A review of Toni Kan’s Nights of the Creaking Bed

In spite of the widely acclaimed offence of immorality that Toni Kan’s Nights of the Creaking Bed purportedly commits, the book indeed reflects the power of confidence that proper narration could exude when it is told with apt words. With the consciousness of what could have been transpiring when a bed suddenly creaks and squeaks in the night, I had had it at the back of my mind when I was picking up the book that I am about to settle down with what might re-enliven the thought I was always having when a lady appears in a scarcely covered top that reveals much of her cleavage and gives a good view of the tiny-tiny dots on the two water melons that cushion her front. Night of the Creaking Bed flings what you are always hypocritically ashamed and timid to say in public in your face before you are through reading its first page. Nights of the Creaking Bed is Toni Kan’s tireless skilled effort at bringing to discourse what is stereotyped to be an all bed-room affair; ditto the lewd words and statements that we can easily identify and evaluate are used to pass the messages in the book across.

As erotic as Nights of the Creaking Bed is, it still does so much with its literary effort at not only regurgitating the affairs that are normally associated with Poverty, Underdevelopment, Immorality, Third-World Superstition, Religion and Extremism; but also narrating the stories as if they are thoughts running in your mind.
Nights of the Creaking Bed is a collection of fourteen independent short stories that share and interpret different themes.

CURSORY RUNDOWNS

Nights of the Creaking Bed:
The only man Andy knows as a person who plays fatherly role to him and his brother, Meze, is Uncle John who never relents in making his mother’s bed creaks whenever he visits their home. Despite the frosty atmosphere Uncle John’s regular visits leave between Andy, Meze, Mama Andy and their neighbours, who are keen to judging her and pelting her with allegation of sleeping with someone else’s husband, Mama Andy takes comfort in the pleasure that the creaking of her bed by Uncle John gives her. Mama Andy’s boat suddenly loses the wind to sail further when Uncle John slumps to death atop her. The day her bed stops creaking and rocking after Uncle John’s death is the moment her death’s clock starts ticking faster until she dies too.

The Passion of Pololo:
Paul’s (Pololo) mysterious and insatiable sexual adventure, that has so much to do with personality-disorder and post-infant-sexual trauma begins when he is confronted with the nakedness of their neighbour performing acrobatic stunts on the stark nude body of his mother when he bursts into his mother’s room after a short tennis game he had with his dad. The memory of his mother’s ‘naked breasts heaving, one hand outstretched in a plea and a finger on her lips urging silence’ makes Pololo to embark on a journey that only him understands. When Pololo can’t solve the mystery his mother’s very nakedness leaves him with from sleeping with numerous girls, he goes back to finding answers by summoning enough courage to have a taste of his mother’s flesh of supple heaving breasts.

My Perfect Life:
Sylvia’s perfect life is distorted and punctured when her past surreptitiously crawls into her present. She has everything working for her as a mother and wife – a car, two children, a fairly handsome husband and a good home. Her visit to her regular shopping mall, Shoprite in VI, turns everything in her perfect life around. Her once-upon-a-time lover, who fate never gives a chance to receive approval for his relationship with Sylvia from Sylvia’s father, because he is a Yoruba man, resurfaces after 20 years. Sylvia can’t help her clitoris from going all wet because she is unable to control the sensation the memory of Seun’s virility causes her immediately she sees him decades after they parts ways in an uncontrollable circumstance. She is unbridled; she wants to have the bite of the masculine power of Seun’s manhood again and feel the soothing pleasure of his semen. She won’t set for herself a boundary as a married woman with two kids; she is ready to feel again the unusual way Seun uses to bring her to climax each time their bed creaks in the past.

God Is Listening:
The innocent cry of a little girl whose maturity stage into womanhood goes through the same turbulence that blithe her life shrills in the reader’s mind; bringing the reader’s mood to empathy.

Angei becomes an unprotected child from external forces that parenting bars out when her parents die in an inexplicable auto accident. She is left with nothing as her father’s brother, Uncle Thomas, swoops on her father’s properties. Her siblings sacrificed their slavery on Uncle Thomas’ farm so that she can be allowed to finish her SSCE. Bright light starts illuminating her dark life when she perceives a great future in the promise her lover, Goddie, who assures her to open her legs for sponsorship through school to study her dream course – accountancy. Unknown to her, Goddie only eggs her on to have what seems impossible with his wife at home – a male child.

God is indeed listening when her mother and father crash to death. The Creator truly isn’t deaf when Goddie dumps Angei because the x-ray shows she is carrying a girl-child. God is even paying attention when Angei uses her virginal to pay her rent to her landlord. God is looking, maybe smiling and just taking note when Angei finally dumps the girl child in a trash can and is afterwards raped by a watchman who exploits her naivety.

Buzz:
His name is Buzuzu, but he is called Buzz. His detective job as a police man is more of a calling to him than a daily-living earner. And as such, he does his work with utmost passion. After the last man that is supposed to help him to join the army falls to gruesome death, Buzz takes it upon himself to unravel lurking puzzles in any murder case. To Buzz, No 7 means two contrary different things; a place of pleasure and horror. It is the night club where he knows what the two succulent breasts of Nana look like, and the spot where he traces the murderer of Nana to when she is assassinated.

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