By
Obododimma
Oha.
The mad fellow is one
of those strange characters in Igbo performances. So, madness has its cultural
usefulness instead of being a problem that the psychiatrist tries to solve?
Just like other “strange” characters like the drunkard, the mad person features
in Igbo discourses as an important figure whose words should not always be
discountenanced. The paradox is like saying that what is considered useless
sometimes has its usefulness. Everything has its relevance; it is a matter of
where and when it comes into play. In that vein, madness is reincorporated into the culture and
its thought, even though nobody likes or wants to be mad; nobody wants to sleep
at the cemetery or marketplace at night. It has to be the plain mad fellow!
Yet, the mad person
is assigned a place in the cultural expression of many African groups. Where
else would it shock us more than in the so-called wise sayings? So, mad people
are wise or allowed to be wizened in cultures where wisdom is reserved for
thoughtful, clear-headed and hallowed individuals? As an utterer of cultural
wisdom, the mad person obviously ascends the ladder of power. It is also a
significant paradox that sanity, even inspiring sanity, is associated with
insanity!
In Igbo folklore,
certain wise sayings are attributed to known and unknown mad people. In many of
these cases, we cannot verify that these mad fellows are the authors of the
witty sayings. The mad people are either dead or have travelled to other
strange places. Goodluck to you if you are following them around to collect
data, especially their sayings! You will have a lot to collect. Moreover, you,
too, might be mistaken for a very crazy fellow!
By the way, is it not
in expression that one’s madness is seen, is played out? Is the person’s
expression not a symptom that psychiatrists and local healers may have to
observe (and often do observe) in order to know what to do, what kind of
madness its is, etc? So, if mad people are said to have said something, that
does not surprise again. The madness is about saying and doing strange things!
In a similar vein,
animals, too, may be taken as authors of wise sayings. This, I believe, partly
connects to mythological time in the culture when animals and other things in
nature were believed to have “talked” and interacted with humans; they were distinguished, as I examined in another blog article, as "talking animals" that should not be killed or eaten. Even today in the African world, there
is still that understanding that the world of humans and that of spirits are
interwoven. A spirit may need to assuaged if it is angry with a person and so
has caused his or her headache!
Generally, mad
fellows implicitly become sages with the wise sayings attributed to them. One
mad fellow in those days was presented as a sage of life, who uttered memorable
things about dying and why it is not “wise” to cry when people die. He was said
to have said: “If I exhaust all my tears crying for this dead person, which
tears would I shed for myself when I die?” As we laugh and think about the
rhetorical question, we are surprised that even mad people know something
called death and are bothered about their own dying. That mad man was seen
crying seriously and then stopped suddenly. Somebody prompted his wise answer
by asking him, “Chiejinoonu, why did you stop crying when everyone else is
crying? That he stopped crying was
because he was thinking about death and the tears he was wasting! When we cry
or hold vigils when people die, we are just wasting our time! Although it
sounds humorous that he was thinking of crying for a future dead self, he makes
a strong point about the futility of shedding tears, since all of us would have
the same experience of dying.
Another mad fellow,
Aputazia, who was known for collecting rusted old cutlasses, hanging them on
himself or throwing them at people, and who hardly gave way to motorists but
walked at the white dividing line separating lane from lane, is often cited as
belching and saying that whenever one wakes up, that becomes the person’s
morning. So, if one sleep and wakes up at 4:00PM, that late hour is the fellows
morning. If you greet people, “Good morning” at 4:00PM, so they won’t laugh at
you or think you are that fictional character in who woke up when America was
no longer under British rule, sneezed at a newsstand and said, “God bless the queen” and was almost lynched!Literally,
Aputazia uttered what indicated that he was really mad.
But Aputazia was
talking about a figurative morning. He was talking about coming to awareness or
consciousness. Whenever we choose to wake up, that becomes our morning and we
can join Aputazia in inaugurating our being part of this world. Indeed, mad
fellows that are so presented as wise people is one way of challenging us (who
claim to be sane and wise) that wisdom cannot be contained in one pot that
tortoise the trickster is carrying. If mad people can utter wise things, too,
we need to humble ourselves in our efforts to contribute to knowledge building.
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