Book Review: A Broken People’s Playlist
Ten years after publishing his critically acclaimed debut novel, Tomorrow Died Yesterday, Chimeka Garricks chose the medium of short story for his sophomore effort in A Broken People’s Playlist (ABPP).
The Author’s Note explains the birth process of ABPP, a collection of a dozen short stories inspired by and named after songs that inspired them and told mostly from POV narrations.
The first sentence of the first story, Love Stars, instantly lures you in like the seductive rhythm of a love song. It is a story of BFFs turned star-crossed lovers whose lives turn full circle only for fate to play the cruellest joke on them.
Whilst you are still reeling from the haunting refrains of the tragic ending of Love Stars, Garricks spins the story turntable to select Music, a sombre story about an adulterous University Don and his narrator son who discovers escape from the dysfunctionality of his life through music.
Assured that the reader is sufficiently immersed in the delicious but melancholic delirium of its sombre playlist, ABPP cuts to the even more melancholic Hurt, a simple but brilliantly narrated story of a life of unbridled excesses lived and wasted, of love betrayed and destroyed and a dying attempt at redemption and one last hurrah at going out on one’s own terms.
Eventually, the sombre playlist effects an up-tempo beat with Song for Someone, a heart-warming ballad of living in denial of Daddy issues and finding love in a hopeless place.
But ABPP is not so much a happy hour party as it is a sad and tragic one. Party pooper In the City, feeds a coin into the juke box and returns the party to sombre territory with its story of a gay young boy trying to get by in a city slum only to get tragically caught in the crosshairs of corrupt and murderous police officers.
For a bit of comic relief, ABBP serenades with I Put a Spell on You, a story of cheating husbands with selectively functioning equipment and scheming wives and all that jazz.
In I’d Die without You, ABPP delivers a denuding of bottled-up emotions over tragedies that went unacknowledged for years. And in Beautiful War, two POV narrations deliver a duet of marital infidelity and the feeling of betrayal that refuses to let up.
In River, it delivers a dirge on the consequences of cultism and in Love’s Divine, it delivers both an ode to the lengths one would go to pursue one’s passion and a mea culpa for filial failings.
With Desperado and You Suppose Know, ABPP rounds up its playlist with a story of love lost but friendship regained, and the endearing (albeit tragic) beauty of geriatric love.
Set majorly in Port Harcourt, ABPP regales you not just with its sweet and tragic stories but also takes you on a nostalgic tour of Port Harcourt city. It hops you on a motor bike ride to one extreme in Eneka and ushers you into a bus drive through creek road to another extreme in Borokiri.
It takes you on a lovers’ stroll through the fruit market and the bole and fish stands in D/Line. It takes you on a hair-raising chase through the meandering slum of Asiama waterside and offers you the uppity refinement of G.R.A and Old G.R.A whilst immersing you in the soot-covered ambience of Port Harcourt.
With ABPP, Chimeka Garricks has cleared any doubt that he is a gifted storyteller (not that there was ever any doubt. You do not write a masterpiece in storytelling like Tomorrow Died Yesterday on a fluke).
As with Tomorrow Died Yesterday, in ABPP, he impresses with his mastery of simple but profound storytelling. His sentences and dialogues are short and instantly engaging.
His narration is unhurried, measured, and relaxed. His descriptive prowess was nowhere more displayed than in his visually descriptive football game narration in Love’s Divine.
His deliberate and unapologetic use of Nigerian English enhanced the charm of the stories in ABPP. The characters in ABPP were all very relatable in their pains, struggles, failings, successes, vices and virtues.
The stories and characters of A Broken People’s Playlist resonate with a poignancy that is so fitting that despite the tragedies, a happy ending would have appeared contrived and a detracting cop out. Life does not always have a storybook ending. For the characters in ABPP, when Tomorrow Died Yesterday, all they were left with is A Broken People’s Playlist.
