To live with another man’s wounds is to wake at midnights with a searing pain and listen to the man breathe and exist.
I am going to my uncle, the man who has been dead for seventy years and has inhabited my body for twenty-three odd years. I am visiting his one-time home through the Milken hill road that sits firmly on a ledge. The road is a coiled wire uncurling on discovery. The tars on it have cracked in some parts and lay bare a dusty terrain. A slope and a cliff flank the track on both sides, and tall slender trees of a certain breed stick out from the slope like praying hands. The verdure of the lush and virgin forest meld with the skies. The brae of the cliff is patterned in horizontal lines, like cornrows on a child’s hair. Bold writing done with the white chalk is waning from weather effects: Vote for Ugwuanyi. Man of the people. The forest injects a coolness that wiggles along the route, the calm as rich as I’d imagined it’d be.
The smell of the forest wafts across my nose as the car speeds through the road. I peek through the lush green forested valley, picking the trees apart with my eyes to catch sight of Iva, the valley town where Okwueke, my uncle was murdered before I was born. The story of the Iva Valley massacre, which claimed his life, was a fable retold many times in my childhood house. Even in the dark, tears brimmed and shone in my dad’s eyes when he narrated the story in detail, rereading from memory the letter that carried the news to them, his old mother’s heart break, and his supposedly display of strength even when everyone threw themselves on the ground in mourning. My dad was consoled when at birth he looked into my neonatal eyes and saw his dead older brother staring back at him through all those distances.
The car orbits the forest, slithering through the road carved on a hill. We are alone with the surrounding vegetation and the wall of the basin that slants sharply into unknown depths. I had journeyed through this road once years ago, as a sick twenty-year old on her way to a surgeon, and there were yet no balusters at the lip of the slope. There have been changes since then. As if prompted by my thoughts, Gregory, who is at the wheel, breaks the silence and reels off tales of head on collisions and vehicles that end up deep below in the ravine.
I got Gregory’s phone contact through a former course mate at the University of Nigeria whom I told that I wanted to rove through the Milken hill and the valley town. The course mate suggested Gregory, someone whom he was sure knew where the lands are fields of broken rocks, who knew the hill peaks from where you could see far regions, and where a river runs lonely and unnoticed to its tributary. Gregory is amiable, and keeps pulling at his moustache with some fondness. He has lived here since his childhood, he says. “The only home I know,” he adds for emphasis. A wide smile smoothens his features. I try to match his smile too, but my hands tense up as the road unveils itself before us.
“You work?” he asks, his fingers move deftly on the steering, like he is merely patting it.
“Yes, I work on a company’s website. I can work from anywhere I find network and battery power for my laptop.”
I am used to strangulating conversations that threaten to tear through personal boundaries, but something reassuring about Gregory makes me want to keep talking. He tells me he works here as a driver and a tour guide because his history is tethered to this hill and the valley town where his ancestry is rooted.
Gregory parks the car near a farm on the cliff and we walk in. The farm slopes into a settlement with rusty zinc roofs and dirt-coloured walls. The slope falls abruptly, and I stagger, unsure of my footing. The ground Gregory and I stand on is cluttered with tiny bits of crushed coal, the remains, perhaps, of an exploited coal reserve. There are two young men farther down the farm, drilling ridges into the soil with such flexibility, going on with uniform strides. The land yields itself willingly to them, brown lumps of sand scooting free from the densely packed soil. Green maize stalks and thick cassava stems crowd the neighbouring farmlands, and a familiar smell of skin folds chokes me. I am getting closer to Okwueke and it frightens me. I try to picture what part of him still lingers here. Did he stroll around here once?
As a child of seven or eight or nine, those years so distant they befog into a quilt spread over time, I was named my uncle, Okwueke’s reincarnate. My dad had gone to consult Elebeke, a dibia from the nearby town. He returned home, joy suffusing his eyes, and made the pronouncement. My mum had forbidden it, it was unchristian and her daughter’s body had nothing to do with a dead man’s.
“But look at the nose,” my dad raged, “from where could she have gotten that cup of a forehead if not from Okwueke? Do you not see the jaunty walk?”
