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Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters
A long-awaited novel from one of Africa's best-regarded writers. He is a poet, but best known as a novelist, original and imaginative. His writing is described as fundamentally African, and specifically Ghanaian in source. Witty narrative and dark humour dominate this novel in which an Anglican Bishop works scientifically and doctrinally with different types of sharks, an ecumenically-minded Pope loves boxing over the telephone, and the Archbishop of Canterbury is powerless to stop genetic experiments which make the interaction between rich and poor countries almost impossible. Kojo Laing is the author of Search Sweet Country, Women of the Aeroplanes, and Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars.
- GenresGhanaAfrican Literature
374 pages, Paperback
First published December 29, 2006
97 people want to read
About the author
Kojo Laing
8 books21 followersB. Kojo Laing or Bernard Kojo Laing (1 July 1946 – 20 April 2017) was a Ghanaian novelist and poet, whose writing is characterised by its hybridity, whereby he uses Ghanaian Pidgin English and vernacular languages alongside standard English. His first two novels in particular – Search Sweet Country (1986) and Woman of the Aeroplanes (1988) – were praised for their linguistic originality, both books including glossaries that feature the author's neologisms as well as Ghanaian words.
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November 2, 2020
"…the entire universe was at one point only imaginary, and that should be the biggest influence on all creation men and women…"
Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters is surreal, ontological, theological, scatological, genealogical, genie-o-logical, dream logical. It’s a story told around a nuclear-green campfire, the wordman’s wordweird wordworld forming a fantasyscape of multiple dimensions. Indeed, several cities real or imagined are mentioned but the focus is on Gold Coast City in Ghana. The wordman is hired through force by the narrative’s main obsession, Big Bishop Roko Yam, yet the nameless wordman struggles at times to maintain control of the story, getting complaints and unsolicited influence from Roko himself, who wants to be portrayed a certain way, and even from other characters like the thief and later Roko’s enemy ZigZag Zala: “There were your decimarvels trying to change a changing bishop (like entering a spin from the middle) while simultaneously going for goals that were not mutable but traditional. […] And ZigZag Zala so ravenous for his cause against the bishop (and this same cause being a means to greater smuggling) that he spilled over into the story and often demanded his own paragraphs.”
Whether characters attempt to alter the story or not (and they’d have a hard time usurping it because the narrator “knew the various spaces and directions in which his nervous systems stretched”), there is no narrative thrust as such, rather each relatively brief chapter is a meditation oscillating between philosophical/unreal exposition and the prose poetry of the paracosm proper, with characters entering and exiting as though through wormholes and rabbitholes. Perhaps the notion of narrating is at least in part misleading, for as it’s rationalized closer to the end of the novel: “You didn’t narrate a profane anti-clerical, anti-communal, anti-individualistic shark story belonging to a boogie pond-mouthed bishop; O, no: you either fried it or you baked it; anything but narrate it.”
The result of this “literary baking” is an accumulation which creates a sense of time within a time suspended in the semi-repetitive purgatory of 1986 (as it happens, this is the year in which Laing’s first novel was published to international yet flash-lasting fame). “Did this bishop even know the age of his own navel? Did you consider how tightly squeezed up we all were stuck in a year that sealed off other years? Could it be that the extra points of time that Zala had managed to steal were after all points from the residue of 1986, rather than the first early dawns of 1987? I got dizzy whenever I mentioned any other year apart from 1986.” He later explains that “there was always a slight after-taste to restricted recycled time, very much like brown lime, a sort of synaesthesia of minutes and seconds. We were all glued to the horizon savouring earth and sea simultaneously.”
In this bardo of the bard where there are time bandits trying to push the year forward or backward even if by decimal points, the reader is graced with the science of mythology and the mythology of science. Indeed, Laing overlaps those (in)famous magisteria, creating his own. But as it is in reality so it is in surreality, for the magisteria only overlap with tectonic and technological activity, thus two wars are fomenting with no small amount of celadon and cetacean foam. Lo, this novel is the linguistic equivalent of a Dalí diorama irradiated with atomic mysticism, serving up an escargot of eschatology atop epistemology, e-piss-temology, religiosity, ornery sorcery, and cybernetic gee-netics: “…it was clear that for God to retain absolute spiritual force, he had to have a density beyond the black holes of cosmology; while at the same time his absolute humility aspired towards an inherent galactic imperfection. This primal flaw gave great freedom to the bishop and me […] and allowed the renaissance city to do two things: to press more and more prayers out through the plankton of the listening sea; and then to renew those same prayers through huge tubes of 1986 toothpaste, for some doctrinal flushing of the mouth, for some pepsodent worship.”
