An Orchestra of Minorities

by Chigozie Obioma

  Three of the police officers and nurses carried away the man who had attacked my host, Fiona following behind them. Then they returned and took him, their shoes soaked in his blood, red footprints marking their trail. Chukwu, by the time they got into the vehicle that resembled my host’s van (called an “ambulance” among the children of the great fathers), he fainted.

  I followed them through the streets of the strange land, seeing what my host could not see—a car loaded with watermelon, the kind found in the land of the fathers, and a boy on horseback followed by a procession of people beating drums, blowing trumpets, and dancing. All these gave way for the ambulance to pass, its siren blaring. I was besotted with fear and a great regret that I had allowed him to come to this place, this country, just because of a woman, when he could easily just have gotten another. I repeat, Egbunu, regret is the disease of the guardian spirit.

  The veil of consciousness that occludes my vision of the ethereal world now torn away, I beheld for a second time the living phantasmagoria of the spiritual world here. I saw a thousand spirits nestled at every breadth of the land, hanging on trees, flowing in midair, gathered on the mountains and in places too numerous to name. Near the Museum of Barbarism, where my host had been only two days earlier, I saw the three children whose blood was in the bathtub displayed inside the house. They were standing outside the house, dressed in the exact same shirts they’d been wearing at the time of the attack, torn, ripped by gunfire, blackened with blood. Because they were standing alone, unattended by other spirits, it occurred to me that they must be perpetually standing there, perhaps because their blood—their life—remains on the wall and on the bathtub, on display for the world to see.

  At the hospital, they wheeled my host into a room, and when I saw that he was secure, I ascended immediately to Alandiichie, the hills of the ancestors, to meet his kindred amongst the great fathers to report what had happened—after which, if indeed he had killed the man, I would come to you, Chukwu, to testify of it, as you require us to do if our host takes the life of another person.

  IJANGO-IJANGO, the road to Alandiichie is one I know well, but on this night, it was more winding than usual. The hills that border the road were dark beyond all imagining, speckled only here and there by the savage light from mystical fires. The waters of Omambala-ukwu, whose sibling is situated on earth, flowed with a muffled roar in the blackened distance. I crossed its luminous bridge, over which multitudes of humans from the four corners of the earth travel in a violent rush towards the land of the ancestral spirits. From the river I heard a stream of voices singing. Although the voices were in accord, one was at its heart. This distinct voice was loud but thin and resilient, swift in its tone, and as sharp as the blade of a new machete. They sang a familiar lullaby, one as ancient as the world in its conception. It wasn’t long before I realized it was the voice of Owunmiri Ezenwanyi, attended by her numerous maids of unmatched beauty. Together they sang in an ancient mystical language which, no matter how many times I heard it, I could not decipher. They sang for the children who died at childbirth and whose spirits traverse the plains of the heavens without direction—for a child, even in death, does not know his left from his right. It must be shown its way towards the realms of tranquillity, where the mothers dwell, their breasts filled with pure, ageless milk, their arms as supple as the warmest rivers.

  They call us nwa-na-enweghi-nku—“wingless” because we are spirits and can travel in the air without wings and “children” because we dwell inside the bodies of living men. So I knew it was for me they were singing. I paused to wave and to acknowledge their song. But Chukwu, as I listened to it, I wondered how you created voices so enchanting. How did you equip these creatures with such powers? Isn’t it tempting for one who hears such a song to halt in his tracks? Isn’t it tempting to even completely stop the journey to Alandiichie? Isn’t it why many dead people remain hanging between the heavens and the earth? The spirits of the dead sitting by the warm shore, aren’t they those who, although dead, have not found rest and whose ghosts roam the earth? I have seen many of them—walking about unseen, unable to be seen, belonging neither there nor here, permanently in a state of odindu-onwukanma. Aren’t some of them in this condition because they are trapped by the enchanting music of Owunmiri and her troupe?

