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by Clarius Ugwuoha

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a people's history of the world

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Nanka, NIGERIA -

Clarius Ugwuoha

I begin to marvel at these mystical powers when I am treated to a scene I can never forget:

I have known him as a child, a chartered libertine whose world is full of bottles and skirts. But this is the mistake he has made -- he has taken Nwogwugwu the deity to protect him in Calabar from where he has just returned, taken seriously ill, after four years sojourn. Dada, for by that he goes, has, however found succour in a Pentecostal church and neglected his manners by his disembodied host. Thus it is told.

The days eat him, till he is wafer-thin and the ribs are so free, you have the urge to count them. I marvel at how, thickset, he has suddenly vaporized into this gory aspect, liquid fierce eyes glinting far in his head. A thin cord separates him from the dead.

I see him enveloped by wisps of incense smoke, by candlelight and herbs; his bony body a cream of so many effusions. Intermittently, he throws up with so much force the intestines seem to want to disgorge. The legs are swollen -- and other signs of full blown AIDS.

But I am intrigued by the fact that it is actually Nwogwugwu who has stricken the victim. I expected him to drop dead of a sudden. But he holds up, seemingly unbowed for many more days than I have thought possible. In that dreadful house of uncanny rituals, cries and many tears, he finally gives up ...

Everyone -- despite grief -- heaves a sigh of relief that it is at least something explicable and not some abstract ailment the jealous whites use to scare Africans from healthy procreation.

I have the urge to scream.

This viscosity of thought, this rarefied height of omen and superstition, is suffocating. Not to speak is mere conspiracy with the forces of ignorance and darkness that imprison Nanka.

I risk complete ostracism. But I must speak. Quite remarkable is that this is the very first time I would see a full-blown case, and I can so effortlessly characterize it. I feel a sense of complete demystification. Here is the most dreaded affliction on earth, loathed by many who love life. But here in our very midst it sits. It is familiar as a person. It is in fact the man next door and not that distant ogre that only?stalks the Western world looking gaunt and as miserable as hell itself.

I must have to speak out. Silence, especially when loud, is the most cowardly way of self-expression!

---

TOMORROW

You may have admired the tenacity of the raindrop
That found its target from the verge of the sky;
Lion is fierce, Eagle is swift;
The tortoise does not regard his shell as a burden,
The Iron never dreads the heat of the forge.

My heart palpitates as if a drum. I listen to its beats and watch its grief-impregnated secretions as I await the break of day.

Here is home. Survival creates new challenges. I look around the rooms.There is something in them that seems to strike at the wrong cord deep within me. The variety in changing environment palls on me and I am confronted by grave realities.

My wife, Chinyeaka, sits up late at night, a woman of faith and power. But it seems she is bowed, bowed by the thick darkness and the arrow of lamps which pierces it. At Lagos, our apartment at night is usually radiant with weak stray light from that of the bigshots around; and in the day, there are places one can go to fight off boredom even when the pay is not forthcoming -- this staves off the deep hunger within the soul. The advantages of the city, as I think over these, become more apparent now, its gains more pronounced than before.

I begin to think differently, to wonder at the wisdom in leaving Lagos. But I am consoled that circumstances -- what else? -- took that decision for me. Aren't there times in our lives when things appear to be happening so fast, when we seem to be in the vice grip of destiny's forceps, in circumstances we have very little control over? Aren't there times when we are unable to gasp for breath due to the spasm of activities and when we seem to be in a perpetual state of flux? I am racked by it, this sedimentation of emotion, alloy of grief and pain , shock and scar.

Most pathetic is Chinyeaka, my wife, whose mien has become unpredictable, a strange amalgam of despair, hope and hilarity. She oscillates among these and would sometimes radiate with a sandy smile and a vacuous aspect. I would get upset as the tears bleed her eyes, chide her with a voice I search for and which I try to make bold. She misses the city really: Iya Olode's hair saloon and its mentality, the gossips around it, woven into the early morning chorus of street-hawkers, the babel of form and will; musical beats, billboards that pronounce louder than words ...

