Christ and Eze Obioha
Okonkwo, the tragic hero of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, went to death uninvinted. With a rope in his hand, Death must have wondered when its relationship with humans, fraught with mutual spite, became so convivial that Okonkwo now brings the symbolic cow gift to It. But Death was in for a shocker. There hangs a man who doesn’t spite or fear Death; a man who ties a noose around his neck and hands the other end of the rope to Death, like a dog waiting to be walked.
Eze Obioha of Iwu Jeff’s Verdict of the Gods is as similar to Okonkwo as he is as different from him. Eze Obioha is another tragic hero that will hang on the rope to Death’s abode. Just like Okonkwo hung on to Death at his backyard, it is on “an Oha tree situated at the back of his personal hut” that Eze Obioha will meet Death. Both Okonkwo and Eze Obioha were men of substance in their societies; Okonkwo a respected wrestler who “was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond,” and Eze Obioha, the “king of Achara land.” But that is almost all they share in common.
Unlike Okonkwo, Eze Obioha wasn’t perpetually haunted by “the fear of failure and of weakness.” His death cannot be explained in the ambivalent nature of Okonkwo’s heroism and cowardice. Rather, in the play, we see a king who lived true to his name, Obioha: The Heart and Abode of All. He is a king who places the interest of his people before and over his own interests. Thus, his suicide did not result from a bid to eliminate himself from a supposed tribe of cowards, rather, it was a salvific undertaking. His, Eze Obioha’s suicide, qualifies as altruistic suicide – a dying not for the Self but for the Others. He had to die because Acharaland is in debt and as the gods had declared, “the innocent would pay for it.” His is a case of the saint dying so that the sinners may live – the very foundation of one of the Abrahamic religions, Christianity.
Christ died so that we may live, or so the Bible proclaims. He is an innocent son of God – who is also with God and is God (Jn 1:1). He died, so that through his death, humans who He had created but who have erred from His original design may be saved and live eternally (Jn 3:16). Iwu’s Verdict of the Gods holds a mirror to this account of Salvation. It reads like taking this account contained (mostly) in the New Testament of the Holy Bible and situating it in an Igbo community in Nigeria in a time when colonialism has succeeded in foisting kings upon otherwise republican communities but has not yet succeeded in foisting the Christian God – a time when colonialism has bequeathed its government to Nigeria but not yet its religion(s).
Verdict of the Gods never made any pretensions about its allusions to the Biblical account of Salvation. It featured Three Deities who saw that the people of Acharaland (the Iwu Jeff’s fictional microcosm of the world) suffer for their sins for “through one man sin entered into the world and death by sin and so death passed upon all men for all have sinned” (Romans 5:12) though in Verdict it wasn’t just through one man that sin entered Acharaland but through everyone – actors and complicit onlookers. These Three Deities are no different from the Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit – three different persons who are one and acts like one. When the Holy Trinity decided to create human beings in their own image and likeness (Gen 1:26), it was an unanimous decision just like when the Three Deities agreed that “Our mouths must be shut! Our eyes must be shut! Our ears must be shut! Our noses must be shut!”
In the playwright’s creativity and fecund imagination, none of the Three Deities became mortal in order to save the humans just like Jesus Christ, the second person in the Holy Trinity, had to. Rather, because it takes the innocent to save the guilty, he created a character, a human character, Eze Obioha, who is not tainted by the sins of the people of Acharaland for which they were condemned to tribulations and deaths. This innocent king is to die for his subjects to be saved. Like Jesus’ death, it was Eze Obioha’s death that tore the temple veil into two (Matt 27:51; Mk 15:38; Lk 23:45). It unsealed the mouths of the Deities, opened their eyes, unclogged their ears and cleared their noses.
Due to all these similarities between the Biblical account of the salvation of the world and Iwu’s account of the salvation of the fictional Acharaland, the reader sees an invitation to reexamine the death of Christ through the lens of Verdict. In Verdict of the Gods, Eze Obioha was never killed to save his subjects, rather, Eze Obioha killed himself to save his subjects. Can it be said then, that rather than being killed for the salvation of humankind, Jesus Christ killed himself for humankind? When Christians say that He offered Himself to be killed so that man may live (Heb 9:15) are they indirectly saying that Christ committed suicide? Christ’s hanging on the cross can as well be Eze Obioha’s hanging on the Oha tree, both altruistic, both salvific in nature. (I’m curious. Can hanging on the cross be a symbolism? Like, hanging on a tree?)
