In parallel stories, a young man in mid-20th century Nigeria struggles to reconcile the oral culture he was born into with the literate culture introduced by European colonialism, and a man in the near future struggles to reconcile the limitations of organic memory with new technology that can provide crystal clear, but not necessarily desirable, evidence of one’s past.
There are a lot of ideas churning in this story: truth vs. fact, fact vs. feeling, the desirability of forgetting vs. perfect recall, and the ways in which cultures change and adapt to new technologies of mind. Thinking about reading and writing as a technology that changes our consciousness, the same way a hypothetical new technology that allows us to record and play back our experiences changes our consciousness, is strange and unsettling: to realize that we have become cyborgs at the age of four or five, our every thought ultimately tied back to the written word, brings me up short; and further imagining the ways that new technology will change our ways of thinking, to the point that a contemporary mind could be completely inexplicable to a mind from just a few decades ago, is somewhat terrifying.