My parents examined me, a specimen subjected to intensive study, searching for separate things. My mum searched for a brother in-law whom she didn’t want in there, while my dad looked for a brother he hoped was there. They both asked, “Do you dream of him? Do you see him?” My uncle’s pictures were pasted on my dad’s room walls and I remember nights of shutting my eyes tight, and wandering into those snug passages wedged within me, trying to find his face as the pictures had it.
I never saw him.
Yet I felt cracked as a coconut, a welter of human cells, my sacroiliac joints dislodged to receive the uncle’s soul placed to rest at the pit of my nub. I walked about bearing the weights; the souls of a dead miner and a living girl who kept running into each other. The dead man was heavier. It bore down on me at midnights while I slept, and left me needy and grappling for air. I was tired on most days. When you are on your second trip through life, the pace wouldn’t be as swift. I was standing on the cusp of bardo, but was existing already in the physical body of a girl whose fingertips were not really hers.
On the tenth month of my twentieth year, some months to university graduation, a black mole turned up on the skin of my lower abdomen and birthed a pain that rang alarm bells through my body. I raised my blouse innumerable times for concerned aunts and uncles to study the mole. It was the spot, the older relatives concluded, where Okwueke was shot four decades ago.
I carried the wound and the seed it primed for twelve months before my family settled for a surgery. My body had groomed the ‘bullet’ long before my becoming, and it had grown into a calcified mass that the doctors could not name. Their lips stroked many terms and words ending with –ss, -sm, -stic. But I knew what it was; a bullet wound passed down generations, uncle to niece.
“Wash your heels with the bath stone. Cracked heels are untidy,” my mum said often to me. Her eyes said different, that I left in my being many loopholes that Okwueke usurped too easily, like my boyish walk and the near-hollow voice, like my hair that receded past the hairline, like my cracked heels. I scoured the fissures with the bath stone, crushing the flakes, soaking my feet in hot water, scraping with the razor until my heels bled. Vaseline, shea butter, coconut oil – I emptied jars of moisturizers on my heels, trying to abridge what belonged to another which should now be mine.
“Coal mining jobs are in decline,” Gregory, who is eager to uncoat his history, says. It sustained his ancestors for a long time. When in twos or threes, white men dressed in well ironed pants and buttoned-up-to-the collar shirts marched around the mining community, engaging in labourious conversations with the chiefs, coal slipped from his people’s grasp and became an affair of the government. Like my uncle, his grand-father was also tangled up in the miners’ protest which led to the death of twenty-one miners. Yet only three names of the dead remained prominent; Ayasodo, Okechukwuma, and Ageni. My uncle’s name, as well as Gregory’s grandfather’s, was mashed into the eighteen others. Perhaps this was what hurt the most, the namelessness that history assumed when retelling a tragedy. Okwueke’s ancestral home was Akpo, a hilly town with rough dirt roads in Eastern Nigeria. He was built muscular with a head full of hair, and left behind an old mother, four brothers, and a sister. He had a kind heart, but history overlooked these details.
“Why have you come?” Gregory asks. The tale of his coal-ravelled history has ended, and now he hands me the baton of speech.
I stump on the words forming in my throat with the surety that should they tumble out at that moment, it will be the voice of Okwueke speaking to Gregory. The inner man has grown intemperate lately, creating major upheavals in the running of my life. The near-hollow voice I had as a child now drones with some hoarseness, and always, mid speech, I feel my air passages shut down, and Okwueke’s voice, coarse and gravelly, rolls through to the world.
I clear my throat repeatedly, plucking clean the roughness.
“My uncle died here, in Iva Valley,” I say, and it excites Gregory that we share this death in common. He plagues me with questions, asking to know the year this uncle died, his age at the time, and why I chose to be here at this time. I am careful not to spill too much.
What I do not say to Gregory is that I have come to see the grounds that I once walked on in a former lifetime.