Read the full review in my Invisible Books column: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/11/0...
Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters is surreal, ontological, theological, scatological, genealogical, genie-o-logical, dream logical. It’s a story told around a nuclear-green campfire, the wordman’s wordweird wordworld forming a fantasyscape of multiple dimensions. Indeed, several cities real or imagined are mentioned but the focus is on Gold Coast City in Ghana. The wordman is hired through force by the narrative’s main obsession, Big Bishop Roko Yam, yet the nameless wordman struggles at times to maintain control of the story, getting complaints and unsolicited influence from Roko himself, who wants to be portrayed a certain way, and even from other characters like the thief and later Roko’s enemy ZigZag Zala: “There were your decimarvels trying to change a changing bishop (like entering a spin from the middle) while simultaneously going for goals that were not mutable but traditional. […] And ZigZag Zala so ravenous for his cause against the bishop (and this same cause being a means to greater smuggling) that he spilled over into the story and often demanded his own paragraphs.”
Whether characters attempt to alter the story or not (and they’d have a hard time usurping it because the narrator “knew the various spaces and directions in which his nervous systems stretched”), there is no narrative thrust as such, rather each relatively brief chapter is a meditation oscillating between philosophical/unreal exposition and the prose poetry of the paracosm proper, with characters entering and exiting as though through wormholes and rabbitholes. Perhaps the notion of narrating is at least in part misleading, for as it’s rationalized closer to the end of the novel: “You didn’t narrate a profane anti-clerical, anti-communal, anti-individualistic shark story belonging to a boogie pond-mouthed bishop; O, no: you either fried it or you baked it; anything but narrate it.”
The result of this “literary baking” is an accumulation which creates a sense of time within a time suspended in the semi-repetitive purgatory of 1986 (as it happens, this is the year in which Laing’s first novel was published to international yet flash-lasting fame). “Did this bishop even know the age of his own navel? Did you consider how tightly squeezed up we all were stuck in a year that sealed off other years? Could it be that the extra points of time that Zala had managed to steal were after all points from the residue of 1986, rather than the first early dawns of 1987? I got dizzy whenever I mentioned any other year apart from 1986.” He later explains that “there was always a slight after-taste to restricted recycled time, very much like brown lime, a sort of synaesthesia of minutes and seconds. We were all glued to the horizon savouring earth and sea simultaneously.”
In this bardo of the bard where there are time bandits trying to push the year forward or backward even if by decimal points, the reader is graced with the science of mythology and the mythology of science. Indeed, Laing overlaps those (in)famous magisteria, creating his own. But as it is in reality so it is in surreality, for the magisteria only overlap with tectonic and technological activity, thus two wars are fomenting with no small amount of celadon and cetacean foam. Lo, this novel is the linguistic equivalent of a Dalí diorama irradiated with atomic mysticism, serving up an escargot of eschatology atop epistemology, e-piss-temology, religiosity, ornery sorcery, and cybernetic gee-netics: “…it was clear that for God to retain absolute spiritual force, he had to have a density beyond the black holes of cosmology; while at the same time his absolute humility aspired towards an inherent galactic imperfection. This primal flaw gave great freedom to the bishop and me […] and allowed the renaissance city to do two things: to press more and more prayers out through the plankton of the listening sea; and then to renew those same prayers through huge tubes of 1986 toothpaste, for some doctrinal flushing of the mouth, for some pepsodent worship.”
Read the full review in my Invisible Books column: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/11/0...
August 22, 2019
this book is written in such an unusual style that it is sort of difficult to work out what is going on most of the time. it is ostensibly about some kind of conflict between the bishop roko yam of gold coast city in ghana, who is conducting genetic experiments on sharks and has a mouth large enough that multiple people can fit inside to look for chewing gum, and the archbishop of canterbury. this conflict appears to have something to do with a kind of transhumanist genetic modification and who should be able to access it - everyone, or wealthy people in the first world. there also seems to be a subsidiary local conflict where people are trying to oust bishop yam from his position because he keeps doing things like making an ant hill into a cathedral and faxing his name into all of the holy books in the world. the book is narrated by a 'wordman' who has been hired to tell yam's story and seems to be kind of a stand in for laing himself. there isn't really plot development in a conventional sense, even though events happen - it comes across more like the narrator telling a story orally and embellishing it and riffing on it - sometimes ghanaian expressions are used for emphasis like they would be if he was speaking to you. it's also full of sex and scatological jokes and generally bizarre tangents or imagery. some people like to say that laing is the first african sf author but i'm not sure if that makes sense, he deploys lots of scientific or technological words but they're not used in the way a sf author would, they're more like how amos tutuola talks about ghosts or something. i still only have a vague idea of what the book was about but it's cool how he concedes almost nothing to the reader.
