Perhaps the biggest conveyers of Ogunbayo’s main thrust in this narrative are The Lust Supper and On Tekel Street in which spiritual defilement and hypocrisy in the church are eloquently foregrounded. Oscar and Leo’s homosexual past haunts Oscar’s church which is also engulfed in witchcraft and promiscuity – a sad commentary on the modern day church which has allowed strange doctrines to infiltrate its ranks, giving rise to “unnatural troubles” within the body of Christ.
In The Lust Supper, Sola Ogunbayo explores common existential concerns that are capable of stimulating man’s interrogatory faculties. The collection of ten short stories exemplifies the writer’s understanding of the modern world as an enclave of humanity punctuated by momentary incursions by supernatural beings from the extraterrestrial world. These man-spirit encounters have always found vociferous amplification in the context of religion, which is supposed to offer direction and a beacon of hope to its adherents.
However, Ogunbayo succeeds in exposing the overwhelming contradictions inherent in religion as a moral and social agent. In Blow Job, we encounter a blunt juxtaposition of outward religiosity and the destructive instinct embedded in the mind of a supposed Muslim sister who ordinarily should lead the world to Aljannah but who ironically is the bearer of an Improvised Explosive device which she soon detonates, leading to a carnage of souls. The only survivor is the young lady on her National Youth Service Corps mission. The young lady is saved by the “messiah in a fluffy robe.” Here, Ogunbayo demonstrates the reality of the failure of religion as a moral agent and the possibility of miraculous encounters with the supernatural. The seeming failure of faith from the moral context of the Muslim women does not diminish its universal value. In other words, while Ogunbayo interrogates the absurdities inherent in certain religious creeds, he does not generalize this failure as we can see in the moral posturing of the young lady on her National Youth Service Corps programme as opposed to the Muslim lady who ends up destroying lives and property. More so, Ogunbayo does not ascribe superiority in terms of morality to one religion over the other. Instead, he succeeds in portraying the very nagging existential realities that have become common in modern day Nigeria where Islamist forces like the Boko Haram insurgents have held the government by the jugular, dislocating social order and crumbling every effort aimed at building a great economy. Ogunbayo thereby presents religion as a moral agent with Ogunnian qualities – the power to create and the power to destroy. He seems to suggest that religion is what we make of it; we can use it as a tool of redemption and as a weapon of mass destruction. The difference however lies in the quality of our conscience. Thematically speaking, the writer explores themes of insurgency, religious fanaticism, Christological surrealism and the paradox of faith in ways that resonate with our current realities as Nigerians.
In Pisces to Pieces, we encounter a Christian family whose only son is entangled in an attraction to a “worldly” song which takes its inspiration from Greek mythology. Peter’s parents are not enjoying their son’s obsession with Odyssey by Talos. They prefer he listens to soul-edifying tunes rooted in their Christian cosmology. Their preference is also embellished with a portrait of Jesus walking on water – something they believe would generate the right spiritual ambience required to expedite the coming to fruition of their most urgent desire – another child. Peter would soon be caught in a web of musical enchantment as Jane, the damsel he had met at the Supermarket charms him with her resonant delivery of Talos’ Odyssey over the phone. And “like some fish doped out of the deep”, Peter loses his senses of reasoning as Jane’s enthralling voice steals his sanity. In the ensuing commotion, his parents invoke the power of God in a dramatic deliverance session that sees their son come back to his senses after the portrait of Jesus walking on water is showed to him as against the picture of Pisces of the Zodiac which Jane shows him in that phantasmagoric encounter. Once again, Ogunbayo digs deep into the multitude of spiritual experiences that have engraved themselves on planet earth, raising their ugly heads against the main precepts of religions such as Christianity. While Jane exudes some marine connections, she almost drags Peter into the deep but for the intervention of his parents through prayers and the portrait of Jesus walking on water. As a Christian himself, Ogunbayo seems to accept the fact that there are powerful supernatural forces that daily threaten the very existence of an average Christian. He therefore propagates the efficacy of the Christian pantheon in the affairs of humanity. He also lends credence to the existence of elemental forces, albeit without denying the fact that the latter can also pose spiritual challenges.
In Gabriel, Sash The Scripture and Chalice Angels, there is an interplay of themes such celestial visitation (angels in disguise), the redemptive power of the scripture (Alvin’s vindication) and apocalyptic intervention (the salvation of Joseph) who is haunted by a trance-like regurgitation of his unholy escapades with women. Joseph is encircled by the gates of hell until he is saved by the Son of Man. Ogunbayo intensifies his preoccupation with the nexus between humanity and divinity, a conversation he has uninterruptedly sustained throughout this compelling narrative. In his worldview, as reflected by this conversation, man cannot detach himself from the influence of supernatural forces, no matter how spiritually forthright he appears to be. Somehow, the spiritual controls the physical and vice versa, depending on the latter’s ability to position itself through prayer and other forms of communion with ethereal forces.
