The death of the first son, the loss of his son, and the death of the matriarch was enough to generate resentments that endured a long time. I realized why she had never sent me back to Nigeria until I had reached legal age and acquired American citizenship. She feared the family would keep me. She also feared that the families of notable figures of the secession and intimates of my godfather were likely to be persecuted after the war. From Gabon, though, she sent the family medicine, money, and items they could sell in the streets and markets. She started doing this when she made her way out of the refugee camp and found friends and supporters of my godfather’s in Libreville, the nation’s capital. The things and money she sent kept the family alive when there was almost nothing left of Igboland.
I understand why it was difficult for her to see the war in purely abstract terms. When our conversations became a debate about blame or responsibility, when I spoke of racism or colonialism and she of the unfathomability of the violence, we both learned to end them. We eventually began to anticipate this pattern as the condition of a new kind of intimacy. It provided the shape of the story of mother and son, Africa and diaspora, America and a country left gutted to bleed out into a world.
She was asleep again, slumped against my shoulder. Not wanting to disturb her with my movements, I sat quiet and still, as I did sometimes for hours.
11
African Night Flight
My name was in my ears as I rushed across red dirt to the nearest tree and evacuated my stomach into a bright patch of green.
“Onuorah, are you okay?”
This bout of vomiting was painful. I hoped it would be the last even though I knew that this was unlikely. It could have been the stew served in my honor the night before when I had arrived in my ancestral village in Onitsha, the well-known city on the banks of the Niger River in Nigeria. The stew was made of the large river snails I’d seen hanging from strings on the edges of the central market. Or it could have been the stew earlier in the day made from local ogbono seeds. Likely, though, it was the alcohol. All rituals here seemed to involve heavy drinking. As I was the returned prodigal, saying no wasn’t an option. But despite hangovers and vomiting, the alcohol served a useful purpose. It kept my emotions at bay, held me in check in the midst of a chaos of sensations and information.
“Your father was a good drinker, so you will be okay. You are just like him, I am sure of that. In the morning, your aunties will make you food my brother liked. He liked English food for breakfast, eggs and bacon, things like that, and we have bought them for you. Here you are the first son of the first son and can have anything you want.”
These items must have been difficult for the family to procure, but the thought of Western food filled me with relief. From the moment I had disembarked in Lagos before traveling east to Onitsha, I’d rejected Western food. I intended to be seen as a native no matter how painful the process proved to be and regardless of how many uncles or cousins dared me to eat things so extreme that I came to relish the act of vomiting into gutters large enough to swallow children.
My uncle was a local politician and a renowned drinker. His taking me through the town at night involved not only copious amounts of alcohol but also sporadic welcome rituals with the sacred cola nut—the center of Igbo culture—and plates of mysterious, grilled bushmeat. Perhaps it was the bushmeat that finally turned my stomach. Also unsettling was the fact that whenever we were recognized I heard “The first son of the first son” or “Your father was a great man. You are him returned. Biafra is not dead.”
“You hear that?” Uncle would say then. “This is where you are from. You are not like those Blacks over there who don’t know where they are from and are always looking for roots and making noise about it. This is your home. You can trace where you belong right back to this place and can stop looking beyond.”
He’d greeted me at the airport dressed in native finery and surrounded by a dozen men and women shuffling and dancing in traditional welcome. I assumed it was a tourist performance or something planned for a local dignitary. When it turned out to be for me, I knew in a terrifying moment that these were celebrations not of me but of their own expectations of me. I knew already that I would be unable to satisfy them.
There seemed no time or space for my own questions about my father or about my godfather or Biafra. There was no interest in such things. Only the material future mattered. The sudden pressure for me to conform to my family’s desires was enough to render me almost catatonic, and I migrated through my homecoming barely able to ask substantive questions about my history. Back in Lagos, all the talk had been about my returning to work in a bank or get into politics simply by attaching my name to my uncle’s campaign or anyone else’s or to work for an oil company, which was the real prize. It was also clear that my return to Nigeria would enable members of the family with political and business ambitions to get close to my godfather. A few months before I’d arrived for this visit, he’d returned from a twelve-year exile in the Ivory Coast. But because Igbos still thought of him as their rightful leader and referred to him as Eze Nd’Igbo, King of All Igbos, the federal government had put him under house arrest.
This evening, my uncle was whizzing me over irregular dirt roads at such speeds that there was no noticeable difference in the motion of his battered jeep whether he was drunk or sober. Everywhere we stopped, there was a cola nut broken in blessing followed by beer and “hot drinks,” meaning spirits.
