SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Tail of the Blue Bird by Nii Ayikwei Parkes: https://t.co/CSwLphZMZF
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) December 18, 2020
Short Review: 7.5 out of 10
1/3
Short Review (cont): A short novel set in Ghana where the traditional village life and corrupt modern city life collide, as a young forensic pathologist is taken by greedy cops to investigate a strange village scene. Really interesting in message and scene.
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) December 18, 2020
2/3
Tail of the Blue Bird is a short (just under 200 pages) novel by Nii Ayikwei Parkes. It's arguable whether it really fits the category of Fantasy (its more usually listed as literary fiction, and whether anything fantastical happens is an open question). The story takes place in what are essentially two different worlds in Ghana - a modern city world of Ghana, in which foreign knowledge is used and misused by corrupt officials and businessmen for their own gain and a more traditional rural world, in which people are not unaware of modern advancements, but still live as per tradition - hunting, medicine making....and believing in things like horrifying curses.
This is a short novel, featuring a young man who was educated abroad to be a forensic pathologist to help the Country uncover answers other than superstition only to run into people who don't actually want answers, is certainly interesting - and worth a read for audiences who are likely unfamiliar with the setting.
TRIGGER WARNING: Abuse of a girl and then a woman by her father, resulting in multiple miscarriages.
------------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
Kayo left Ghana for schooling in England to study medicine. But a memory of his grandfather's unexplained drowning led him to become a forensic pathologist instead, which he hoped would allow him to explain mysterious circumstances - deaths, damages, etc. - that his country traditionally explains with either superstition or just a shrug. But when he returned to the country, he found the corrupt police force with no interest in using his skills for explanations if there wasn't any profit in it for them, and found his skills being used in a tangential way at best by a greedy businessman.
But when the girlfriend of an influential man finds a mysterious bloody mass in a rural village, Kayo is forced by a promotion-sniffing inspector into leaving his job to investigate the scene. The inspector doesn't really care for the truth - just that Kayo can use his skills to produce some interesting looking results, but Kayo finds himself intrigued by the mystery. A mystery that may have some ties to a story Kayo is told by a villager - of a missing man, his abused daughter, and a curse cast upon him - a curse that might explain things more than science, perhaps....
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Tail of the Blue Bird is, as I've previously mentioned, a story of two worlds in Ghana. The story's ostensible protagonist - Kayo (although some parts of the story are told not from his point of view, but from that of the hunter Opanyin Poku) - essentially has feet in both of those two worlds - he didn't come from the most rural of villages, but he knows the traditional ways - both language and culture - of those villages, but now works in the City, which attempts to imitate the modern outside world, in its own Ghanian way. Kayo left Ghana for school and there made a choice seemingly to try and make his life's work in helping to bring Ghana more into modernity, by disproving superstition and by providing scientific evidence of unexplainable things like mysterious deaths. But when he came back, he found even the modern aspects of his country uninterested in such things unless it would provide monetary value to them immediately. And so the corruption and dismal nature of the supposedly better modern world is contrasted with the simplicity and respectable culture of the rural world by the story, as Kayo comes to in the end make a choice that will seemingly stick him in the rural world for good.
And yet, Tail of the Blue Bird is not simply a story making a case that the rural, old, and most importantly traditional and superstitious Ghanian culture is better than the modern world either. The superstition filled story that emerges to explain the mysterious bloody body in the hut that Kayo is to investigate is one of brutality - a man beating his daughter repeatedly as a child and then, rather than being punished by the village, having the villagers rely upon a curse to do the punishment....which takes years to take effect (when it finally does). The people in the village seem happy in their lives and are no mere simpletons as some of the urban police might think, but their world is hardly...good either.
The result is a story that is, as I said, interesting, and revealing, even if it doesn't seem to me to make a clear case or argument about these worlds and connecting them to our modern world. This is a short book, and from a perspective that is likely to be very different to most readers of this blog, being of Western audiences, so it is worth tracking down however just for that, and it is very well written through it all, even with its grim message.
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