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Title: My Encounter with a Prostitute
Author: Promise Adiele
Publisher: Malthouse Press
Year: 2025
Pagination: 107
Reviewer: Henry Akubuiro
Something must kill a man: the first thing that strikes you in Promise Adiele’s debut collection of short stories is the title, My Encounter with a Prostitute and Other Stories, is perhaps a randy bloke and a tawdry affair in a red light district in the title story. You might imagine coquettish overtures and haggling, doing the nasty, and who comes out worse off from the encounter. Who is drugged and lost his wallet? Who ran out of gas? None of this applies here, surprisingly. With that title, Adiele has seeks to lure readers with a hooker to explore his twelve collection of short stories to explore humanity and its multiple facades.
The short story is often seen as the best training for a writer. Unlike the extensive character and plot development, florid language or time management, which a novelist is expected to work into the story, the short story writer often thrives on brevity with a clear focus on engaging conflict, a concise plot without diversions, an emotional connection, a memorable moment the reader will recall, and an internal logic that makes the story relatable to life and believable to the reader. In the twelve stories, Adiele spreads his dragnet on the length and breadth of our society to distill stories that touch the heart. He enchants the reader with tropes and narratives that make us laugh, yet propel us to reflect on the sordid pictures painted of man.
Adiele has always been fascinated by an insistent urge to create an alternative world of innumerable possibilities within the limits of his existential connections and the vehicle provided by words and imagination for a literary experiment. Thus, he revisits the girl child dichotomy, materialism and social debacles, religious shenanigans, class struggles and political untenability, domestic violence and the porous moral fibre of our contemporary society. The author deploys a simple language, inviting all grades of readers, from post primary school, university students and the general reader, to read. The stories are told by a first person narrator, who provides intimate access to his thoughts, emotions, and experiences in relation to the outside world.
Let’s begin from the middle with the title story “My Encounter with a Prostitute”. The narrator is an academic working on an academic paper, “Vice or Virtue: Humanity and Profession”, which demands he should embark on research that takes him to the prostitute haven of Opebi in Ikeja, Lagos. The prostitute in question stands on six-inch heels and “Her clothes clung tightly to her body, accentuating the seductive outlines of her provocative, sumptuous endowments. Her legs stood out like a well-polished and chiselled piece of furniture. Her skin glittered under the semi-darkness of the night, like the smoothness of the sea. The beauty of her physiognomy would disarm a whole satanic army. She was the mythical mermaid from the depth of the ocean” (p.65). No doubt, Adiele has a way with words, the fine turns of phrase work as a mojo to feed your curiosity in seeking to unravel the nature of his encounter with the prostitute.
Forgive the author if he disappoints you with the detour of the story midway out of a potential sex encounter. Instead of telling the prostitute how much he will offer and where the character will take her to have a good time, he proposes an interview, rather, to which the lady says: “This is new. Are you a secret police agent?” The narrator informs he is a lecturer on a research mission. The interview with the prostitute then unfolds in a dramatic fashion. Cynthia the prostitute turns out to be a university graduate, who took to prostitution to survive.
She is also philosophical, fielding intelligent questions: “…what it takes me to pull my clothes for a stranger is what it takes any government or employer of labour to owe workers for several months’ salaries. Moral depravity has no gradation. Moral degradation is when our leaders oversee the daily strangulation of the masses through economic hardship,watching our economy sink, watching our people die like mosquitoes in the hands of terrorists and bandits, but set up propaganda to defend the ugly trend” (pg. 68). Adiele echoes here: nobody is a saint, from the prostitute to the political office holder. It is a subtle call, using the voice of the prostitute, for society to rise up and regain its essence.
The first story in the collection, “Tribute to the Girl Child”, is an apologia for inclusion and gender balance. Our primordial sentiment privileges the boy child over the girl child. This short story uses a 23-year old, youth corps member posted to a strange land to change the perception of a troubled father with all-female children, including his student, Stacy, that there is no need to take a second wife to bear him male children. Stacy’s father has already sent her, her sisters and mother away when the youth corps member intervenes and succeeds in appealing to man’s reasoning, which leads him to recall his family, leading to Stacy becoming an accomplished surgeon in Canada later in life.
Adiele’s “Who Owns the Bag” interrogates greed in society. No matter how highly placed we are, we tend to throw morality to the dogs when money is involved. Take for instance the road trip to the South East in December when soldiers stop the commercial bus they are travelling with for a stop-and-search and where dollar bills in packs of ten thousand are discovered. Surprisingly, three different men – a middle aged man, a lawyer and a contractor – claim to be the owner. But when the bag is emptied, two incriminating, severed human heads drop on the ground, and the three people claiming ownership of the money all deny ownership of the bag. They are subsequently detained to answer further interrogation. This is what greed can do.
Adiele takes us to the church in “In The Name of God Plc”, where merchantilism has become the name of the game with men of God exploiting the desperation of the congregation to make money for themselves. Ajunwa and Okite attend a vigil organised by a pastor dressed in brown Italian suits, a sky blue shirt and a silk tie.
The two watch as the pastor entices members with promises of overflowing blessings to donate millions of naira. Okite and Ajunwa, impressed by the rain of naira on the pastor, hits upon an idea to open their own church instead of hunting for better jobs, hence Riches Miracle Centre is born, where the rent neigbours to give fake testimonies to draw a crowd to the church. But the Bible burst after shortchanging one of those hired to give fake testimonies.
My Encounter with a Prostitute and Other Stories contains other interesting stories like “The Return of My Grandma”, “What Shall I Tell Akanmi”, “Where is My Wallet”, “The Cheque”, “My Journey to Kirikiri Pison”, “ My Rich Handsome Husband”, The Strange Preacher”, and “Nemesis”. In all these stories, Adiele interrogates aspects of the human condition, inviting us to empathise, criticise our lives found in these tales and go off the beaten tracks in the search for truth and social congruity.
