Within the entire gamut or canon of Ernest Hemingway’s works – some seven novels, fifty-odd short stories, a play, and several volumes of non-fiction- “The Sun Also Rises”, is something of a curious exception. Published in 1926 while Hemingway was still in his twenties and relatively unknown, it was his first serious attempt at a novel. Yet, in spite of the fact that it was to be followed by such overwhelming commercial successes as “A Farewell to Arms” (1929), “For Whom the Bell Tolls”(1940), “The Old Man and The Sea” (1952), most critics agree that “The Sun Also Rises” is one most wholly satisfying book. Here, Hemingway indelibly fixed the narrative tone for his famous understated ironic prose style.

And here, he also made his first marked forays into an exploration of those themes that were to become his brand-mark as a writer and which were to occupy him throughout his writing career. The pragmatic ideal of grace under pressure, the working out of the Hemingway “code”, the concept of style as a moral and ethical virtue, and the blunt belief or determination that some form of individual heroism was still possible in the increasingly mechanized and bureaucratic world of the twentieth century: these characteristic Hemingway notions deeply informed the structure of “The Sun Also Rises”.

Yet, at the same time, while “The Sun Also Rises” is characteristically Hemingway’s, it is radically different from his typical fiction.

Indeed, it may well be precisely in the area of its differences that it attains its special quality and pertinence as a major American novel. For there are subtleties of tone and meaning in “The Sun Also Rises” which suggest a profound confrontation with the ambiguities of the modern experience than Hemingway was ever to sustain again. “The Sun Also Rises” is a novel about loss. But this, amongst Hemingway’s novels, begins with the loss as a given, as fatal limitation on open possibilities and opportunities.

As in the best of Nick Adam’s stories, “The Sun Also Rises “ is concerned with that moral space which remains for man’s occupancy after necessity has affected its inexorable curtailment on his freedom. And the concentrated passion which gives this novel its tautness of structure and its authority of statement is its exploration of that diminished measure of dignity and endurance which a man may still strive for even while he is a captive in the nets of bleak fatality. It is against this backdrop that we must acknowledge and celebrate the rising of another Sun in Rivers State in Nigeria in the person of His Excellency (Barr.) Ezenwo Nyesom Wike, the Executive Governor of the State.

In particular, this columnist is happy and is celebrating Wike for the memorable inauguration of the Opobo/Nkoro Road. It was indeed a huge celebration as the ancient Kingdom of Opobo in Rivers State witnessed the commissioning of a section of the Ogoni-Andoni-Opobo Unity Road on Saturday, July 3, 2021, about a month ago. For the first time in the history of the 150-year old ancient town, the road has granted unlimited access to the community.

Who says Wike is not a rising sun in Rivers State? This is akin to what Chief James Ibori did in Delta State when he invited then President Olusegun Obasanjo to inaugurate the Bomadi Bridge, the longest in the state, which has made the Ijaw drive to their hinterlands or ancestral homes since their origin, in 2006.

With the inauguration of that road alone, Wike has demonstrated class and elan’ in democratic civil governance. He is undoubtedly not your perfect gentleman. For instance, some of his detractors and fifth columnists are saying that Rivers, a state surrounded by water, has no potable water for the people to drink. They are also saying that Wike talks too much; and does not delegate responsibility to his deputy, Dr. (Mrs.) Ipalibo Harry Banigo, and that he does everything alone. But the fact remains that no governor can please everybody.

Wike is, therefore, no exception. And it has nothing to do with the fact that he is a hero who has turned dangerous proclivities into harmless channels. Go to Rivers State and see that there is a governor on the ground despite the slummy topography which would require you to sand-fill before construction.

When one considers Wike’s emblematic heroic resonance against the backdrop of the gallery of the popular Hemingway heroes – and how difficult it is to refrain from imposing Hemingway’s own photogenic features on those of his heroic characters- the composite image can almost be stereotyped in Nollywood terms.

The Hemingway “hero” is first and foremost a vigorously athletic figure. He is a man who eats and drinks with natural gusto, a generally successful “village boy” who paradoxically, is innocent of lust for power and of money, a man professionally dedicated to a physically oriented metier, a hunter-fisherman-soldier who battles against fate with the native resources of his own skill, endurance, and courage in order to wrest a small victory in a long war which he knows he couldn’t possibly have lost because of his consuming faith in God and his exuding energy.

All these Hemingway’s heroic characters are embedded in Wike. But the development in Rivers State has become an effort in human actuality. Like a typical Hemingway setting, the original background of the battle has affected the final tone.

Wike’s feelings for the condition of his people after eight miserable years of alleged misrule and plundering of state resources by his predecessor drew upon a number of sources: they were partly social, partly political, and perhaps most of all, emotional. Wike saw that Rivers State, hitherto the leading light in civilised comportment as the home to the Garden City in Nigeria, was diminished to a micro-hell where killings and vice-crimes were the established problematic.

Imbued with an implacable passion for his people, Wike shuddered and vowed to redeem his state whose treasury had been looted and rendered prostrate, from the jaws of human sharks intent on emasculating the people to total extinction in their inordinate drive for power and capitalist venturesomeness. He fought relentlessly combing every nook and cranny in the state to drive home his philosophy and programmes. The people who had been left almost breathless like a fish on a dry sandy beach panting loved him and voted overwhelmingly for him.

That was the beginning of the liberation of the state and Wike’s magic wand which earned him the sobriquet, “Mr. Projects” by the Vice President Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, who was then Acting President.

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The then Acting President’s timely quip was just a confirmation of what Senator Godswill Akpabio had said when he visited Rivers state to commission projects just after Wike clocked one year in office as a working governor, not a sitting one. Today, much of the importance of Nyesom Wike as governor of Rivers State does not lie in who he is but in what he represents to the Nigerian imagination.

Of course, Nigerians have had two or three governors who had stolen the heart of the governed in terms of performance. But Wike is one with a difference. Since he won overwhelmingly in the 2015 governorship election and was sworn in as Executive Governor of Rivers State, and repeated that feat in 2019, he has won more awards than all the other governors put together.

It is in Wike that the people of Rivers State have seen for the very first time a governor who is meticulously developing all the nooks and crannies of the state and setting up institutions that will stand the test of time, in a comprehensive and holistic manner.

This is why the aggressors want him out nilly willy. If these trouble makers and confusions are not deluded beyond redemption, these protagonists of the Rivers State crisis must be dismayed that beyond the vast fortunes that they have accumulated over the years, as political jobbers and god-sons of fraudulent social pretenders, they have little or nothing to show in terms of followership in their home state, for all the frenzied manipulations, the willful distortions, and obfuscation. They have little or nothing to show except the blackmail and the lying that has been systematically employed by them to consecrate their desire to malign the governor and to make the state ungovernable for him.

Yet, they have failed to appreciate Edmund Burke’s wise dictum that the most important platoon to a politician is his home base. If they are popular if their boast of overwhelming evidence of supporters in Rivers is anything to go by, why are they on self-exile in Abuja? They have failed to realize that but for a hardworking and accountable governor like Wike, their effort would merely help to prolong the agony of their people.

These so-called Abuja politicians have reaped and are reaping huge dividends from the crisis they have created and from the grief it has brought to their compatriots at home. To consolidate their new prosperity and influence, to remain politically relevant, they have to keep stoking the crisis. But given Wike’s pragmatism and composite mien, their braggadocio is caving into insignificance. Like a typical Hemingway hero, Nyesom Wike knows that however complex the calculus of political action is, in the end, one has to live by one’s own convictions. One must finally march to the beat of one’s own drum. And so, it is the reality in Nigeria as the sun also rises in Rivers State.