Tag: Enugu

By C.V.C Ozoaniamalu

Enugu. 042. Ugwuonyeama. New Haven. Abakpa. Names that resurrect the events of yesterday, of the things that would not be anymore. Indelible thoughts, pronunciations that are still stiff, inelegant yet appreciating. Writing this makes me feel stupidly emotional and happy at the same time.

I remember when I first came here. In the early Christmas season of 2019. I was in my early twenties and Obeleagu was in his early thirties. We were a fresh couple, fresh in many ways, green in the best possible sense, and secured that the future would remain as we imagined it. Our traditional wedding had just been concluded in my hometown in Boki Local Government of Cross River State. It was love at first hearing, not at sight, a phrase I had coined myself to explain that I first fell for his name and not the person; even without knowing the meaning, the name sounded so funny. When he told me that it meant, “The Little Lion”, I was some kind of confused: why did his parents, after beholding such a huge, broad shouldered, tall and aesthetically-carved face of a man choose to name him a “Small Lion”? Perhaps , he had none of these features when he was born.

Months later I met his father, now my father in-law (Papa).

Papa indeed was the bigger lion. He was everything my husband was and more. At his age of almost 69, he was standing the same height as my husband. He spoke rapidly, with a hoarse voice and had the same quick temper as Obeleagu. One could hardly differentiate when he was ranting or when he was talking calmly—the cadences are all the same. To crown it all, his name is Agu. This made my husband’s name “Obele-Agu, Agu” and now his only friend had shortened it to ‘O.B.A’. But teasingly, I would call him “Nnukwu-Agu”, especially when money was involved, and then Obeleagu when he annoyed me.

Becoming Mrs Obeleagu-Agu came with its uncertainties. Unlike the many stories I had heard of the risk of marrying outside my ancestral home, the fear of adaptation to a new culture, a new people, and the uncertainties of acceptance into a new family, made mine seem like an exception. That is not to say that my marriage to Obeleagu was one without difficulties, a rose without thorns. Of course, it was not. I would be the flagbearer of any eerie little cult of patented young liars if I even think so, not even talk about it.

We had our moments of doubt, our moments of despair and anger, but like a child in love with hiking, we waited for the harmattan on rolling hills.

Obeleagu and I did not agree on many things. I was the gregarious one while he was the quiet one. He never went to parties and had fewer friends. He kept his emotions in check and was always expressionless. He was interested only in his work, his family and me. He played West Life when in his elements and insisted we play Osadebe when we made love instead of blues. He had a fatalism for flying and would escort me to the airport while he drove back to meet me in Lagos. There was an old-fashioned quality about him that I loved and hated at the same time. He loved to wear natives to every event, but only had to wear jeans because I insisted.

In the political sphere, he believed classism could only be curtailed by the government’s ownership of all properties, while Papa and I always advocated that private ownership follows nature. In one of those our heated arguments during Christmas reunions at Mgbagbu-Owa, Papa would no longer take to sitting but would stand, his voice filling the room and his hands gesticulating in support of his argument. He would lecture, “Man not only should possess the fruits of the earth, but also the very soil, since from the produce of the earth he has to lay by provision for the future. Man’s needs do not die out, but forever recur; although satisfied today, they demand fresh supplies for tomorrow. Nature accordingly must have given to a man a source that is stable and remaining with him always, from which he might draw continual supplies.”

Then I would chip in, supporting Papa, “Needless to say that man precedes the State, and possesses, prior to the formation of any State, the right of providing for the substance of his body”.

My mother-in-law, who always joined the supposed winning team, would scream “Oh yes, ride on” from her bedroom, and a deep ineffable pride would engulf me, knowing fully well that Obeleagu would hold that against me later. Such that when I asked him for something afterwards, he would half-jokingly tell me to go ask my father-in-law and mother-in-law.