  The fathers of old say that a man whose house is on fire does not go about chasing rats. So although I was thrilled by the tune, I was not charmed. I walked on until the music died away and any sight of the habitation of man was completely gone. No longer could I see the shiny kpakpando whose numbers are so vast that a duality was ascribed to them in the language of the fathers. They pair with the sands of the earth to form the single word: stars-and-earth. As I walked, the stars and all that was connected to the earth rolled away like a blanket of darkness into an empty abyss whose expanse is beyond measure. Across the hills was a long winding path lit in every corner by torches, their flames as bright as the light of the sun. It is here that one begins to encounter ndiichie-nna and ndiichie-nne from all over Alaigbo and beyond, gathered in pockets as they walk towards the great hills yonder. The path is decorated on both sides by strands of the sacred omu leaves, fastened to the trees like strange ribbons. Attached to the fresh palm leaves are also mollusks, cowries, tortoise shells, and precious stones of all kinds.

  From here, as one ascends the hills, the number of travelers increases. The recently dead throng towards the hills, still bearing the agony of death with them and the marks of life—men, women, children; the old and the young, the strong and the feeble, the rich and the poor, the tall and the short. They tread, their feet soundless against the fine earth of the road, which sparkles in the bright lights. But the hills, Egbunu, the hills are filled with light—an arrangement of shimmering radiance that seems almost to flow like an invisible river into the eye that beholds it and then dissipates into a misty whorl of glow. I have often thought how close the living came to capturing Alandiichie in the moonlight song the old mothers (and their living daughters) sang:

  Alandiichie

  A place where the dead are alive

  A place where there are no tears

  A place where there is no hunger

  A place I will go in the end.

  Indeed, Alandiichie is a carnival, a living world away from the earth. It is like the great Ariaria market of Aba, or the Ore-orji in Nkpa the time before the coming of the White Man. Voices! Voices! People, all dressed in spotless shawls, walking about or gathered in omu-ringed circles around a big earthen pot of fire. I located the one in which the Okeoha’s kindred had gathered. And it was not hard to find. The eminent fathers were there. The ones who had died at a ripe old age, a long, long, long time ago. Too numerous to mention. There was, for example, Chukwumeruije, and his brother, Mmereole, the great Onye-nka, sculptor of the face of ancestral spirits. His sculptures and masks of the deities; the faces of many arunsi, ikengas, and agwus; and pottery have been displayed as some of the great arts of the Igbo people. This man left the earth more than six hundred years ago.

  The great mothers dwell here, too. Too numerous to mention. Most notable, for instance, was Oyadinma Oyiridiya, the great dancer, who was synonymous with the saying At the pleasure of gazing at her waist, we slaughter a goat. Among many others, there were Uloaku and Obianuju, the head of one of the greatest umuadas in history, one whom Ala herself, the supreme deity, had pomaded with her honey-coated lotion and who poisoned the waters of the Ngwa clan many centuries ago.

  Anyone who saw this group would know at once that my host belongs to a family of illustrious people. They will know that he belongs to the genealogy of people who have been in the world for as long as man has existed. He is not of the class of those who fell from trees like mere fruits! It was thus with utmost reverence and humility that I stood before them, my voice like a child’s but my mind like an elder’s:

  —Nde bi na’ Alandiichie, ekene’m unu.

  “Ibia wo!” they chorused.

 
—Nde na eche ezi na’ulo Okeoha na Omenkara, ekene mu unu.

  “Ibia wo!”

  I was silenced by the stately voice of Nne Agbaso, which was as shrill as that of a caged bird. She began singing the usual welcome song, “Le o Bia Wo,” her voice as enchanting and serenading as that of Owunmiri Ezenwanyi and her crew. Her song rose and scattered solemnly through the air and surrounded the gathering, crawling up and encircling every man. And so silent did they become that I was made acutely aware again of the absolute distinction between the living and the dead. Afterwards, she rattled a string of cowries and performed the ritual of authentication to ensure I was not an evil spirit pretending to be a chi: “What are the seven keys to the throne room of Chukwu?” she said.