“The settlement below this cliff is also the Iva Valley town. That was where the senior coal officers, the Britons, lived,” Gregory says, pointing my gaze to the settlement. Smoke rises from somewhere and shreds itself in the light. I sweep the view with my glance, and the sacredness intrigues me. Here on the far edge of the city, Enugu is a bold scrawl beneath my gaze. I look across the distance and glimpse where the gentle brushstrokes of the afternoon sun make a palette of gilt out of the highlands. There, the city melds with the skies, and the houses and trees blur into a patch of deep blue lining. There are network masts, trucks and buses scurry the distant roads, and electric wires suspended by poles line the sky in two or three dark strokes. Everything looks vaguely familiar.
New houses spring slowly up the highlands and mountains with small incline in altitude. Foundations of newer constructions are advancing upward, civilization making a gradual progress to obliterate nature. The boundaries between what is the hill and the human domain are thinning. The hills resist often, baring pointed fangs of rock to discourage the human obtrusion. But man finds a way to pit bricks into the hill’s body until it absorbs and plays host. Man holds sway. Always. Strewed all over the city, though inconspicuously, are tinges of black, the ghost of coal perhaps hovering over its home. I think of what life could have been for my uncle if he still lives. Will his houses litter these hills too?
The afternoon is far advanced. We leave the farm and return to the car. One hour is left before my tour time expires. Gregory and I vote to go to the part of Iva where the junior workers lived. The tarred road snakes its large body through the hill, and stretches until it bursts into a table land for a heartbeat, before sloping into the Iva Valley town. About me lay the town, like a mass of brick cottages deposited by a careful hand upon the hillsides, doused in weakened sunshine. Iva, on arrival, looks haunted, and my illusions of what it should look like crumble as we move through the streets. It appears as though the town has lost a great chunk of its essence since the death of coal. Something else springs from the ground, the land’s keening of the dead miners.
The quarters are old fashioned, alike, and bear identical carvings just above the doors. The chimneys atop some of the houses mirror the life of opulence the coal miners once led.
Gregory guides me through a path where water pipes lay above the soil, where so many scantily clad children run about, jabbering in their native Igbo. We stop in front of the door of a house, his house. Gregory speaks about how the town has struggled since the demise of coal. His people have formed an affinity with soil, and it rewards their hard work. They feel ignored, their role in mining which was the backbone of Nigeria’s economy has been airbrushed from history. Their lands endure erosions, the aftermath of the coal drilling. Besides the journalists who show up with cameras and note pads, seeking a piece of the town to feed to their blogs, Iva Valley is barely written about.
“We lived well as children of coal miners,” Gregory says to me, wistful as he reminisces. At that moment, two dark children run up to him and clasp his legs.
“My sons,” he says sweeping his hands above their heads. All of his life’s joy seems embedded in that phrase. His wife walks up right after the boys, her stomach swollen with new life, her cardigan unable to button around the middle. She is beautiful, a tiny glimmer of perfection. Gregory shows me a bridge with weakened stilt that was constructed in 1930. It overlooks a stream that flows in the fold. The familiar feeling cripples me again, and I wander away from Gregory to discover the town unaided.
The fevers erupted first, stomping about my body with the feet of a young elephant, burning me to a crisp. Then my vocal folds grew thicker in size and in the middle of conversations, my voice transformed often into the voice of a man. I searched and found Elebeke, the renowned dibia who had, years ago, pronounced me a carrier of two souls. I was sure that my mum would not approve, that she’d be more concerned about whether her state of grace permitted her to receive the wafers at the Holy Communion.
“You have ignored your spirit man, your reincarnator. You leave him unattended. He is hungry,” Elebeke told me, his sing-song voice old and worn out beneath his neck beads. I wanted to scream at the inner man who had upturned my life and still claimed disregard. Why did he come to me? Why did he choose the body of a girl for his second coming, imprinting his mining fingers upon everything that was mine? Was that him clouding my vision too, causing the short sightedness? What more will he stake a claim to? What more is left? I felt too weary to demand these answers from Elebeke.
“Go to him and feed him,” were the dibia’s words of farewell as his servant guided me out through a room filled with dangling animal skulls.