As an only child of my parents who had come to embrace the Agu’s as my home and siblings, I noticed that there was also a kind of subtle uniqueness of each of my husband’s siblings, a custom peculiar to every home, and as my husband would always describe it, though of the same blood, but not of the same Chi, a phrase I may not strongly agree with. Because I had come to the belief that all siblings do not have the same parents. Allow me to explain.

Let us start with my husband and Omalinze, his brother, the first two of their kind who Papa and Mama had when they were almost our age, I guess. Both inexperienced in child upbringing, like many young parents, were placing their hands on a lot of options. As I gathered from Obeleagu, Mama and Papa were very strict parents. There were a lot of rules, and breaking any came with severe punishment. My husband always told stories of how he had gotten the beating of his life after a neighbour had visited them at night to report to his father that he was amongst the boys who had broken the windscreen of his Volkswagen while playing football in the street; of how Omalinze had bought eggs with the money given to them by a relative and how Papa who would rant and rant that it was an act of greed and would trigger stealing, and had beaten him instead of Omalinze on the ground that he should have guided him better as an older person.

These stories and a lot more were, in a way, building two different people. My husband, who, as a child, had assumed the role of a second parent, had become the man who looked out for his siblings and their well-being, the one who, though emotionally, screamed when things were not done the right way. That rigid, stick-to-the-rule, and non-philandering teetotaler.

Omalinze, on the other hand, had grown to become the carefree spender-uncle everyone would like to visit. He obeyed his own rules and fears no one. He was a man who only thought of today, as he believed tomorrow would speak for itself. Papa called him “The wolf amongst lambs,” while Mama would always stick to his side while reassuring Papa that he would change.

Then came Amalu, the last of their kind. who was born fourteen years after Omalinze, that is to say, that he met a different version of their parents, unlike his brothers. A different version, both in physical appearance and emotions. This explains why he insisted that the older pictures of their parents be used for their 25th Wedding Anniversary celebration rather than the younger pictures of them, as required by my husband and Omalinze, as those were the parents he could relate to. My husband mentioned how surprising it was to see that the things which were a big issue to Papa and Mama became not so much an issue during the early days of Amalu. “He was not police maned like the rest of us. He got the love, and that is why he had so much love to give. They allowed him to cry in situations where they confronted us with “Be a man”. He had the best relationship with our parents as he stayed longer with them than us all. He is the one who remembers everyone’s birthday, even those of our grandparents. He cries at every discomfort of my parents or ours. He never buys his clothes even when he has the money to, because he knows the ones before him would get it for him. He got a pattern of treatment different from everyone else because Mama and Papa now know better than they knew years back.”

That explained why he had mourned so much after the accident at Milikien Hills, which took the lives of Papa, Mama, Omalinze and my husband. The tragedies of yesterday.

Having had no child with Obeleagu, I left Nigeria six months later to cure myself of grief. It is six years now, and Amalu and I still extend our littlest pleasantries and kindness. Coming to Nigeria, on his invitation, to stand in as his parents and siblings at his convocation, resurrects the events of yesterday.

Amalu is family and will forever be.

To the loved ones who went before us, cheers.

There is something about today that is yet to settle in with you. Something that felt like someone invisible yet very near was watching you.

The first time you had this feeling was at your boarding school at Ikot-Ekpene when a JSS 2 boy who stayed a bunk away from yours died. You’ve kept awake all night as rumours continued to spread of his visit to Akubue Paschal, a classmate of yours who had fallen sick shortly afterwards and who was said to have punished him some weeks before his death. But you’ve never punished anyone. Would he attack you for being there without saving him, for being a coward in the face of injustice? You felt the pain that followed the belt on the boy’s body and his eyes meeting yours calling for help, but you had looked away and went another direction just to avoid making enemies with Paschal.

“You have no enemies, you say. Alas, the boast is poor. He who has mingled in the frail of duty must indeed have made foes. If you have none, little is the work you have done. You hit no traitor on the hip…you poured no cup from perjured lips, You’ve been a COWARD”

This poem, whose author you have forgotten tormented you. After some days the feeling disappeared.

