent infection. It is something I had no prior knowledge of before reading the book.
The book pays tribute to some of the things that Ever Obi holds dearly, like Enyimba FC (the football club of his city), literature, and his Alma mater, Unizik. The prose is lyrical, and the storyline is captivating from the first page. A truly memorable read.
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