I remember meeting someone with a grand title who was dressed in white. My uncle fell to his knees and prostrated himself before the man. He asked me to do the same, and when I did, everyone laughed, including the man dressed in white. Apparently, there were ways of bowing that I did not know. Another time I was asked to give a toast to a group of old men under a large tree and speak on behalf of my family. Some complained that I didn’t speak Igbo. Others argued that although it was true that I’d left the country too young to learn the language I could still learn when I returned for good. This didn’t placate those who’d complained, but after a few more rounds of drink, anything I said drew cheers. All I needed to do was keep suggesting that I would soon be coming home to repair whatever rifts in their lives they still traced back to Biafra. And pay for drinks.
Then at some point in the dark, we were in a house full of women sitting on cushions and listening to local music. They smiled hospitably while I waited for my uncle to return from wherever he’d gone. The house boy brought more beer, easy to drink due to the incredible heat and lack of clean water. The women ranged in age and girth, some in heavy makeup, some in traditional clothing, and others in Western dress. A large older woman came into the room and sat with me. She was clearly the owner of this place, and I could smell the mix of sweat and perfume.
“You are the American nephew. They say your father was famous from the war.”
I nodded.
“I want to go to America one day. I think I should be there. Don’t you think?”
I was too drunk to follow my ideological instinct, which was to tell her about racism and capitalism, but not too drunk to remember where I was. Telling these people these things would be a sign of how much of a native I wasn’t.
“You will help me get there, okay? You will send invitation letter and then ticket.”
This had been asked of me many times since I’d arrived in Nigeria, and I never knew how to respond. Eventually, I realized that I didn’t need to respond since it was never really a question but a claim. Everything was settled because they’d asked and I was the American through whom all things were possible.
She reached into her bosom and pulled out a small piece of paper. On it was her name and her mailing address.
I took the paper.
“Hey! America,” she squealed at the other women who looked at her jealously. “America! I’m going to be American! I will come and go as I please!”
She got up and restructured the fabric wrapped around her generous waist and hips. One
of the younger women came over to me and took my hand.
I followed her into a smaller room that had a bed we sat on.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t worry. I am clean. I have a doctor.” She pulled from her pocket some kind of card as proof. With red dirt stains everywhere and my breath reeking of vomit, I feared the outcomes of this particular ritual. But I did appreciate the privacy so I lay down on the bed.
“Are you sure you are okay?” she asked.
“Yes, I’m okay, but all I want is to lie here.”
She laughed. “What will I tell your uncle?”
“What do you mean?” I sat up.
“Your uncle. Don’t you know why he brought you here?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Ha, it’s not just that. He wants to make sure you like women.”
I was too drunk to be angry. The expression on my face made her laugh.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I never met a Black American. I will say the right thing.”
When we went out into the main room, my uncle was waiting, his arm around the woman who had given me her address.
“Is it okay?” he asked. I nodded, but then he took the young woman into a corner and began speaking to her in Igbo. I watched her smile and nod her head enthusiastically. He looked over at me with a massive grin.
Somewhere later and somewhere else, someone was baking bread, or at least it smelled like it. The people around me were different but the same, or at least they were saying the same things. I was saying the same things too; they only seemed different due to the level of inebriation I’d achieved. I was praying for dawn when I’d be with the young cousins who did not drink and my aunties who had less complicated expectations than my uncles. When I awoke, I was quickly helped into my uncle’s jeep. My uncle was helped in also, put in the driver’s seat, his hands placed on the wheel. I don’t know how long we sat there, but we eventually began lurching forward and then stopping, moving in bursts. The jeep had bent the gate of someone’s compound, just barely missing the gutter that was wide enough to sink a portion of the vehicle. The gateman came out cursing until he recognized my uncle and receded into the darkness.
We reached our family compound sometime near dawn. Uncle almost had to crawl into his house, the central building, which I’d been told my father had built before the war for his new bride, my mother. I was staying in a house farther in back, and to reach it, I had to pass my father’s grave. There was no headstone because where he was actually buried was only approximate. At that time during the war, everything was chaos and the family temporarily had to abandon the compound. Because there had been no ceremony my father wasn’t officially dead. According to tradition he was still alive, waiting for me to bury him.
The only good thing about being this drunk, I thought, was that it would be easy to sleep in the brutal subtropical heat. Even the mosquitos couldn’t keep me awake now. But too soon it was morning, and the promised eggs, bacon, and toast were there. Also, blessedly, there was powdered coffee.
But then I was on the road again, this time on foot with a group of young cousins. We walked the pocked and jagged red-dirt roads through a staggering sprawl of structures that seemed to have been arranged by rolling a handful of dice and building wherever one landed. There were houses, sheds, and a few bars, restaurants, and garages, sometimes all three in the same building, brick mostly, some rising up four or five floors. Nothing escaped the red dust. New things seemed heavy with time.
One young cousin said, “Big Brother, you have to get rich very soon. Not just for us but your mum. Uncle says you should build a school or hospital here in her name because she saved so many people and children. People remember your dad but many remember your mum.”
The size of my hangover made me agreeable, and the humidity rendered me helpless in the face of his relentless talking.
