The conception of dream, literary writings teach, has an uncanny component about the depiction of the protagonist in fictions and memoirs of the bildungsroman tradition. The memoir only advances it in a realism distinct from sheer imagination. But the benchmark is invariable: the protagonist must in themself appeal to the reader’s sense of empathy and certain deviant drive towards a memorable end. This is proportionately true of even the autobiographical novel where the fictional narration is a re-enactment of the author’s own indelible experiences. Now to come to Awwal Owolabi’s The Boy Who Had a Dream.
To give a synopsis. The narration revolves around the protagonist’s long-conceived dream of acquiring a university education and the rough road down that alley. It begins with a result failure, and the consequent wait which terminates in a social adaptation which costs the narrator a moral status – at least, by virtue of family expectations. The narrator will later go on leading the life of a typical picaresque character in a bid to survive, practically. That alley becomes a layer of assorted realities, the confrontation of which only destiny can absolve the experiencer. He continues, broken but unbending, himself shuffling between fate and faith. Everything else is a pathetic reel of how he goes from one institution to another where he fulfils his ambition.
The Boy Who Had a Dream is a memoir about the author’s own fraction of the male child’s socio-psychological palaver, if anything. That palpable bit of the universe called society is an inexhaustible fabric of assessment. It has shown that in every area where existence matters, the individual has many confrontations to make, beginning from its littlest circle, the family. This unit may break one with internal strife beyond one’s imagination; or with some inadequacy or elusive privilege(s); still it reserves, in the sense of the flawed human condition, a sense of disillusionment when pathos strikes. Whichever way, the naturalist is right with their theory of an organism being affected by heredity and environment.
This evaluation takes assessment from that view. In fact, it becomes a motif in the story. At strategic intervals, the author’s intersection with folks and friends culminates in an environment where the question of ambition springs to mind. Therefore, the mea culpa factor keeps being mended because he is swift to admit the flaws and hubris that hangs about his origin. Of course, and as the reader will find, his origin is defined just by all factors of socio-cultural affiliation. The author is fully aware of the inescapable, but he vehemently refuses to let his vulnerability relegate him to the façade of an ambition. In other words, dreams grow in the same fashion plants survive in designated environments. Thus does the memoir establish one important Yoruba axiom – by virtue of some literary elements of its presentation: language.
The first is the omi l’èyàn pithy saying. Which literally means humanity is water. But on a deeper level, it means we can spill around and meet our acquaintances anywhere again in the world. Not to retell the story of how the story justifies this claim, a huge portion of this story is foregrounded on the boon from friends and allies. In fact, it is one reason the narrator does not drown in the fatal and disastrous occurrences and circumstances his condition thrusts on him. To turn this over in the reader’s mind, this would be a story that establishes the attributive function of wishes to mutual interdependence. Truly, success has some story of companionship about it. And this is generally true of those who have attained success in areas they are most ambitious about. It happened through the detour of friendship and companionship that no family relationship can ever provide. This mutuality is a miraculous part of every human situation; the angelic alignment we cannot explain and without which we are quite incomplete. There is thus a scientific issue raised in the narration. That is, the experimental basis of luck, chance, and destiny.
The Boy Who Had a Dream would also interpret itself as a socio-political reality. For context, it is the judicious use of that cloak of humanity in its unapologetic empathy. Those who transform their harrowing experiences into useful manuals to understand the foppery of their immediate world tend to become triumphant diplomats. More than half of our resolve in life depends on how we respond to our conditions. And the response as it were is a product of an internalised sense of survival. An irrepressible drive and an unmistakable touchstone of careerist vision. The story then projects something absolutely philosophical about a Yoruboid perception of life as a journey and an allusion to the underscores of religion and man’s hope in a world full of impediment.
Even the titular choice is not without optimum relevance to all that has been underpinned. For instance, the psychological import of resolve points to an allied value system from religion and society which helps the narrator balance intertwined failures without losing his mind. And as such, it is still significant to examine the insanity module of man under such an absurd clime of a stubborn hope. The leitmotif of hunger propels the reader to agree with the author’s libidinal quest for the finest of available chances at life’s far flung sky-like possibilities. In that bout of pathos, the reader realises that food is basic to life to the degree that man acknowledges the ephemerality of the deepest moments of agony. It would be wonderful to also bear in mind that the question of insanity naturally occurs in this memoir as a fine delivery of some masculinist drill of failure and anguish.
To this end, The Boy Who Had a Dream achieves a decorum that absolves the work from sheer recollection of a pain-dented past. It is an enactment of the dregs of life impossible for man to turn away into an oblivious old age. That decorum would be the talking point of its literariness, besides having a mastermind’s acuity of what to be told and at what point and in which context. The tone of the writer is well suited to the flush and gush of emotional vulnerability that sweeps the reader even in their own security of existence. It yokes all human condition – privileged or otherwise – into one sense of destiny. It asserts that dream is the absolute marrow of an existing organism, a truth ultimately scooped from Langston Hughes’s conception of dream in his timeless poem Dreams (you should rather see for yourself).
Kehinde Folorunsho
Kehinde Folorunsho is a literary critic and a scholar of literature. His interest in literature spans poetry, visual arts and translation studies. He made it to the shortlist of the Atẹlẹwọ Prize for his Yoruba translation of Chimamanda's Ngozi Adichie's "We Should All Be Feminists"; shortlisted for the Gbemisola Adeoti Poetry Prize, 2025. As a book reviewer, he has been published in local newspapers. He is the recipient of the 2025 Ken Saro-Wiwa Prize for Book Review.