here are the first few sentences:
"Destiny is such a selfish thing: it not only achieves itself when particular things happen, but also when the opposite every thing is realised. My own destiny was to be a joiner of dreams. It was exhausting holding the ends of millions of dreams and trying to tie them together physically. The annoying thing was that there were no symbolisms involved whatsoever, and this got my body more and more tired. Some sweet smeller of dreams."
here is part of a list of churches that goes on for nearly two pages:
"There were so many additional churches all crossed together like spaghetti over the waakye earth: there was the Jesus Yoga movement, the Christologue Digital Church(that was how Gold Coasters took their science to religion and vice versa); the Sergeant Army Christians(holy coup makers of the lower ranks, at one point); Christ Church of Banished Darkness(but rays of darkness continued to crawl up the Christian-Muslim-Traditional and other arses); Judaea Praise Brotherhood, Spiritual Calisthenics Church(they did press-ups in the open mouths of the prophets); Yoghurt Transformed Church, the Milkbush Sorority (twins of a different type of white rain); the Pilgrimage of Joy Church; the Brown Eye of the Great Healer Tabernacle, All Horses Gallop the Way of Gotterdammerung Hall(how effectively did a horse gallop while manifesting some huge flatulence?); the Resurrection of the Combustion Engine Worshipping Society, I Am what I Am Church(this being a combination of African rhythmic spirituality and American Haematology - the bloody part of transubstantiation); I Am What I Am Not Church(the opposite of everything of course, with its entrance at the side exit, and vice-versa);"
one of the longer sentences in the book, plus one more sentence:
"The strange thing about trying to build a temple for words was that words themselves would form very little of its walls: I found myself gathering polished stones, raw rotunda granite, pebbles forming a bumpy plateau with earring like holes in the middle, fat partly formed drooping rocks with the finger marks of those who could hold eternity on them; huge detached stones that could serve as final altars but which were now carried with great difficulty into my carriage; and there were big rocky hills I would like to have punched into shape, and there were juts I would punch out of shape; and there were red grey and brown anthills parts of which I took in to flaunt my oaken desk; plus the wood dust, gathering in a thimble, of huge trees attacked by woodlice; plus the harmattan dust that I swept and kept everyday, this dust that seemed to be the epiclesis of the miserly sacramental skies; and the beak of a grey and white buzzard left as an afterthought by the devouring ants; the oval dome of a perfect little perfume canister, silver to the last; shellfish and dead fish small, left by one of the bishop's receding ponds; even matchsticks, struck and kept for their shape; all sorts of miniature masterpieces that were more beautiful than symmetrical , but emotional all the same; a hawk's claw fallen down a dead cow's horn, clipped unplanned onto this mad bull's bones; God's red beads and the seeds of succulent fruit from this city forest; sic solder ants dead upside down and six fire ants too, beetles dead in their own rolling dung; and the sad eye of an akyinkyina tom out to shame the masterful beak; sharp squirrels with stolen nuts in their anus, shitting all over the place and redrawing their trees thousands of times over with their movements; a harvest of quiet cigar ash that I never smoked but smelled; transformed uranium from the recent nuclear bomb; a tiny bit of a president's desk brought to me by an understanding cathedral ant; live tortoises in fresh valley rain; desalinated crabs and the generous feathers of daytime owls left beside their equally generous shit; the recorded cries of crows; the roll of Pata's magnificent buttocks on her thin legs, a woman so at home with her body that you fell for her and crawled forever; the decalcified jaws of the great bull; hearts that could not be cynical for more than one day, and their vulnerable love too; the tip of an aeroplane's wing stolen from Roko's junkyard; a cat's placenta before it was eaten; massive elephants with their stirring orchestral cries; villages so remote that the evangelical cross had to fly to get there; and the toothbrush/chewing-sticks of the Deputy Jesus, Bishop Bender's gospel refrains, the quiescent ex-mangoes of Canon Creem, the latest tapioca-laden crosses of Mother Smith. O I never knew that the universe wore shoes for every occasion!"