The feeling came again in 2020 at Umusiome Hospital, towards the end of the days of COVID-19. You had thought the feeling came with the unfamiliar smell of the hospital…, ‘No, that’s not the word’, it was not an unfamiliar smell as you know this smell comes with some hospitals and that was not the first time you slept over or looked after someone in a hospital that smelled that way. Debunked, you began to think it was the incense burnt by the other patient, a short unpleasant man, with hands so short that it looked like they were pegged to his arms. This incense does not have the familiar scent of the one burnt by the Priest at SS. John & Paul (Iba Pope, Awada, Onitsha) during the Sunday benedictions or Holy Mass. When your brother was moved to another ward weeks later after your complaint, the feeling never went away, but you woke up one day feeling like it was never there, it’s gone.

But these were years back. You’ve become an adult now, with malnourished strands of beards gathering at your lower jaw. You thought of going to Kachi’s place to spend the night. How much you’ve missed him, you told yourself – a ritual to emasculate your ego, but in actual sense, you were looking for a means to run away from your fears. It was not the weekend yet, it was still Wednesday and you would have Jurisprudence class the next day. The plan was out of the box.

You live off campus, in a hostel called Woodland without the woods, just a stone’s throw from the school gate. The hostel was so quiet that you could hear the jiggling sounds of the onions being splashed fiercely by Obinna into the sizzling oils from his kitchen at the far end. You could have gone to knock at his place to start up a discussion but you dread talking to the fellow housemates as you are keen on the thing “Privacy”. His name you’ve learnt from other boys when they scream at him to pass the ball in their monkey-post football marches downstairs. He always looked at you in a certain way, the way that suggests that he wants to be your friend, or rather, that says “I know what you are”, so you avoided him more.

“Let me go to night class”, you said out loud. At least it is the only place that registers little human interaction during the night. In the bathroom, baring your shy nakedness to the midnight blackness, you felt a hand run across the line of your spine. You jolted up almost immediately, the soap falling at a distance, you looked back in shock to see who it was, but saw no one. You ran your hands through your body, cold rashes hit the softness of your palm.

“A mam na onye nche m no nso (I know that my redeemer liveth)”, your voice rang, a song you have learned to sing over the years to assure yourself of the presence of God. You quickly checked your phone, it reads 8:00 pm. It was time. Time to speak with Okenna, a friend who has been fighting cancer for the past few months. 8:00 pm has become a ritual you both have formed over the months. The past week, he has always been the first to call, and with each day, his voice became weaker, he laughed less and only listened to you talk and talk. Each call leaves you with tears, each call breaks you. You wondered why he had not called this evening and decided to clean up and call him.

Opening the bathroom, there he sat, on your bed. “Jesus!”, you screamed, cleaning your eyes to clear off your hallucination but he did not vanish. You pinched yourself and you felt the pain. It’s no child’s play.

“Onye?”, your voice asked, shaking, trembling, and panting audibly. He turned, smiled at you and vanished.

Hours later, you woke up at the Health Center at Umueze, a pack of injections stuffed into your veins, with Obinna your neighbor seated beside you.

“I know you saw something, I heard you ask ‘Onye’ before the loud scr..ea..m” He stuttered and stopped as if he realized it was not the best time. “You have got some missed calls from different people, but the name Kachi recurs and I have told…”

“Help me dial Kachi?”, You said, cutting him short.

The number at the other end rang for a while and then a familiar voice came up “Nnam ndo, I guess you’ve heard….”

“Tell me nothing has happened to Okenna”

“He passed…”

You went quiet for some minutes before letting out a loud shout and falling from the bed, you opened your eyes, it was your room at Ikoyi, Lagos. It was 2025 and you are late to CDS thumb printing. Just a dream.

Christmas seems to come with different feelings for different people, and these feelings change at each stage of life. I hated Christmas and anything that reminded me of it.

