On the 14th of January, 2023, the Centre for Memories-Ncheta Ndigbo, Enugu, Nigeria hosted the Nigerian author, Chima Nwoke, for a book reading/meet-the-author event. Chima Nwoke was invited to read his debut collection of short stories titled Amaechi: The Past, the Present and Tomorrow. CFM, Enugu holds a monthly book reading event that has featured the likes of Professor Okey Ndibe, the author of Never Look an American in the Eyes, Arrows of Rain, Foreign Gods Inc. etc., Professor Pat Utomi, who read his book The Art of Leading, Ngozi Achebe, daughter of the legendary Chinua Achebe, who read her debut novel, Onaedo: The Black Smith’s Daughter, Uzodinma Iweala for his war narrative, Beasts of no Nation, Obiageli Iloakasia for her collection of poetry, Kàmbílí, and a host of many other brilliant authors.
For the January 2023 book reading, the Nigerian reader and writer, Ugochukwu Anadị, was invited to introduce Amaechi to other enthusiastic readers who have gathered at the centre to celebrate and engage the book and its author. To do that introduction, Ugochukwu Anadị produced a commentary that draws the reader into the book by allowing them reflect on the cover designs. That commentary, because we found it interesting and of some literary merit, is what we have reproduced here. Read and enjoy.
***
A good entry into the book Amaechi, I believe, is through the cover designs. But let’s start with the back cover. On the back we can see a model, who on a closer inspection reveals himself as the author of the book, our own Chima Nwoke, clad in a loose overflowing tie-and-dye wrapper that seems to be with no joints. The colour pattern on the tie-and-dye is green with varying shades against thin lines of white that runs mostly horizontally and slightly vertically too. Aka, an ancient form of beads can be seen on the model’s wrist with what I suspect to be a newly carved mask modelled in the ancient tradition of mask-carving in his only visible hand. Who knows, it might be the last mask Obika, Ezeulu’s son of Arrow of God carved before he died in his dignified and altruistic service to his community. The model’s eyes are nowhere to be seen as they lie under a different kind of mask. This mask is the AR/VR headset.
The model is Nigeria we see standing, the green part of her sometimes darker than life, for that is what red does to green, that is what the blood from the Lekki tollgate does to a country’s flag. But the white remains unstained, a defiant pose in the face of erasure, the only strength that can make a country like ours hopefully look into the future through the VR headset. But in this future-gazing, we must not throw away our past for we may need to return to them, to positively influence the events of the future, just like the character, Lance Corporal Osondu Anyanwu, did in the story ‘Biafran Boy’ in this collection (pg. 165). I do not want to spoil the story for those of us who may not have read the book so I will leave it at that: at the instruction that while we dance the dance prevalent in our time, while we wear the mask of Augmented and Virtual Reality, we must also have in our hands the mask of our past. And this past is not a rigid one. Rather than being one cast in stone, it is a flexible one that permits Obika to recreate it by carving new masks, just like Chima Nwoke has recreated and reimagined history in this collection.
The front cover presents our model, still dressed as previously described, but now in the motion of dance. Once again, we turn to ‘Biafran Boy,’ the last of the eleven stories in the collection, to make sense of this dance. The incantation of Dibia Nzeako is the key we are looking for here. An English translation of the incantation originally rendered in Igbo is provided thus:
“We call on you, O God, giver of time.
We have time, but we do not have time.
We see the time, but we do not see time.
We know the time, but we do not know time.
The past is in the past, the future is in the future.
All we have is the present.” (pg. 162)
Attention must be paid to the last line: “All we have is the PRESENT.” By dancing, that activity that requires our minds and bodies to stand elegantly and contort and swirl, our model revels in the present as we are wont to do when faced with the beauty of this collection.
Written in a language so simple that it can be read with not many efforts on the part of the reader, it is a testament to the quality of the writing that such a book, even while it is obvious that its major aim is to entertain with tales of the fantastical, still yields itself to subtextual readings and analysis. One can see beyond the fantasies contained in Amaechi the tough layers of lived reality. In ‘Unit 27’ for example, we see Okenna faced with the dilemma of having to choose between career or family, a dilemma common in our society today. What is striking here though is that Okenna is a man and not a woman. This creates a deviation from the trope of women being the only ones having to sacrifice their career when they form new families as we have it in most of our literature. It may not seem like it, but this deviation is a critique of gender representation as it is done in recent times, to borrow from Chinweizu, An Anatomy of Male Suffering. This anatomy was initiated earlier on in the collection by Buike, the narrator in ‘Low Budget Sherlock Holmes’ when he asserted that “[m]en have really suffered” (pg. 67) following Ihunanya’s assumption, even without any supporting evidence, that the murderer they are looking for is a ‘he.’ Funnily enough, the culprit turned out to be a ‘she.’