  —Seven shells of a young snail, seven cowries from the Omambala river, seven feathers of a bald vulture, seven leaves from an anunuebe tree, the shell of a seven-year-old tortoise, seven lobes of kola nuts, and seven white hens.

  “Welcome, spirit one,” she said. “You may proceed.” I thanked her and bowed.

  —I’m the chi of your descendant Chinonso Solomon Olisa. I have been with him from the earliest emergence of his being, when Chukwu called me forth from the Ogbunike cave where guardian spirits wait to be called into service and told me to guide his foot in daylight and to shine the torch onto his path at night. On that day, I had just gone to Ogbunike from the mortuary in Isolo General Hospital in Lagos, a land far from Alaigbo but a place where many of the children of the fathers now live. Ezike Nkeoye, who now sits over at the gathering of the kin of my host’s mother, had just died, and I had been his chi. He was just twenty-two. The day before, this bright student of the White Man’s education had gone to bed after studying. I had stayed in him, watching as he slept, the way guardian spirits are called to do. And indeed he was asleep. Then he woke suddenly, clutched his chest, and fell out of bed and onto his neck so that it snapped. The agreement with onwu, the spirit of death, was swift because he, like the rest of your children, does not have an ikenga. In a moment after the fall, he was dead.

  —Even though I had lived among mortal men many times before, I was shocked by this. So quickly had it happened, and with such intensity, that I was left without a word in my mouth. Death had come to him swiftly, with the violence of a young leopard. Only the previous day, he had been kissing a woman, but he was now gone. So strange was it that I did not go at once to report to Chukwu in Beigwe, as we guardian spirits are required to do. I did not immediately escort his spirit to Alandiichie, either. But at the time, I went with his body in the ambulance to the place where it would be kept at the mortuary. It was then I became satisfied he was dead and brought his onyeuwa with me to here, to the compound of the Ekemezie kindred of Amaorji village. After I left here, I hastened to Ogbunike, to rest and wash in its cataract, in water so warm and ancient it still carried the peculiar smell of the world at creation. I was lying in the stream when I heard Oseburuwa’s voice summoning me and asking me to ascend forthwith to Alandiichie, as Yee Nkpotu, the ancestor whose incarnate my host is, was ready to be reborn. As you know, a man and a woman can sleep together for eternity. If one of you here has not decided to return to the earth, conception is impossible. Thus knowing that conception was about to happen, I swiftly heeded his call.

  —So on the night my host was born, I brought his ancestral spirit from here in Alandiichie, and you all were distant witnesses as I took his onyeuwa away to Eluigwe, where it was received with wondrous celebration. Then I led it from the Eluigwe fanfare to accompany him to Obi-Chiokike, where the great fusion between spirit and body to form mmadu—the ultimate bodily expression of creation—happens. That was a glorious day. The white sands of Eluigwe, glistening with pebbles that bore in them the very essence of purity, was the ground on which we marched. We were followed in the distance by a group of the adaigwes, the spotless, luminously beautiful maidens of Eluigwe who sang of the joy of living on earth, of the innumerable cravings of man, of the duty of the mind, of the desires of the eyes, of the virtues of living, of the sorrows of loss, of the pain of violence, and of the many things that make up the life of a human being.

  —The family and household of Okeoha and Omenkara, you all have been there and know that the journey to the earth is far but not tiring. In your oracular wisdom, you liken this journey to the proverbial sturdy egg that falls from the nest of the raven, tumbles down through the black branches of the ogirisi tree, and lands on the ground unbroken. The road is beautiful beyond words. The trees that stand in the distance on both sides of the inner road not only provide deep vegetation, they are also transparent, like the silvery calico veils weaved by Awka women. The trees bear golden fruits, and on them, within them, and outside of them stand a chattering of emerald birds. They glide around the procession, swinging their wings in the thermal, diving and playing as if they, too, were dancing to the song of the procession. As I walked, they shone in the pure light that filled the road. I could not tell when we reached the great bridge that serves as the crossing between Beigwe and the earth. But just before we reached it, the women stopped in their tracks and raised their voices in a strange, spectral song. Their lovely tunes turned, suddenly, into a threnody, and they sang with trembling voices. Their cries rose as they sang about the suffering in the world, the evils of man-pass-man, the shame of disgrace, the affliction of infirmities, the wounds of betrayal, the suffering of loss, and the grief of death. They were joined by the onyeuwa and I had bonded with them and with the dwellers of Eluigwe, who stopped every time we passed by to say, “May he who is going to uwa have peace and joy!” and even with the flock of white hornbills, the sacred birds of Eluigwe, who hovered around us, beating their wings in obeisance.