Perhaps the biggest conveyers of Ogunbayo’s main thrust in this narrative are The Lust Supper and On Tekel Street in which spiritual defilement and hypocrisy in the church are eloquently foregrounded. Oscar and Leo’s homosexual past haunts Oscar’s church which is also engulfed in witchcraft and promiscuity – a sad commentary on the modern day church which has allowed strange doctrines to infiltrate its ranks, giving rise to “unnatural troubles” within the body of Christ. Whatever affinity the church has with witchcraft must have been due to the former’s inordinate quest for power as we can find in Bishop Dave’s reminiscence about “the voodoo man he consulted to make more worshippers come to the church…” This reality resonates with Goodman Brown in Nathaniel Hawthorn’s Young Goodman Brown who discovers some of the so-called pious people of his community partaking of a demonic ritual. For Ogunbayo, the church is the light of the world, however, not all churches lead mankind to salvation. Many are extensions of a demonic agenda.
Today, we are faced with the reality of gay and lesbian churches scattered all over the world, including Nigeria. With these strange realities, as portrayed in the narrative, Ogunbayo seems to ask a simple question: “Is religion truly a way out of darkness for humanity?” This question becomes germane in the face of our collective existential experiences in a world where darkness seems to be encroaching into light, even in broad day light. More so, the contradictions embedded in religion, especially Christianity cannot be left unquestioned. As Ogunbayo subtly implies, there could be surprises on the last day. This possibility is depicted in On Tekel Street in the way and manner Deacon Bade (who impregnated two church members), the penitent prostitute and other worshippers were raptured whereas the judgmental and holier than thou Bishops – Dave and Chidi as well as Pastor Ortega remained entrapped in their hypocritical worlds. A similar scenario plays out in Listening Heir where the reckless monetization of salvation results in Philip’s healing of the dreadlocked madman, Dugbe. Dugbe’s deliverance from the yoke of insanity becomes the loss of sanity for the popular pastor of Revelation Chapel – a naked paradox mocking the proclaimed efficacy of the Christological credo in solving the problems of modern existence. In The Only Ghost and Mask Execution, themes of man’s fallibility and the glorious intervention of divinity in human crises are addressed. A pastor who heals others is unable to heal his deaf and dumb child. Unknown to him, an old girlfriend he had deflowered had placed a curse on him after he cajoled her into aborting her pregnancy while he deserted town. In the end, however, his remorseful spirit coupled with Portia’s willingness to forgive and break the curse brought about redemption in his family as his deaf and dumb son regains his hearing and speaking faculties. In Mask Execution, Ogunbayo celebrates the power of faith through the intervention of the divine in critical situations such as ill health. He establishes the fact that what the ordinary doctor could not achieve becomes a stroll in the park for the Doctor who “wore a customized face mask with the word INRI inscribed in front of the mask.” This Doctor is surely divine!
Finally, Ogunbayo’s TheLust Supper is a successful attempt at x-raying the many realities and contradictions that permeate modern existence from the perspective of religion (its strengths well as its weaknesses) as a moral agent in the drama of being. Ogunbayo also demonstrates his uncanny mastery of words – a quality that signifies his poetic inclination as one of the finest teachers of African poetry. His combination of scatology, symbols of piety and the man-spirit continuum, expressed through a poetico-prosaic fiction, reveals a deep-seated passion for interrogating human existence and its nexus with the supernatural realm. Despite being the creator of the narrative’s world, Ogunbayo’s tone radiates the Keatsian principle of Negative Capability as he strips the work of any iota of authorial prejudice. Instead, he allows readers to make their own conclusions without imposing his own perspectives on them. In The Lust Super, what Ogunbayo is simply saying is that the hood does not always make the monk. This universally acclaimed dictum shows that there could be surprises even in Heaven just as there are in human existence. Even the name Ogunbayo is linked with the Yoruba god of iron who is also a famed ‘liquor monger’. How then does Ogunbayo reconcile the ancestral and traditional impulses of his name with his calling as a Christian clergyman? I believe the answer to this question is also rooted in the writer’s ability to accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” as they relate to other religious worldviews apart from Christianity. Like Keats, Ogunbayo is one writer whose adherence to the principle of negative capability has made him a global literary ambassador receptive to the divergent voices struggling for attention in a universe perturbed by unending strife and competition.