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The human journey Writer explores African culture in novel, ‘The Man with No Skin’
With a rare majestic blend for different lands, cultures, and struggles, two worlds collide in the newly-released book, “The Man With No Skin.”
Irish author Orfhlaith Ni Chonaill has spent her life between Nairobi, Kenya and the west coast of Ireland. Chonaill draws upon these two distinct places for her debut novel.
The story opens in rural Nairobi, where the character Wambui toils away at harvesting her family’s small plot of maize. She and her child live in a straw hut while her husband Irungu works as a Mercedes chauffer to a wealthy family in the nearby city. While his family struggles back home, Irungu turns over all his wages to his girlfriend so that she can purchase an urban stone house.
 | | The Man With No Skin
by Orfhlaith Ni Chonaill
Dialogue Publishing
2005
ISBN# 0-976-4904-8-X
$14.95
softcover
254 pages
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Father Ciaran O’ Sullivan is a native of Cork, Ireland. Steady and certain of his priestly calling from an early age, he dismisses his father’s vehement objections and enters the Irish seminary, never looking back.
Sent off to serve a parish in Africa, Ciaran begins to question his once-idolized Irish mentor Father Madden’s tactics and ways. Ciaran finds his life slipping into a web of betrayal, death, and potential new resurrection in this new and mysterious world of Kenya.
Two parishioners turn up dead in the Kishagi Market and Ciaran is tasked with the agony of delivering their eulogies. Ciaran stirs up controversary when he stands at the pulpit facing his entirely black congregation and advocates the use of contraceptive devices for reducing the spread of AIDS as well as openly voicing opposition to the land abuse by the ruling white class.
Contention seems to follow Ciaran wherever he goes. Tension builds when a gang of six black men — including Irungu, who has voiced strong disdain for Ciaran and all whites — viciously attack the outspoken priest with a machete.
Following the assault, Ciaran’s dear friend Shiku dutifully grabs all of the priest’s diaries and journals. As if by instinct, Shiku takes his writings into safekeeping while he begins to recover at her family’s comfortable home. At the house, Ciaran studies Shiku, the young girl and protégé who years earlier he had taken under his careful wing, even sponsoring her schooling. Shiku is now an independent beautiful woman, wife, and mother.
The dutiful and snowyhaired Father Madden, a pawn of the ruling and highly political archbishop, pays a visit to Ciaran urging the younger priest to flee to his homeland of Ireland for his own safety. Ciaran instead chooses to remain with Shiku and her husband Julius, who have opened up their home to the injured priest. When Julius leaves for a three-month trip to America, Ciaran, Shiku and her young daughter are left in the house to themselves.
As Ciaran begins to study the healing of his gashed skin, he senses deeper wounds of other dimensions beginning to hemorrhage.
Throughout, the author demonstrates and masterfully threads together the differences between the Roman Catholic religion and the African culture and religion, eventually bringing them into one light.
Careful and beautiful accounts are given to the sacrament of the Mass and all that makes the human spirit and senses gravitate to the Catholic faith and belief in God and heaven above.
Conversely, for native Africans, their god is known as “Ngai.” Unlike Catholics, Africans espouse to the faith that when you die, your spirit goes back into the earth.
Once again, Chonaill offers a rare perspective of a priest as a man with human frailties when Ciaran gets a call from home that his own father is dying. He flies home to Ireland. There he comes to terms with his family and their expectations of him as well as their own misgivings about his clerical path. During the funeral Mass, Ciaran discovers that his true home really is now back in Africa.
Upon his return to Nairobi, Ciaran spends his days writing in his journals and visiting with Shiku. In eloquent prose, through the character of Ciaran, the author writes, “It was then that the conviction came to me”: ‘My life has been a waste. I have tried to be divine and failed to be human.”
Flashbacks begin to flood Ciaran from his past seminarian days. Recounting his close confidant Liam’s quiet and quick departure from the seminary due to a personal dark secret, Ciaran must reconcile himself with his own failure to support his friend in his time of need.
Liam’s self-perceived shortcomings and withdrawal from the seminary as a future priest begin to linger in Ciaran’s conscience. Upon his departure, Liam directly challenges Ciaran and says, “I can’t believe that being human is sinful anymore than being gay. Or that anyone is more or less worthy regardless of whether they are celibate. You live in a fantasy world, Ciaran. And you don’t let anyone get deep enough to challenge anything you think.” These words continue to haunt Ciaran for the rest of his life until he begins to look at himself in Shiku’s guestroom mirror.
Eventually the snowyhaired Father Madden visits Ciaran a second time. Representing the archbishop, Father Madden releases Ciaran from his parish duties in Kishagi and orders him to return home to Ireland. Stripped of his parish role and with no other job training to speak of, Ciaran is faced with yet another dilemma.
Weaving a tapestry of darkness and light, with no sense of right or wrong based on the color of one’s skin, “The Man With No Skin,” is poignant, provocative, and lush in language and setting. In this challenging and mosaic-like book, Orfhlaith Ni Chonaill reminds us that we are all human and together on the same journey.
Elisabeth A. Doehring serves as Book Review Editor for “The Gulf Breeze News” and “Splash! Magazine.” An award winning writer, she is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, Southern Book Critics Circle, Women’s National Book Association, and Alabama Writers Forum. Her reviews and feature works appear in various publications throughout the states of Florida, Alabama, and Kentucky as well as in her ancestral country of Ireland .
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