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YObACHi
Child
What an adult sees sitting down, the
child cannot see from the top of an
iroko tree.
The announcer had called my name, Yobachi, as the winner of one of
the most prestigious literary prizes in the United Kingdom. Yobachi. In
my native Igbo, it means Ask God, and that was all my mother did after
she had me: ask God. I signed my work by my first name only and so
no surname was announced along with it. As I took the measured
steps from my seat to the podium in the midst of rapt applause, the
events that had led me here flashed before my eyes in technicolour.
What fascinated me however was that the pictures I expected to see,
those things I termed the landmark events of my life, were not the
images I saw. Rather, it was a different mash of events that might have
been deemed insignificant that now played in my head. I realised as I
took that walk that those events had shaped me more than I would
have ever admitted.
I was the third of three girls born to Igbo parents living in the then
and more desirable to her than us, mere three female children.
I was ten years old when my mother's prayer was finally answered and
she had Afamefuna. In all my ten years, I had never seen my father that
excited about anything. On Afam's naming ceremony, he even
produced his rifle and shot excitedly into the air. My mother named
him Ugonna, but my father insisted on everyone calling him
Afamefuna. And woe betide if you made the mistake of calling him
Afam as most people who went by that name shortened it to. My
father would remind you sternly that he waited for thirteen years for
this child, and he would not be denied the full meaning that the name
carried.
And so, Afam came, and the rest of us became invisible. Afam was the
sun around which my parents revolved. My sisters didn't feel it as
much as I did. The first, Uzoamaka, was just like mother. She had been
apprenticed to a seamstress in Ikoyi and had moved in with her
madam when she turned fourteen and Afam turned one. Father was
only too glad to let her go; he would have one less mouth to feed. I did
not see Uzo again until the time she was getting married two years
later.
Cheluchi was my other sister, and she was very different from Uzo.
Where Uzo conformed to everything mother laid down as the rule,
Cheluchi was rebellious and constantly got into trouble with mother.
She was the one female child my father grudgingly showed some
You see! You went about showing off your body to men in the
barracks, you want to bring pregnancy home with your lack of
modesty abi? Mama thundered, poking my midriff.
But mama, maybe the dress just got smaller and Yobachi didn't
notice ni. This is like giving a dog a bad name to hang Cheluchi
tried to chip in.
A slap silenced her. Will you shut up! She didn't see any of the decent
gowns like the one you are wearing abi?
Cheluchi quickly beat a hasty retreat and stayed out of range of
mother's slaps.
Mother turned back to me as my trembling got worse.
Before you disgrace me, I will show you I have been longer on this
earth. The child that wants to kill the mother will not live to tell the
tale. I will not spare the rod and spoil you. The leftover punishment of
Judas, you will get it today.
With that, she produced the cane she had hidden behind the chair
and descended on me. It was the last time I accompanied Cheluchi to
the barracks. One year later, Cheluchi joined the army as a medical
officer. She told me one of the reasons she joined was so she could
have an excuse to wear trousers without mother being able to stop
her. I was left alone in the house with my parents and Afam.
That was when I took up writing stories to fill the vacuum Cheluchi's
absence created. In those days, the only way we could communicate
was writing letters, and I wrote lengthy letters to her, filling her in on
all the happenings at home. I remember the first reply she sent, along
with a few pictures. She had pierced her earlobe and was wearing tiny
earrings. Her hair was permed and she was wearing her army uniform
combat trousers. Mother had torn every single one of the pictures she
could lay her hands on in anger, screaming akwuna at the top of her
voice as she did. I managed to hide one in the calendar wrapping of
my literature textbook and I would look longingly at it each time I
pretended to study. And then I would write lengthy letters to
Cheluchi describing how I longed to be free.
In all this time, my father was a distant figure, living on the periphery,
only featuring in my life on rare occasions. We lived in the same
house, but I hardly saw him. He had built his house the way traditional
Igbo men did, with the wife and children's quarters separate from his
own quarters- his obi- and we hardly ever went there.
However, there was an enduring memory etched in my
consciousness for a very long time, and it took growing up to break
free from its influence. It was in the period that led up to Uzo's
wedding, and Cheluchi was yet to join the army. Afam was just three,
but as it was typical of little boys of that age, he wanted to walk on his
Girl
The one place I felt some freedom was school. Maybe it was because
it was an all-girls school. We were lucky in my house. My father's
friends who had their boys and girls around the same time had
educated their girls only up to Standard Six (modern day Primary Six)
and then shipped them off to learn a trade and marry. It wasn't
unusual to be married by eighteen. My sister, Uzo, followed this path.
But that wasn't because my father was unwilling; it had more to do
with her own acumen for book things. For Cheluchi, she was
admitted into Methodist Girls School. Mother had made sure it was an
all-girls school. She didn't want her daughters corrupted by any boys.
