By
Obododimma
Oha
In those days
when my late father was counselling me,
I thought the old man was disturbing my life. Now that I have grown old and
have got my own headaches, I have seen the wisdom of his words. I wish I could
reach him if only to ask him to come back and disturb my life till daybreak! We
do not know the value of what we have until we have lost that thing. Sad. Very
sad.
My late
father hardly writes or sends a wire (as telegram was known in his village when
he was alive). How can he stay for such a long time without writing? It is
possible that he has forgotten that he was once here, and even had a son called
“Obododimma.” Memory loss is common with old people, we know. But that of death
must be total! Why and how can I be a total stranger to him now? It is terrible
to forget, especially forgetting beloved ones. One would have loved to listen
to his croaky voice and his choice of words in his letters, to search for and
find him in his letters, to scout for intimacy in the way he usually began
those letters, asking after one’s
wellbeing “which is important to me.” But one cannot even see the letter,
before asking language in it where my father is resting in an obi!
Whenever he
wrote letters to me, he tried to put himself in those. The words were the means
of searching for his presence. There were words
he was fond of using, which, it seemed, he tried to make sure that he used in each letter. “Condition”
was one of them, and that word kept company with “health;” so, there was “condition
of health.” The “condition” should not be that “bad roads” or “lecturers
on strike.” Although these were important issues, too, my late father
thought that the most important and which served as an effective summary, was
that of health. So, “How about your
present condition of health which is very important to me?” If he did not have
to drive away that impudent housefly with his fly-whisk, he would add: “I hope
you are swimming in the ocean of happiness, just as we are here today!”Oh, I
miss those letters and “present condition of health” and “ocean of happiness!” I miss them greatly. I miss my
hoary-haired father!
Our village
folks put it philosophically in a song:
ọ laba obodo ahụdebe!
(“He has gone
to the land of See-no-more”! That was
scary! See-no-more! So, there was
such a place?
But if that
is the sentence waiting for all of
us, life must be complex and greater than we describe or speculate about it in
this world. In other worlds, is life like our life, predictable, mortal, brief,
flesh-and-blood, stuck in twoness, and so on? In other words, is life in other
worlds that cheap like ours? So cheap that one could lose it anytime?
Anyway, my
concern here now is that my father’s words are no longer disturbing my life and I so much want it to. How briefer
still the life of language of the counselling!Even the morning drizzle seems
longer. How I wish I could get hold of that voice and take it out of that
vanishing corpse! How I wish I could rescue it and let it keep talking till
daybreak and talking over and over again like an audio that cannot leave a
point. But that counselling voice has escaped with the man and I am here all on
my own. The roads that meet at an orita have to continue on their way later,
leaving the orita and company behind.
O laba obodo ahụdebe! That voice has vanished, to be
heard here no more. Only heard in imagination. But it is gone. It is no longer
“disturbing” my exuberant life.
And what was
that “disturbance” all about? It was about the future, my future. It was about
being serious with one’s life and taking stock. It was about planning one’s
life and learning from life. In other words, he was catering for my interest; he
wanted me to be good and to reap the fruits of goodness.
It seems
there is an expiry date for certain kinds of discourse. Try what you may, you
would not get that discourse again. Worse still, you cannot reach the source;
even the audience has become a mere fiction. And so, that written mode, in
which the spoken form of the counsel got transformed into permanence, helps the
fossilization of the experience.
It all means
that I have to realise that I have collected
the baton in the relay race and have
stepped into the role of my father. I have become his continuation and must not
be “the weak link in the chain.”
It is my turn
to pick up the discourse and not let it become fiction. It is my turn to
counsel and write letters, burying myself in those words. It is my turn to write letters and to ask about “present condition
of health” and “ocean of happiness.” It
is my turn to remember that my late father
tried to counsel me whenever he got the opportunity, and would not mind
if this counselling was the major meal of the day. Now I have to hunger for his
presence, to counsel me about
counselling.
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