“Felix navidad, Felix navidad 🎶🎶”, Onwudinjo sang, but kept mute and shrank at the sight of me. I had warned him about singing of Christmas rhymes in the house or attending Christmas parties. Its Fifteen years now, yet the trauma never left me. I had once beaten Onwudinjo severely for leading a troop of children around on Christmas carols.

“I wouldn’t work all day long to get you mess up on ephemeral joys of Christmas, you should be studying “ , I would rant and rant, basing my anger on the need for him to study ahead during Christmas breaks, rather than accepting that I don’t like the idea of Christmas.

At childhood, Christmas was a source of extravagant joy, but things have changed in recent times, and now Christmas became for me, the harbinger of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (that was what Dr. Ifee said I should call it). I still remember what childhood felt like those days in the little yet populated suburbs of Onitsha, in Anambra. The large long compound, highly fenced as though there were reasonable valuables buried therein, with reddish sands, referred in Igbo as “Aja upa”, which held the foundation of the old faintly painted eight rooms that housed the big eight families that migrated from different Biafran states. The circumstantial communal sharing of things was both hilarious and annoying. Hilarious, when it came to the absence of boredom, of exchanging the biggest gist of a tenant’s public secret, or of extending littlest but meaningful kindness: like the borrowing of certain cooking utensils or condiments. Annoyance only came, richly dressed, where issues of the failure of a particular tenant to clean the toilet arose, or where he or she cleaned without so much attention, or where the toilet was not properly flushed, or where a particular tenant had refused to pay light bills, or had beaten another’s child for an alleged disrespect. These and lots more became a source of joy and distraction.

Unfortunately, my sweet beautiful ideas of Christmas changed in 2007. It was a revered ritual for the male head of each of the eight families that lived in our red earthed compound to break kola two days before the eve of Christmas. This kola breaking was followed by a party which lasted through the night.

The breaking of the kola was always done at the center of the compound. Miss Olaedo, a single lady who occupied the first room was excluded from the kola activity.

During this morning ritual of breaking kola, Papa Udenya, the tall, full-haired Enugwu Ukwu man, who wore black dye to hide his aging grey hair, always arrived first. His room smelled of different things at different days: sometimes, it smelled of old dusty newspapers which had not been opened for years, or of a rusty old radio placed on top of a TV set that had not been played for years, or of snuff or his hair dye. A great comedian who would always tease Mr. Enyi of his timidity.

Mr. Enyi, a brief happy man from Ebonyi State, who stayed with his son, Anene, at the fourth room, had never sat on a chair during such gathering, for he rather preferred folding his legs and balancing his body weight on his legs, as the Muslims would do. Rumors had it that he was converted to Islam during his stay at the North but had denounced his faith during the war, when Sabon Gari massacre in Kano claimed the lives of his wife and other four children leaving only Anene.

There was Mr Igwe who stayed in the last room, who always arrived from the village to spend the last six months with his second family in Onitsha, making it a cycle for the year, having spent the other six months with the first wife in the Village.

Then, Ikeokwu, the occupier of third room had this air of impatience, even in showing his emotions. He was very huge and carried sarcasm everywhere he went, and always in search of whom to spit it on. His Ihiala dialect was very significantly different from those of other Anambrarians I know. A normal Njikoka or Dunukofia man would translate “I don’t know” as “Amaro m”, this however, is different from what Ikeokwu would say. He would always argue that “Amania m” sounds better than “Amaro m”. Everyone feared his spoken words because it came out always well garnished with sarcasm.

There was also the Imo state man, nicknamed “Super Dede”, who enjoyed playing the tracks of Osita Osadebe and Emeka Morocco Nwammaduka in the wee hours of Sunday mornings. His room was the most decorated with a lot of old and new date calendars that hung on every corner. There were also calendars of boxing men and footballers with their names and achievement written below each picture. It was where everyone went to check which day was Eke, Orie, Afo or Nkwo.