In those days, secondary education was what most people got and a
man who trained his girls up to secondary school level was ahead of
his time.
My case was a little more interesting. Afam was born around the same
time I sat for my entrance exams. It was a day after he was named that
the letter from the school arrived. I was one of the top ten students
that the government had offered a full scholarship for secondary
education. It was years later I would realise how close I was to not
going to secondary school. Father had been unwilling to spend
the years to come, and a very young one at that. I wrote to Chelu
excitedly about it, and when I read her response, I could hear her
shrieks of excitement jump out from her letter.
I sat for the university entrance exams about a month to my final
exams at Methodist Girls. I remember when alumni of the University
of Ibadan like the great Chinua Achebe and a white man, Uli Beier
came to speak to us about education and life at the university. I put in
my best and began to pray very hard at every devotion about my
university education. I dreamt about being at the university every
waking hour I had. Every time I said those prayers, mother would
smile, as if she knew something I didn't know. I wish I had been raised
differently and had the courage to ask her why she smiled so. Maybe I
would have also summed up the courage to find a way to run away.
One should never look back with regret though. Only thanks, for how
life has turned out, are in order.
A week to my graduation, shortly after my sixteenth birthday, I
returned home from school to a full house. There was a shiny silver
Mercedes car parked in our compound and it made father's Datsun
look very old. I passed the back of the house to avoid the voices I was
hearing. They were coming from father's obi. I saw the signs of heavy
cooking in the backyard as I skipped over the utensils still scattered
and entered mother's quarters through the kitchen.
The eagle has landed! I heard a familiar voice say.
husband is here. He has been in London for the past six years and he is
going to take you with him and you will study in the same university
he went. You should be doing serious thanksgiving, see as God used
one stone to kill three birds for you. What some people twice your age
are praying for, God just gave you like that. Miracle worker. You get
husband, university education plus living in London at once.
I was bewildered by all this. It was too much to take at once. I knew
telling my mother that I hardly knew this man would be stupid. She
would never understand, really. She would remind me she hardly
knew my father when they married and they had been together for
twenty years with four children. I had never felt so helpless in my life.
While everyone around me was joyous and boisterous, ululating as I
changed from my school uniform into the attire already prepared for
me, I was moving in a haze. In those days, we didn't have telephones
everywhere and so I couldn't tell the only person in the world who
would understand the way I felt: Chelu. I felt alone.
A week after our traditional wedding known as the igba nkwu, I was
on the way to London on a British Airways flight with Ugonna, my
husband. I had convinced myself I could live with being his wife. It was
not like I had much of a choice in the matter anyway so I resolved to
make the best of it. I had written Chelu a lengthy letter telling her
everything, but more importantly, telling her how I felt about
everything. Years later, these and all the other letters I wrote to her
would be the main reminders of these feelings.
Ugonna was not a bad looking man. I was dark-skinned, and like my
polar opposite, he was as light-skinned as they came. He spoke Igbo
in a funny manner on the rare occasions that he did. What enamoured
me the most was the way he spoke English. He had soaked in the way
the onyeocha spoke and if you heard only his voice, you would not be
able to tell that it was an Igbo man speaking. I looked forward to
sounding just the way he did after living in London for a few years.
One thing he had not lost was the measured deliberate pace of
speaking that Igbo men possessed, along with our classic guttural
voice to booth. I believed I could make this life work if I put my heart to
it like mother advised me to do. Her words echoed in my head: If the
home is happy, it is the woman. If it is not, the woman is the one. Your
home is a reflection of who you are. And so, the little girl who was
living a regimented life in secondary school a few weeks before
headed for London to be the mother of a house.
Woman
Those first couple of weeks were a blur the regular things that
shocked first timers in London did not occupy a large place in my
memory. From the get go, it was clear to me that Ugonna was in the
same conundrum I found myself in. If he had his way, he would be
with one of his white friends, but his parents had prevailed on him to
come back home to honour the betrothal. Now that we were alone, it
did not take long for the Londoner husband to manifest his disdain
for his wife from home.
He complained about everything. The food was too Nigerian. Why
couldn't I cook it like his friends. My sense of style was local. My English
disgraced him. The pains I felt when we had sex disgusted him. Of
course, it didn't matter that I was a virgin and just sixteen years old. I
was his wife and I couldn't please him. Our marriage quickly devolved
into Ugonna having affairs, eating out and only the occasional sexual
encounters. I attempted to assert myself as his wife and confront him
on his affairs, but my husband never took me seriously. He acted as if I
was a child throwing tantrums. Maybe that was what I was, but I
deserved the dignity of being quarrelled with. That would have made
me feel human and worth something. But even that courtesy, I didn't
get. All he gave me was disdain. I never wrote about this to Chelu. I
didn't want to burden her with my marital troubles. I was sure she had
her hands full with her Hausa in-laws.
