JJC

There is a character here in JJC called Pattie Dazzle. She is a journalist; she is a radio and television host—not hostess, since we do not have gentleladies, just gentlemen of the press. She is a representative of white-supremacy America. She is much more besides all those. But what could those things that she is or may also be be? That is one of your duties as a reader—to find out. There is a family of six people here in JJC whose collective tears make an ocean so huge, so mighty, and so much like a flood of tsunami proportion that it overruns an international airport in a city called Baltimore in a state called Maryland so badly that it makes takeoff of airplanes impossible! In JJC, Dumo Oruobu has taken the word and the total concept of hyperbole to a whole new level. In dealing with Pattie Dazzle as the Female that she is and whose first name is Pattie and not Dazzle—Dazzle, which she carries along anyway as her father’s name—Dumo is deliberately or inadvertently echoing and reechoing the master of words, William Shakespeare, in his classic question, "What is in a name?" in Romeo and Juliet. There’s Professor Abejide Olanrewaju, from whose initial naivety the novel takes its title as referring to a Johnny Just Come—a new man, Johnny, who has just come to town, but yellows very quickly, becomes dark blue and red, and is nearly falling off the cliff, horrifying both his wife Abimbola and Pattie Dazzle, his interviewer, and whatever else she is or may be as you will or may find out yourself. In JJC, Dumo Oruobu has succeeded in creating a classic. That is what you will find buried in these pages.