“When you come back, you can get a job with accounts. You can travel and shop in the UK, and if you get sick or your family, you can go there. That’s the way it is here and you can have it. With your father’s name, you can even do politics. In the East, people will vote just when they hear that name.”
“Yes, Big Brother,” said another cousin. “Here it doesn’t matter what you studied over there, just that you have the degree. With your godfather, you can do anything.”
I’d given up tracing actual relationships given how many cousins, uncles, and aunties emerged from seemingly everywhere upon my arrival.
A record shop was blasting rap music. My cousin got excited.
“Big Brother, Big Brother, let me sing a music for you!”
He was a dark boy, stretched tall and with an impressive natural Afro. I’d thought he was Yoruba, not Igbo.
“Listen, Big Brother.” He stopped us all in the road and began rapping.
“It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white; it’s how he catch the mouse!”
His eyes were so open with pride that they seemed unnatural. He repeated his lyrics just in case I didn’t understand their cleverness and gravity.
“It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white if it’s catching the mouse! You see?”
“Yes, I understand, but what do you mean by it?” I wanted to know how issues of race and racism translated here. But I was pretty sure this cousin had never ever seen an actual white person. There were very, very few this far east.
“It means that the cat can be any color if it can catch the mouse.”
“I understand, but what are you saying about race? That it doesn’t matter at all?”
He was perplexed. “Big Brother, there are cats of many color who can catch mouse the same way and that is a good thing. That is my music.”
“Yes, but you are rapping about skin color and black and white people.”
He was stunned now, his eyes even bigger than before.
“Big Brother, no, I don’t know about this black or white people thing. That is not what my song is saying. I’m talking about the cats and why the color of them is not what matters but the catching of the mouse. Do you get?”
I worked hard to suppress a chuckle. He had been talking about cats after all. My chuckle escaped. Thank goodness it was seen by him as sudden comprehension.
Cousins joined us and disappeared as we got closer and farther from the areas where they lived. I began to assume that the best way to evaluate the strength of kinship was by proximity to our compound.
From three or four days of walking or being driven around by my uncles, I came to recognize particular areas by the shore of the great murky river or near the central market. These places seemed distinguishable only by virtue of their relationship to our family. Belonging here meant being attached to territory marked by those who bore a particular name for centuries. It made sense then to imagine my very blood stained by all this red dust.
Or perhaps belonging meant turning up yet another indistinguishable road miles into another labyrinthine village and encountering someone screaming at the top of aged lungs, “Onuoraegbunam! Sokei. Sokei. Onuoraegbunam!”
I spotted an old woman with gnarled skin and a thin white beard leaning out a window. I recognized my last name, but she’d said my middle name in a way I’d never heard it.
“Big Brother, we must greet her. She knew your dad and your mum.”
That she’d known my parents was unsurprising, so many I met had, but that she knew this stranger, me, was shocking. She’d seen us coming up the road and immediately began calling out my name. She came out to the road and fell to her knees, holding my hand to her face.
“Onuoraegbunam! Sokei, nno. Nno, O? Nno! Chukwu d’aalu, Chukwu d’aalu!”
She began bobbing her shoulders and dancing despite her limited mobility. She didn’t speak English, but I knew that nno meant “welcome”; Chukwu, of course, meant “God”; and d’aalu meant “give thanks” or “thank you.” But why did she call me Onuoraegbunam? What was that last part added on to my middle name?
“It’s
your name,” said one of my cousins. “That’s your name.”
“My middle name is Onuorah.”
“That’s your name too. The whole of it.”
After the old woman danced and embraced me and then returned to her window, I asked my cousins what “egbunam” meant. None of them knew. I assumed it was because for many of them Igbo was no longer a first language. Even if they were fluent in it, some names and terms were hazy or archaic.
When we returned to the compound later that afternoon, my youngest uncle, a barrister, was there.
“Oni, are you home?”
“Yes, Uncle. From walking the village and town.”
“God is great,” he said. “This is wonderful. How was it? Did you enjoy yourself after your busy night?” There was a sly smile there, but I couldn’t tell just how sly it was meant to be. As I said, he was a barrister.
“I’m still very tired.”
“Ha, yes, many people want to see you. It will be my turn to take you around this night so take some sleep.” He called the house boy and told him to take a cold beer to my room. “That will help you.”
“Thank you. Uncle, I met an old woman today. She saw me out of a window and called out to me. She recognized me.”
“Which woman? What was her name?”
“I don’t know, but she was very old and was very happy to see me.”
“Everyone is happy. Very happy. God is great. Not everybody comes back.”
“But she called me a different name, or a different version of my name.”
“Really? What did she call you?”
“I won’t pronounce it correctly, but she called me Onuoraegbunam.”
“Yes, that is your name. From your father.”
“But my name is Onuorah.”
“No, Oni, it is Onuoraegbunam. Your full name. You don’t know your name?”
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