Now, in their place, semi-cultural aesthetics, dirty angry skies, their dapple, at dawn, of cattle egrets and orange weaver birds; swamps and lush trees. And Chinyeaka, her mind burdened, her eyes overcast, has never come to appreciate these. I wonder in her pensive silence this night if those eyes will ever grow equal to the picturesque scenery that is Nanka countryside. Someday, maybe, since time has its own miracles.

She misses the city -- one can see it in her big toe, which shakes poignantly as to the tune of grief -- has actually opposed my decision to leave Lagos, but docile and submissive, a Catholic woman who has come to take her religious callings seriously in the wake of our travails, she has given in at long last.

She cannot look me in the face. Her face is averted, her look dry like a seedless season. Beside her the children are all asleep: Nnenne, the ten year old girl, whom I have named after my deceased youn ger sibling; Uchechi, the boy of eight, looking gaunt and far below his years, and Steven the youngest. They are all asleep. I can read their confusion, can vicariouly live their nostalgia. This sudden change from one environment to another and losing one set to friends to find another.

I remember that on arrival in Nanka, they have looked lost staring at waves of strange faces which stared too at them. Steven, the youngest, has burst into tears.

"When are we going back to Lagos?"

"We are here to stay." But when that seems to distress him, I add "Everything hinges on tomorrow. Stop crying."

He obeys instinctively. I have not failed in that aspect. My voice commands so much respect that they -- Chinyeaka inclusive -- obey my breath.

So much depends on tomorrow that the tension around it creaks like the hinges of a rusty door. And I think hard, think up things I can do when the curtain of darkness lifts to usher in my cast for the new drama of life, things I can do to make Nanka our own favourite city, where everyone will like to go and stay. I am ready for all the challenges. The tortoise does not regard his shell as a burden, the iron never dreads the heat of the forge!

I will do my best to enlighten the people, about health pandemics, about the foolery in laying hectares of land to waste, these boundless potentialities that can give life to a new craft and art all Nanka's. I will teach them their rights and powers and the ignominy in theft, even of properties in our trust that belong to the state. I will teach them that ill-gotten wealth makes us poorer in the by and by and brings us to grief. Nwajeihu, my friend, who has made it fraudulently is today, Her Majesty's guest. I can feel his pain . It is palpable as true dawn crows the?early cock.

Chinyeaka, Chinyeaka, my pearl, when I look at you, your eyes heavy as with pain, I remember the Nanka woman who does not know of liberation. She, ragged, is tied to childbirth, to the barren soil that takes her strength of a morning; and her husband there, always making saves to evaporate to the city where there is everything; saving every coin to make it to the city forgetting that if these owners of the city did not take pride in their own land, no one would probably be there after all.

I promise you, Chinyeaka, I promise that you will be the shinning pearl among these women. You will remain the queen at the front of the house and not the serf at the back of the courtyard. I will teach you to live anew even in want, so that every woman in Nanka will look up to you.

We will rear our children with care and understanding, so that parents in Nanka will take a cue and no longer pawn theirs to neighbouring cities and countries, will realize the pain and agony they visit on their erstwhile charges in such acts.

Nnenne and her siblings will go to the mission school, which arms them with a weapon no one can disarm them of, which every dictator dreads and thus cajole them back to the mission school that waste in the creeks.

Tenant in the city, Landlord in the village....? I know this will be the case tomorrow. My destiny in my hand, I part the curtain to see if it is yet DAWN!

---

CLARIUS UGWUOHA says of himself: Born as Clarius Iheanacho Ugwuoha, on July 29th 1974,I studied at the Holy Ghost College Owerri and the University of Lagos. My poems have been published in various international anthologies and have won international prizes. I am author of the books: MONARCHS OF THE FOREST, a satirical revue and BEYOND RIVER UR ASHI, a biography.

This is Mr. Ugwuoha's first article for your World's Magazine.