I course through the Iva Valley town trying to fit my feet into the footsteps of my uncle. An uninhabited ruin of a hut that’s hidden from the roadside by a thicket beckons on me with two hands, I tumble towards it. The shrubs tower above the roof, and right there in the shade of the surrounding trees, my shoulders shed their age long weight. Chill stabs through me. It is here, the piece of earth I once called mine. The sand and the pebbles susurrate underfoot. I bend and pick a handful of sand, letting the teeth graze my palm. My head becomes awash with unclear flashes of screenshots from a past deemed to have belonged to me once. The breeze teems with voices that appear passed down across distance and time through millions of sagged phone wires. The wind breaks into a welcome hum.
I throw some kola nuts and conch shells on the ground as Elebeke instructed, in silent plea to Okwueke to accept the offering and pardon me for trying to repress him. It is the first time Okwueke and I hold a real conversation.
I have always striven to give voice to the feeling I get from being a repository for two souls, listening to the guilts and fears of one, mollifying them, and trying hard not to spill them to the other, settling rows between them and establishing partitions that are often disregarded. I exist in a constant fractional state, taking great strides in the present, in the birdsongs, in the traffic jam of the cities I live in, in the subdued light of dusk, in the perfume the earth lets off after a heavy rain, and even greater strides in a blurred past that whips around me like a howling wind, like there are whispers littered about in the air, or like there’s a kettle of water aboil for many lifetimes.
I return to Gregory’s car and we drive towards the exit road. The houses are old, the walls with cracked skulls are left as they are. There is no visible effort to preserve this coal town as modern and as breathtaking as coal left it.
The market that rests on the crest of a slope brims with buyers on our way out. Just at the tail of the town, before we rejoin the city of Enugu, we accost ten bronze images of men erected on a platform at the junction. It is an art work dedicated to the massacre. Two of the men (who represent the colonial police) have their guns pointed at the other men, the miners. One of the miners raises a shovel in defiance, it appears. Another miner lies spread-eagled, dead, and three others fall backwards, captured mid-air. Either screaming in protest or pain, there’s a sense of pride about the men, even in the face of a thing as terrible as death. Looking at the sculptures, I imagine the scene of the ill-fated day; seas of bearded and clean shaven faces, mops of black hair, muscular bodies of men darkened by coal swinging and pushing blindly against the gunshots. My hands dart involuntarily to my lower abdomen, the spot where the uncle, who has become me, took his own bullet. The scar from the surgery has solidified into a narrow line of callused skin.
I have appeased Okwueke, the spirit man, the miner, the reincarnator, and hopefully erected a frontier that he’d respect going forward. We may still share things – voice, hairline, fingertips and heels, but I am exhausted being the dunghill for the ailments of his lifetime. I hope he honours the new wall.
The sky is a bowl of Sapphire. The evening wind rolls around the fading greenery of the surrounding forest; nature speaking to nature in all courteousness. My tour time has long ticked past.
*
Twice have I been lacerated by a surgeon’s knife, and in that semi-conscious state before waking, where you swim strange oceans and walk fields that drip with blooming roses, where you gaze at life as a person dying of thirst might gaze at water placed beyond her reach, it is here that I come. It is the Milken hill that I traverse in that state of halfness — the cliff, the slope, the valley, the shallow river that flows in the glens of the highlands and beneath the dead cadavers of trees and leaves. I always see Dad (who is now also dead) and Uncle Okwueke, his figure sheathed by a black shroud. It is in this state that I see the man whose cells and wounds I carry and nurture, whose face has constantly eluded my dreams. It takes the transparent mask, and the surgeon’s knives that section the layers of my skin, and some bleeding to summon him. He and Dad scoot ahead, the wind roaring by them. Uncle is always tight-lipped; Dad appears to do all the talking. Sometimes the paths are free; other times there is traffic of bodies I have to push through for a coup d’oeil at them. It is here, the place that perhaps held the most pain in their lives that I spend the hours that precede my return trip to life.
Frances Ogamba’s stories appear or are forthcoming on Chestnut Review, Jalada Africa, Munyori Literary Journal, Arts and Africa, in the 2019 New Weather for MEDIA anthology, and in the first issue of Rewrite Reads. Her nonfiction piece, “The Valley of Memories,” won the 2019 Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction.
Valley of Memories was first published in Arts and Africa.
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