Ever Changing Perception of Suicide
The early Christians hailed suicide victims as heroic. Suicide was deodorized and baptised into martyrdom. This meant that suicide victims, rather than pitiably referred to as victims, were (and are still) heroically and admirably referred to as martyrs. Several Christians, for example, were canonized in the past for suicide in defense of their virginity. The fourth-century preacher and Bishop of Constantinople, John Chrysostom, who is himself a saint, said of one of such saints, Pelagia, that “while she was prepared for tortures and punishment and every kind of penalty, even so, she was afraid that she would destroy the crown of her virginity. Indeed, that you might learn that she was afraid of the sexual predation of the unholy men, she got in first and snatched herself from the shameful violence.” Chrysostom has a poetic and euphemistic way of telling us that Pelagia jumped from the rooftop, landing amidst the soldiers lying in wait for her below, and dying as a result of that: she snatched herself away.
The early Christians’ consideration of suicide, under circumstances of religious martyrdom and defense of faith, as heroic, stem from their understanding of the crucifixion as an act of suicide on the part of Christ. That consideration of suicidal martyrdom as heroic, is not only a function of religious understanding and rationalization; even the society has her own share of secular martyrs who are suicide victims.
A quick example is Bruce Baruch Mayrock (6 May 1949 – 30 May 1969). Among the people of the defunct Biafran nation, the 20 year old student of Columbia University who, by self-immolation, protested the genocide against the “nation and people of Biafra” in the Nigeria-Biafra war, is nothing short of a hero, a secular saint. This is a testament to the fact that suicide as a moral issue has always been dynamic; always been determined by culture whose primary characteristic is still its dynamism. Because culture is not only a function of space and the people inhabiting the space but also a function of time and circumstances, events leading up to a particular case of suicide determines the way the case is looked at.
The late poet, Chukwuemeka Akachi, is today remembered by his readers, not just for his writing prowess which is distinguished, marvellous, aesthetic and comely, but also – more popularly and commonly so, even – for the way he chose to exit from the stage called Life and living: suicide! His death, alongside his suicide note, culled from the Ghanaian, Jo Nketiah’s poem which read :“they said / you came / looking for me / I didn’t drown / I was the water,” made the headlines and sparked lots of conversations and debates around depression, suicide and writers on various media.
His death, unlike Pelagia’s, wasn’t hailed as heroic by any religious leader. Social media users from his own part of Nigeria, which belonged to the defunct Biafran nation, who are part of the people who today hail Bruce Mayrock as a Biafran hero never celebrated his death, rather, their cries were like that of the elders of Acharaland: What? Arụ! Abomination! When then, does death by self become heroic and when is it an abomination?
Suicide As a Salvific Undertaking
Suicide has always been a salvific undertaking. When Christ decided to go the way of Golgotha and hang on the cross, it was to save humankind from an impending doom. When Pelagia jumped to her death, it was to save her “crown of virginity.” When Eze Obioha went “with a rope, a white cock, knife and a calabash cup of palmwine” to hang on the Oha tree “situated at the back of his personal hut,” it was to present himself as a “lamb to the slaughter” (Isaiah 53:7) for the salvation of his people. When Bruce Mayrock made himself a bonfire outside the United Nation Headquarters, it was to save the dying children of Biafra, whose pictures, bones collected in tattered clothes (for the lucky ones), must have given him sleepless nights. Suicide thus has always been a salvific undertaking.
And that’s true also for the not so altruistic type of suicide – the ones termed selfish. (It is these un-altruistic, selfish suicides which the society views as abominations, unlike the so-called altruistic ones which are termed heroic and legendary).When Okonkwo hanged himself, he may not have had it in his mind to save the people of Umuofia from any harm or danger, yet, he wanted to do a saving – to save himself from men who he reckoned must have became asthenic while he was away. He, whose fear of being thought weak was “deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic,” wanted to save himself from a tribe of people he supposed have become cowards. It is such that when Akachi noted that he didn’t drown, but was, rather, the water, he was lamenting of how tough his own salvation is. He needed saving, not by any person but by himself; not from any thing or person, but from himself.
Suicide though is never a good option (the cliché is that suicide is not an option, but that will be denying reality; it has always been an option, one that has been chosen by many). And what makes suicide to not be a good option, what makes it to be redundant is the salvific role it purports to play. It is said that a man who jumps into the ocean to drown soon realizes, that he never wanted to drown, to die. This realization gets him struggling against the water, to live. It’s most likely that he won’t succeed. It’s then that he realizes that he had wanted to kill something in him and not himself; to save him from something inside him and not him from him.
It is thus in the services of a therapist and supporting and understanding friends and relatives that the true salvific nature of suicide lies – its ability to make us realize that we need help and seek for it. Suicide, thus, becomes a salvific undertaking when it helps the suicidal person to get the help enough to kill the unwanted in him and never himself. That was where the Nigerian poet, Akachi Chukwuemeka, failed in his trial.
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