A Homage to a Kinsman Who Wept at the Foot of a Palm-tree

By

Obododimma Oha

One kinsman who loved his drinking horn was one day returning from a burial ceremony. He saw a palm-tree that was well pruned and ready to bear fruits or give wine to a tapper. Something came over him and he became downcast. He went to the foot of the tree and started weeping.

Those who saw him thought that he was weeping for the dead person. So, they consoled him, asking him to bear it like a man, and went their way.

But he continued weeping! So, somebody stopped and said to him: "Stop weeping! You are not a woman or a baby. Or were you the one that killed him?" But he answered: "No! I did not kill him! I am crying because of this young palm-tree. Will I be alive when the tapper will come down with its wine? Do I know the lucky fellow who will be there to taste the wine? I may not be lucky and be alive to be there the! That was why I was weeping. I was weeping for my future absent self."

My kinsman said that he was weeping for himself, not that he would be dead, but that he would be deprived of the pleasure and honour of tasting the palm-wine by death. Chei! Onwụ emee arụ! Death must be heartless; in fact, a terrorist. Imagine preventing a man from tasting the frothing palm-wine.

What my weeping kinsman did might look foolish to some and represent the shameful life drunkenness imposes upon us. But at least, he was able to show that, once we are dead, we are dead! We can’t even as dead people remember that we visited this planet, what more a particular country. At death we get reformatted and we lose all our files, it seems. We lose our palm-wine files. We lose our presidency files. We lose our “selves.” No wonder in the Qoheleth’s Rhythm (Ecclesiastes) , it is said the “vanity upon vanity, all is vanity.”

Death is also a leveler: it reduces something to nothing. Every nothing remains nothing. The water in a decaying body flows and joins the water coming from a decaying body of an arch-enemy! Even if we had branded the owner of that other body a terrorist, fluid is fluid and, worse still, we have no power to stop it from fluid from joining fluid. So, you see: we need to sit under the palm-tree and weep for ourselves!

You may say: the weeping was a sign of his foolishness, the foolishness of a drunkard. But does a drunkard not teach us lessons sometimes? Does a drunkard not philosophize? At least, his drinking horn tells a good story that he had lived to see many palm-trees before becoming nothing. Actually, the weeping is for a forthcoming nothingness. When something suddenly becomes nothing, we need to sit down at the foot of a palm-tree and weep.

But does something that would become nothing ever think of it? Does something-nothing ever pause in its arrogance and drunkenness with power? I think that that it is that power-drunkenness that makes it forget  to sit at the foot of the palm-tree to weep for itself.

So, kinsman, you were not tipsy, though you were returning from a burial ceremony where you took a horn of wine or two. You were at the base of the palm-tree philosophizing, philosophizing in tears. Only philosophers understand philosophers.