Sleeping with One Eye Open in a Time of Insecurity

By

Obododimma Oha

The expression “sleeping with one eye open” is an example of a statement of contradiction in logic. One asleep normally shuts two eyes in order to travel out from the body. Unless one is into witchcraft (if you believe in that creepy spirituality) or one is one strange alien whose idea of “sleep” is different from ours. But if one is at home with our human reality, one would view sleeping with one eye open as a very strange practice. Yet the expression becomes a necessary counsel in a time of insecurity or uncertainty where one may be in one’s hut at night only for invaders to break open the door, rape one’s pregnant wife, slaughter one’s children, and set the hut ablaze afterwards. One has to sleep with one eye open and observe the movement of malevolent shadows in the dark. Did our ancestors not take necessary measures to save themselves from slave-raiders, kidnappers, burglars, invaders, and all kinds of mischief makers? Now, we claim to be wiser, helped by exposure to modern technology, how can we be helpless? If we ask them humbly how they were able to do it in their own time, perhaps, they  would tell us. The fact is that we must be ready to learn. For we are in this galaxy to learn.

The Igbo sage puts it rightly: “Kee nkwụcha, na nkwụcha abụghị ụjọ” (Be vigilant, for vigilance is not an attitude of fear at all”). Another Igbo expression from the mouth of another sage adds: “Dụlaga m abụghị ụjọ maka na onweghị onye n’amaghị be ya (“See me off is not a symptom of fear because there is no one that cannot tell the way to their homestead”). And so, watchfulness is an ancient and all-time requirement. Leadership and the Law in many post-colonial nations may claim to be our protector, but our survival remains our individual businesses. Sleeping with one eye open and sleeping with both eyes closed in time of big trouble only indicate how far one understands one’s reality or environment and the measure of skills (life skills) one has cared to develop.

If I say that “sleeping with one eye open” is an example of a contradictory statement, am I not speaking from an angle of one privileged logic; am I not saying that there is a logic that is idealistic and better left to the books and the logic that flows from one’s understanding of one’s reality? “Sleeping with one eye open” may look like a contradictory statement in a logic taught at school, but not contradictory in a context where judgments are not held down with tough nails. In very strange situations, meaning has to be encoded in unusual ways and the insider has to have the keys to be able to unlock the doors of meanings. “Sleeping with one eye open” becomes the oppositional logic operational in worlds where things stand on their heads. Yes; worlds where things are upside-down, and being upside-down is my own problem, a perspective imposed by my reality or the way I look at things. That reminds one that in Igbo folktales, for instance, whenever the narrative shifts to the land of the spirits, the representation of things changes. The logic changes. The spirits, because they have to be unlike us, are presented as walking upside-down, speaking through their noses, could be given seven heads, process information differently, and made to do strange things. For instance, they could eat through their eyes and may be offended if you frown at that or laugh at them! In other words, if we look at the statement (“sleeping with one eye open”), we could discover that it is inviting us to read meanings differently because it is a strange new world where, if humans have learnt to shoot without missing, one has to learn to fly without perching.

One has to learn to “sleep with one eye open” if cows are rated more important than humans and populations are slaughtered, including babies, because we in the era where communities could be”sacked” and renamed and a gate-keepers would watch this, helpless.

One has to learn to “sleep with one eye open” because cows are free to move free-range and could enter a garden and ruin it, devastating sites of labour from the Sahara desert to the Atlantic Ocean. The cows could even move freely in the streets of New York and London in the 17th century pretending to be the 21st century!

One has to begin to “sleep with one eye open” because we are back to being hunters and gatherers across time and no land belongs to anybody. In fact, one does not need be civilized anymore but should turn caves into homes, traversing territories and swinging one’s crudeness.

“Sleeping with one eye open” tells me to stop saying that it is well when it is not. I am either a hypocrite or a liar or even both if I say that it is well, when it is NOT. When logic fights logic, thinking is in trouble! Is thinking not even in trouble if one has to sleep with one eye open, or if somebody is moving backwards while others are moving forwards?