  —Afterwards, as if signaled by an unseen banner, the singers separated from us and waved at us from a distance. They waved. The birds did, too, as they hung suspended above the bridge as if there was a line they could not cross which neither I nor the reincarnating spirit could see. We waved back, and once we stepped on the bridge, I found myself in a place I seemed to have been before. The place was filled with a bright light similar to that of Eluigwe, but this was man-made. The source of light was thronged by moths and apterous insects. A gecko stood beside one of the lightbulbs at the arc of a wall, its mouth full of the insects. On a bed under the bulb of light, a man screamed, trembled, and collapsed against a sweating woman. The onyeuwa entered into the woman and merged with the semen. The woman did not know or realize that the great alchemy of conception had happened within her. I joined the onyeuwa and became one with the man’s seed, and in joining we became a divisible one.

  —Ndiichie na ndiokpu, unu ga di.

  “Iseeh!” the eternal bodies chorused.

  —From that moment on, I have watched over him with my eyes as wide as a cow’s and as sleepless as a fish’s. In fact, were it not for my intervention, or were I a bad chi, he would not have been born in the first place.

  To this, a cold murmur echoed through the gathering of this deathless throng.

  —It is true, blessed ones. It was in his eighth month, while in his mother’s womb. She was seated on a stool sandwiched between two buckets, one containing clean water, with a transparent film lying over it, a spill from suds, and the other containing muddied water, in which clothes are soaked. A packet of Omo detergent lay on the pile of unwashed clothes. She had not seen, nor had her chi warned her, that a poisonous snake, sniffing the wet earth around her and the dewy smell of the tree leaves and shrubs around the place, had crept under the pile of clothes and begun to suffocate. But I stood out of my host and his mother, as I frequently do until my hosts possess their bodies in fullness. I could see it—the black snake slithered into one of the legs of a pair of trousers, and as she made to pick it up, the snake bit her.

  —The strike had an immediate impact. From the dazed look on her face, I could tell that it was a terrible sting. On the spot where she’d been bitten, a deep-colored bead of blood appeared. She screamed so loudly th
at the world around rushed to her aid. Once the snake bit her, I became aware that the poison could travel and kill my host in his abode in the womb. So I intervened. I saw it moving towards my host, who was then only a fetus asleep in the sac of the womb. The venom was full and hot and powerful, instant and destructive, and violent in its movement through her blood. I asked her chi to force her to cry so loudly that neighbors would immediately gather. A man quickly fastened a rag around her arm, a little above her elbow, stopping the venom from traveling further up and causing the arms to swell. The other neighbors attacked the snake and dashed it into a paste with stones, their human ears deaf to its pleas for mercy.

  —You all know that it is my duty to know, to probe the mysteries around the existence of my host. And truly, even a goat and a hen can assert that I have seen and that I have heard many things. But I have come here mostly because my host is in serious trouble—the kind that can cause the eyes to bleed instead of shed tears.

  “You speak well!” they said.

  —The men of your kin say that even a man who stands on the highest hill cannot see the whole world.

  They murmured in agreement, “Ezi okwu.”

  —The men of your kin say that if a person desires to scratch his hands or an itch on most other parts of his body, he does not need help. But if he must scratch his back, he must ask others to help him.

  “You speak well!”

  —This is why I have come: to seek an answer, to seek your help. Dwellers of the land of the living dead, I fear that a violent storm has petitioned for the closure of the only road to the utopian village of Okosisi, and it has been granted its request.