Talking of ‘Low Budget Sherlock Holmes,’ it is important we do not miss the wittiness of the title, as it is a mark of the authentic Nigerian witticism that permeates this collection. The authenticity of this collection’s Nigerianness and Africanness is partly due to its use of language: a perfect blend of Igbo, Naija Pidgin and Nigeroian English. There is no doubt as to whom this collection was primarily written for. It is for all of us here gathered today, Nigerians who may or may not be proud of our Nigerianness but who this book urges to be, no matter where we find ourselves in the universe, proud of our heritage.
There is a rich harvest of themes in the book. From themes of religious intolerance, pretense and deceit, to themes of cultural and physical displacement, uncertainty and death, this rich weld of different genres, glued by the fecund imagination of the author and sustained by his use of such technical devices like plot twist, suspense and unresolved endings, invites us creatively into moments of critical thinking and reevaluations. In ‘Nwa Ekwensu’ for example, Nne constantly nudges us to rethink our contemporary understanding of the Igbo deity, Ekwensu. This short story, ‘Nwa Ekwensu,’ reminds me of Professor Damian Ugwutikiri Opata’s Ekwensu in the Igbo Imagination, another book I recommend we all read.
By presenting the mythical and even the superstitious aspects of our past existence in a way that is devoid of contempt and degradation, Chima Nwoke joins Achebe in the noble task of reminding us that our history was never “a long night of savagery.” We may, for example, be quick to, just like Aunty Regina in ‘We Shall Come Again’ dismiss the concept of reincarnation as a product of uninformed, ignorant, dark minds but what if it was our own simplified way of explaining evolution and the big bang? What if it was our ancestor’s way of explaining the scientific fact that our existence is an ouroboros, a cyclic movement of star dusts which the theoretical physicist, Carl Sagan, explained in his book Cosmos thus: “The Nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff,” that disintegrates at our burial grounds to reintegrate into this cycle of life. Carolyn Porco, a planetary scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA captured this cycle of disintegration and reintegration succinctly when she said that “all atoms of our bodies will be blown into space in the disintegration of the solar system, to live on forever as mass and energy.” Our own brother and poet, Christopher Okigbo, reflected on this phenomenon more poetically in this stanza from his poem, ‘Elegy for Alto’:
“An old star departs, leaves us here on the shore
Gazing heavenward for a new star approaching;
The new star appears, foreshadows its going
Before a going and coming that goes on forever.”
Chima Nwoke tells us that our myths are not products of ignorant minds, rather intelligent postulations travelling at wavelengths our minds are no longer attuned to today. In ‘Biafran Boy,’ my favourite story in the collection, Dibia Nzeako is shown, not as a tattered-clothe-wearing old man of Nollywood, but as a female scientist and technologist. That is the recreation and reimagination of our past that we speak of; an argument, maybe, for the so-called ‘African Science.’
Before I end, let us briefly look at an important theme in the collection that I have overlooked till now—the theme of death, or more correctly put, of the ephemerality of life. Baba Dee, a character in ‘The Day I Die,’ made the full import of this temporality of life known when he said that “at least one of the people you come across in a day is going to die that day” (pg. 122). Since I would not want to give out the story for the sake of those of us yet to purchase their own copy of the book, I would like to reflect on this theme by returning to Achebe’s Obika whose tragic memory I invoked at the beginning. His death after carrying out his dignified and altruistic duty as the Ogbazuluobodo of Umuaro is a depressing example of this ephemerality of life; the manifestation of Baba Dee’s assertion that “at least one of the people you come across in a day are going to die that day.” But are we to cower in the face of death? Should we resign to fate since none of us is leaving here—and by here I mean the world not this hall—alive? Or should we be thinking of ways to make the short while we stay on this earth better for us and those to come after us? This collection insists we take the last option for futuristic writings, especially the utopian ones like many stories in this collection are, are done with the conviction that if we will, we can make tomorrow better. That I believe, is why Amaechi, a collection that kept away from Nigeria’s politics, has in it a President Obi who is presiding over a country somewhere in 2026. In this time when we are faced with our 2023 general elections and with what has culminated into the ‘Obidient Movement’ waxing stronger, I dare to say that this is a prediction on the part of the author.
Chima Nwoke is a photographer, filmmaker, graphic designer and writer based in Essen, Germany.
He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree in Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences. He is the co-founder of Dinta Media, a media outfit dedicated to telling stories of Africans and Africa. Amaechi is his debut collection of short stories.
You can reach him on Instagram and Twitter, @chimaezenwoke.
Recent Comments