The man who occupied the fifth room was an Issele-Uku man, an Igbo tribe whose geographical location had placed them with the Deltans, whose name I know not but who was referred by all as “Oga Delta”. Aloof he was from the others probably because he was disabled and couldn’t walk well, but this disability never limited his generosity to myself and Udoka. There was this certain kind of likeness he had towards us. He had always expressed his happy emotions during the Kola ceremony. He would drink and talk and laugh to the amusement of all.

So that year’s Christmas was just like every other that had come before it. The kola ceremony which initiated the end of the year’s party had started. I could remember it was Osita Osadebe’s song that was been played by Okezie, a boy whom had been invited from Delta by “Oga Delta” to give us the latest jams.

People danced and jubilated. There were numerous foods and drinks. I had gone to lay my younger brother, Udoka, who had fallen asleep near Mama who was at that time pregnant with her last child and the Doctor had given her an expectancy date of 18th December, which had passed by.

I remembered coming out and joining my age mates to dance and dance and dance. We danced and jubilated till it got darker. As soon as the elders began to move into their rooms, Okezie changed the genre of the song from those traditional classicals to hip hop. I had removed my foot wears to give my dance steps an energetic turnaround when the fierce sound came. Much people didn’t notice the sound because of the volume of the music. I touched Odira, the boy who stayed at the next compound, to confirm if he heard the sound.

“It’s just a banger”, he assured me, as we continued in our mini night party.

A faint voice was shouting from what seemed to be a distant place, it was the voice of a woman, the words were incoherent and fear gripped me. Maybe my mom had gone into labour, I thought. I ran inside and saw Udoka playing with Papa inside the room, while Mama lay on the bed enjoying their drama. Satisfied, I ran back to continue with the other children in the party.

The voice came again, it was no longer faint, but this time, it was not the voice of a woman, it was the voice of a legion, their feet matching fast like those of foot soldiers, a battalion of them. They seemed to be running away from danger, the kind of sound I heard while watching American movies of zombies taking over a city and people running as fast as possible, trying to save their lives.

“Chim ohhh” Okezie shouted, pulling the speaker to make way as he ran out of the compound. The voices shouted “Fire, fire, fire”. I could now feel the smokes. The fire was near already. Everybody was running out of the compound. I stood still, unsure of what to do. We had heard stories about fire explosions in certain other places but never in the suburbs. Papa was the first to come out carrying Udoka, then followed by my mom. The whole compound was already deserted. As we were about to leave, the fire had blocked the gate and the only option was to jump through the fence to the backyard. The fence was very high; I still can’t fathom where Papa got his strength that day. Papa helped me climb through. It was difficult to carry mum over but we tried till it worked, Udoka came last as I helped him down. I looked through the opening of the fence, the fire had taken down the first room and ours, it was heading for the third. The harmattan helped it grow faster and faster. Dad was about to jump when he heard a noise coming from the fifth room. I already knew it was Oga Delta, oh poor soul, he can’t even walk. He had crawled out of his room and was shouting my Dad’s name to help him.

Dad had ran back immediately and carried Oga Delta, placed him on the fence so I could help him down. I was about to extend my hands to him when mother shouted “The baby, the baby is here”.

Confusion and fear gripped me. Why now? I cried. I perceived something like fuel and a certain kind of heat from a burning furnace ripping off my shirt and the voice of Oga Delta in agony. Someone pulled me into the huge gutter and I hit my head on a metal. That was the last thing I remembered.

Six months after, I had woken up from a coma only to learn that Papa and Udoka were dead, Oga Delta and many others didn’t survive the explosion; God bless their souls.

Mama had some life in her and in her pain, she saved all her energy to give life to her new child but passed away after giving birth and naming her new son “Onwudinjo”, she would always be my hero.

Now, I feel bad that I had stopped Onwudinjo from having a beautiful taste of Christmas. I know I shouldn’t do this, for God had kept us flourishing these years and our story need not follow the traditional ark. I would make this Christmas an amazing one.

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imaginations” – Mary Oliver.

Merry Christmas, my gorgeous audience.