Against the Odds

Against the Odds by Dr. Ben Igwe won the 2010 ANA/NDDC/Ken Saro-Wiwa prize for fiction. In the words of the Judges:

“Ben Igwe’s Against the Odds … is a classic in which Igwe deftly uses irony, suspense, description and diction to underscore the importance of love, peace, discipline and tolerance in interpersonal relationships cutting across race, gender, religion and groups.”

Undaunted by hardship, a determined widow, Uridiya, arranges a wife of her choice for her western- educated only son. Little does she know that her son, Jamike, had fallen in love and married a foreigner against her wishes and the expectations of his village. In a show of love, loyalty and commitment he rejects the arranged wife to the disappointment of his mother and the community. Can his defiance succeed against all odds? Set in an Igbo village in Eastern Nigeria from the late 1950’s to early 1970’s and in the United States in the early 1970’s, the author sympathetically handles the powerlessness of the widow in rural African societies and addresses with candor and sensitivity the problems of race, human sexuality, cultural disengagement and the role of love in blurring the “color line”.