As my people would say, my body was full of children. So, in spite of
the sparseness of the sex, I became pregnant in the second month of
our marriage. I had several emotions running through me at the
news. Maybe it was the hormones, but my hands trembled every time
I thought about it. The dominant emotion was awe, that little me
could have life growing inside. Mother was ecstatic when she got my
letter informing her and she even went to Iddo to telephone us. Of
course, Ugonna was not around to speak with her. She prayed some
fire and brimstone prayers, covered me and the baby with the blood
of Jesus and then went on to give me detailed instructions on how to
take care of myself during pregnancy. It actually felt good to hear my
mother's voice. Distance had made the heart grow fonder.
It was in this time that events in faraway Nigeria that would again alter
the trajectory that my life was going on began to unfold.
The war was still raging when I had my first and second children. Biafra
had taken a serious beating and was on the verge of defeat. My father
I did not cry. I tried to, I really, really tried. But the tears refused to come.
I spent the next few days obsessively collecting all her letters to me
and arranging each letter and its response together chronologically.
Of course I was not as organized as Chelu, so I had to search for them.
One by one, I stapled them together and began to read them,
laughing here, giggling there. I wonder what kind of picture I must
have painted to Ugonna in those days. It must have looked to him like
I was losing my mind. He kept away from me and wasn't his usual
obnoxious self. There was one letter in the collection that was not
from Chelu. It was the letter that pained me the most, my offer of
scholarship to the University of Ibadan. Yet, the tears did not come.
It was something else that triggered the tears. I saw in the papers a
few days later that the war was over. If death had shirked its duty for
those few days, the war would not have taken my sister. It was also in
this period I discovered that I was pregnant yet again. I willed the
baby to be a girl. In fact, I prayed to God the way we used to at
devotion back home for the first time in my years in London. It must
have been the news of the pregnancy that gave me renewed resolve
to do something with my life. I had been waiting on Ugonna to make
my university education happen for four years. It was time to take the
bull of my life by the horns myself. I didn't say a word to him. I simply
picked up my typewriter and began writing.
The writing didn't come easy at first. It was very different when I was
simply pouring out my experiences to Chelu. Now that I was trying to
write deliberately, nothing flowed. I spent hours staring at blank
sheets of paper on the typewriter daily. I would write half a page and it
wouldn't sound right. The bin around me got filled with crumpled
paper.
Ugonna consistently taunted me by unfolding the junked writing
and reading them out aloud with an exaggerated Igbo accent. He
would finish by reminding me that I would never be a writer and that
all I was good for was bearing children. He wasn't even sure I could
raise them, he would say. I had learnt by this time to ignore him.
The writing grew in me like the pregnancy I was carrying. The first
trimester was the struggle, the nausea and the inability to write. As I
eased into the second trimester, the pregnancy got easier and the
writing flowed easier. Now, I was producing a beautiful tale and had
even been introduced to a literary agent, Rosabelle. She thought my
story was shaping up fantastically and was certain we would find a
publisher easily when I was done. I missed Chelu dearly in these days,
but writing became my new friend and we were getting closer every
day.
Legend
I almost lost my second Cheluchi. But God was merciful and the
healthcare system in the United Kingdom was superb. I had her one
whole month earlier than scheduled but she survived. It was as if her
survival spurred her mother to be strong like the person she was
named after. I never returned to Ugonna's house after that. I moved
into a council flat with my three children. Rosabelle was my angel and
she helped me secure a job writing for some magazines. The income
was small, but one of the good things about the country was that
once you had work, you could at least feed and have a roof above
your head. I locked Ugonna into a corner of my memory and threw
the key into an abyss. I didn't even bother to try to get any child
support money from him. Not like he was keen on it anyway. I realised
I had lost myself and needed to rediscover who Yobachi was. Writing
helped me find this person over time. Rosabelle didn't put pressure
on me to write a book during those times.
She nudged me only ever so lightly. On Chelu's second birthday, she
brought a gift for the little madam. Before she left, she told me she
had a gift for me too. It was an exact replica of my old typewriter and
she had stuck a note that repeated my sister's words on it. That night, I
cried, finally allowing myself to cry for the loss of that final night in
Ugonna's house. As I rose in the morning, the story danced in my
head already. I began to work my typewriter and by Chelu's next
birthday, the book was done. This time, I got an even bigger present
on my baby's birthday that year- the response to my application for a
place at the University of London came through. Four years later I
would look back as I completed my degree, unsure of where the road
was leading, but determined to enjoy the journey all the way
Yoba, they are waiting for your speech, a pretty lady said to me
gently.
I smiled and adjusted the microphone. First, I would like to thank the
judges who selected my second novel for this award.
@tundeleye