here are the first few sentences:
"Destiny is such a selfish thing: it not only achieves itself when particular things happen, but also when the opposite every thing is realised. My own destiny was to be a joiner of dreams. It was exhausting holding the ends of millions of dreams and trying to tie them together physically. The annoying thing was that there were no symbolisms involved whatsoever, and this got my body more and more tired. Some sweet smeller of dreams."
here is part of a list of churches that goes on for nearly two pages:
"There were so many additional churches all crossed together like spaghetti over the waakye earth: there was the Jesus Yoga movement, the Christologue Digital Church(that was how Gold Coasters took their science to religion and vice versa); the Sergeant Army Christians(holy coup makers of the lower ranks, at one point); Christ Church of Banished Darkness(but rays of darkness continued to crawl up the Christian-Muslim-Traditional and other arses); Judaea Praise Brotherhood, Spiritual Calisthenics Church(they did press-ups in the open mouths of the prophets); Yoghurt Transformed Church, the Milkbush Sorority (twins of a different type of white rain); the Pilgrimage of Joy Church; the Brown Eye of the Great Healer Tabernacle, All Horses Gallop the Way of Gotterdammerung Hall(how effectively did a horse gallop while manifesting some huge flatulence?); the Resurrection of the Combustion Engine Worshipping Society, I Am what I Am Church(this being a combination of African rhythmic spirituality and American Haematology - the bloody part of transubstantiation); I Am What I Am Not Church(the opposite of everything of course, with its entrance at the side exit, and vice-versa);"
one of the longer sentences in the book, plus one more sentence:
"The strange thing about trying to build a temple for words was that words themselves would form very little of its walls: I found myself gathering polished stones, raw rotunda granite, pebbles forming a bumpy plateau with earring like holes in the middle, fat partly formed drooping rocks with the finger marks of those who could hold eternity on them; huge detached stones that could serve as final altars but which were now carried with great difficulty into my carriage; and there were big rocky hills I would like to have punched into shape, and there were juts I would punch out of shape; and there were red grey and brown anthills parts of which I took in to flaunt my oaken desk; plus the wood dust, gathering in a thimble, of huge trees attacked by woodlice; plus the harmattan dust that I swept and kept everyday, this dust that seemed to be the epiclesis of the miserly sacramental skies; and the beak of a grey and white buzzard left as an afterthought by the devouring ants; the oval dome of a perfect little perfume canister, silver to the last; shellfish and dead fish small, left by one of the bishop's receding ponds; even matchsticks, struck and kept for their shape; all sorts of miniature masterpieces that were more beautiful than symmetrical , but emotional all the same; a hawk's claw fallen down a dead cow's horn, clipped unplanned onto this mad bull's bones; God's red beads and the seeds of succulent fruit from this city forest; sic solder ants dead upside down and six fire ants too, beetles dead in their own rolling dung; and the sad eye of an akyinkyina tom out to shame the masterful beak; sharp squirrels with stolen nuts in their anus, shitting all over the place and redrawing their trees thousands of times over with their movements; a harvest of quiet cigar ash that I never smoked but smelled; transformed uranium from the recent nuclear bomb; a tiny bit of a president's desk brought to me by an understanding cathedral ant; live tortoises in fresh valley rain; desalinated crabs and the generous feathers of daytime owls left beside their equally generous shit; the recorded cries of crows; the roll of Pata's magnificent buttocks on her thin legs, a woman so at home with her body that you fell for her and crawled forever; the decalcified jaws of the great bull; hearts that could not be cynical for more than one day, and their vulnerable love too; the tip of an aeroplane's wing stolen from Roko's junkyard; a cat's placenta before it was eaten; massive elephants with their stirring orchestral cries; villages so remote that the evangelical cross had to fly to get there; and the toothbrush/chewing-sticks of the Deputy Jesus, Bishop Bender's gospel refrains, the quiescent ex-mangoes of Canon Creem, the latest tapioca-laden crosses of Mother Smith. O I never knew that the universe wore shoes for every occasion!"
July 24, 2012
This is one of the most difficult books I've read. Kojo Laing's magical realism was at its peak in this semi science-fiction novel. In this novel, the ideas of genetic engineering had reached such a high that it has become the new tool for diving countries into developed and developing. And there are Bishops in this.
the following leads to my review of the book on my blog.
http://freduagyeman.blogspot.com/2009...
Thanks
the following leads to my review of the book on my blog.
http://freduagyeman.blogspot.com/2009...
Thanks
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews