By
Obododimma Oha
When my late father made it a habit to be paying me a visit in my room, I thought that he was inconveniencing me. That old man always came when it was most inconvenient, particularly when I was enjoying my sleep. In the afternoon? How could I be sleeping in the afternoon? Was I sick? These were among his queries if it was in the afternoon, but he came mostly at night, when many people were asleep and everywhere was quite. He preferred the night, for he asserted that: “Ufu na egbeleke bụ n’ehihie, mana iruro bụ n’anyasị” (roughly translated as “Playing and gallivanting are for the daytime, but a serious discussion requiring counselling is for the night.” You see, so he was coming regularly to counsel me, but I did not realise it then. Since he was always awake in the night (so it seemed to me), I thought that he meant to punish me and force to stay awake with him! So, I had no choice but carry my cross. I realized later that he guessed this wrong thinking of mine and it pained him, and I was included in the frustration that he sometimes voiced out: "Nkịta m na-egburu ngwere asabeghị anya" ("The puppies for which I am killing lizards have not yet opened their eyes."
When I was an undergraduate at the university, it just entered my young, noisy head to record some of that seemingly useless talk. At least, I could prevent some future night visits by letting my father know that I could play back the recording and listen to him when I wanted or in my privacy. What a strategy!
That casual recording was a personal assignment of a sort and you know how one could be highly committed in such assignments. I quickly bought some empty cassettes and set out for our village. It was late in the afternoon when I arrived and quickly swung into action. I told him that I needed to record the story of his life and luckily, he cooperated. We started and I did not mind all the local noises that were intruding. I recorded all.
Today, when I play the files, those noises even provide some naturalness to the whole thing.
Many years later, after his death, when I was playing the files to the hearing of my siblings, some almost wept on hearing the voice of the man who owned the homestead and had been buried. Who would not go to pieces on being given a shock like this?
When I did the recording, I did not know that I was serving the future and helping paternal presence to speak beyond death. Ufu na egbeleke became immortal. Indeed, the recording was one of the most important things to take away as a memento from my late father.
This is a clear case of technology helping one to relive experience. I am now able to hear that voice again and to listen to my late father tell his own story. Even where one is unable to invoke memory on the thing narrated, the witness is there and can be invited again and again to tell it all as a witness.
Does it not show that we have been missing a lot by not trying to save a voice before it is heard no more?
Some lessons from this effort are noteworthy. First, the more authoritative transmission of experience. Then, there was was some serendipitous training on oral interview on culture, history, and life. Another is an additional articulation of personal story and personal life. Of course, we can think of many others.
Let us take this transmission of experience further. The tragedy of African and other cultures has been described by many commentators as the distortion of African experiences because of orality and the process of documentation. Human memory is also not very reliable, coupled with the fact that each re-teller may try to put in more salt and pepper here and there. And with more salt and pepper, don't we also see a distortion? But with some preservation of originality and authority, this distortion is minimized, if not erased.
Also, the person who recorded the narration has had some training through experiencing. There could have been a previous training on collection of this kind of historical data, which becomes an advantage, but the interviewer indeed has attended a practical session involving the learning of the past and early life of the narrator. The practical is indeed "Practical Oral History and Folklore," if we have to find a name for it.
I am sure many are just waiting to see what I have to say concerning memory as being unreliable and deliberate distortion through the addition of more salt and pepper. On memory: we know that it has to be kept green, has to be preserved. But memory sometimes fails and the narrator may just improvise. Improvisation means that, even though one is trying to make up for an inadequacy, one is really being dishonest in the performance. Has lying ceased to be a human art? This where that immoral conduct is enjoyed by humans and given some fanciful names!
Whereas this and other ones may suggest that society or audience is gaining, the idea of an attempt at articulating one's life and one's story points towards the narrator gaining more. We are often bombarded with a lot to think about in daily life. So, the interview gave the narrator an opprtunity to put X and Y together, stitch bits of personal experiences together to give us a coherent text. Without the opportunity, he probably would not have the time to write a biography few lettered people would read and learn.
I have said somewhere before that we sometimes learn from the experiences of other people. That is true and exemplified in this case. Listeners get to think of another way of handling the problems handled by the narrator. Is that not already critical thinking skill? The narrrator's personal experiences while in the village, an apprentice-trader in Cameroon, a plantation worker in Cameroon, as well as struggles over marriage and accidents in Nigeria are important contexts from which we can learn a lot.
A recording tries to save, for us to be able to retrieve later. Thus it is like preventing something from dying, making it live longer than naturally designed. Along this line, is recording not helpful to folklore?
To conclude, I am happy and proud that I did an audio recording of my father before he died many years ago, and wish it had been a video recording! Of course, the advantages of such a recording are enormous but real physical presence is far better. Death could be a devastation and a deprivation. Yet, capturing the little presence of people could be enriching and even more consoling than total absence except a gravestone, photograps marked "RIP" and obituaries from the archive.
