By
Obododimma Oha
There is an
Igbo children’s playtime song that identifies a father’s attitude as being
remarkably different from that of a mother in terms of the delay in the
father’s display of affection, even though both may be clear attempts to show
that their agents care (not all fathers are guilty of delayed affection or display of lack of love and not all mothers show love to their children as assumed in that folksong). The song, which is also a game, goes this way:
Nne na-enye mgbe o ji agụ m o
Nne na-enye mgbe o ji agụ m
Ma nna na-enye m ọ-gụbiga
ọ gụbiga o
were wetaya o!
(Mother gives me when I hunger for
it
Mother gives me when I hunger for it
But father gives
after-the-hunger-has-died-down
When the
hunger has died down he brings it)
Well, you can see that mothers are in favour
and do carry the day. In the child’s consciousness (he or she may grow up with
this brainwashing!), the mother is, comparatively speaking, idealized as more caring than
the father. Her show of love is not delayed! But the father delays his. Maybe
he is weighing things. Maybe he wants the child to have it maximally. Maybe
there are other reasons; not mere poor attention.
David G. Maillu’s novella, Dear Daughter, an
East African publication, demonstrates this this difference between paternal
response to a serious domestic issue, and a maternal type, in an interesting epistolary
narrative. The four letters that constitute the narrative (from the father to
his daughter, from the mother to her daughter, from the daughter to her mother,
and from the daughter to her father) are like the moves in an interaction, according
to Malcolm Coulthard’s structuring of classroom discourse (Initiation,
Response, and Follow-up). But the
exchange is not exactly as in Coulthard model. There is a response from the
daughter, Juliet Kamuya, to her father, Obadia Kivelenge, but is delayed (as a
way of building suspense), so that it becomes the last letter. Maybe the
absence of her father’s response, more than an authorial handling of plot,
indicates that there is nothing to respond to, that her allegations are
indubitable! It may also be a dignified silence (an indication of fear, that
this may open more cans of worms).
Dear Daughter is surprising, right from the
outset, because there is nothing endearing in the father’s first letter to her.
There is rather a deliberate attempt to make her get hurt in the type of
language used. Her father does not hide
this weaponization of language in his letter, even though there is that irony
in his opening, “Dear Daughter.” Is he just following a stereotype in letter
writing opening or trying to make her realize the demise of endearment? Maybe
so. In his letter to her (for which he would not want any reply), he disowns
her quite clearly:
(1)
If
you were my child, you would have tried to live like my child and kept up the
standard of morality in my home. Go away, I don’t know you (p. 10)
And much later, also says:
(2)
No,
no, no, Kamuya, you are not a child from my blood. Possibly your mother
conceived you with another man either through rape or by agreement (p.12)
His intention to hurt her, the goal he is pursuing, is made clear right at the beginning:
(3) If you find this letter bitter,
and I intend it to be so to you, you should also try to see why, being your
father, I am driven into being furious like this. And I want you to keep it in
that your small raw head that I do not get any pleasure out of writing
to you. I am even going against my will and committing a sin in doing so. (p.7;
underlining mine).
The
endearment then cancelled out, he proceeds to unleash his venom in language,
even to the point of being vulgar. The following are some of the expressions
with very offensive meanings in his reference to his daughter who has become
pregnant before marriage:
(4) A devil
(5) A living evil spirit which took
shelter in my home
(6) Your evil mouth
(7) A wild child, too difficult to be
loved
(8) A prostitute
(9) A sensual pig itching in the anus to
be fertilized by all the dogs of the village
(10)A female child of mine who has
thought it in order to piss on my Bible
(11) An adulterous evil-filled person
(12) A sheep that would wound you one
day or a dog that would bite you one day
(13) ... you prowled through the village
with your legs wide apart with the result that you got yourself impregnated.
The hate in
him, as revealed by these expressions, is undisguised. We are not even
surprised that the reply from Juliet is delayed. Wouldn’t she do some thinking
and decide whether to use an equally hurtful language (i.e. letting him taste
his own medicine) or not? The reply can wait. Good thinking in the plotting.
One is even reluctant to cite the examples above, but for the need for
evidence.
Obviously,
Odadia Kivelenge wants to create a distance between him and his daughter in
language, not just physically driving the poor girl away from his house. The
offensive expressions are face-threatening clearly, particularly her fellowship
face, the desire to be included or to be seen as an insider. She is labelled, a
prostitute, an evil spirit or its agent, and even animalized. In fact, the
animals in the metaphorization are culturally despicable ones – pig, dog,
sheep! This is an obvious way of saying: “Please, avoid her! We are not
surprised to read the impending doom he has predicted for her:
(14)What devil had courted your mother
for your birth? The world would witness the ruination of your life. And I want
you to die alone wherever you will die (p.9)
Yes; his
use of language shocks and we can’t help wondering what kind of father he is.
But we should not be much surprised for it all springs from his idea of love
for offsprin. He writes:
(15)To me, to love a child is to give
him food, a home, and education. Whatever else above that is a demand too big
for me to meet (p. 16). Nsogbu dịkwa (There’s a huge problem, you could exclaim
in Igbo, if you know the street language).
Unlike
Obadia Kivelenge who has allowed his religious fundamentalism and his
difficult personality to overtake him in his affection for his daughter, his
wife shows good understanding for the poor girl’s condition and the unborn baby
who has not offended anyone by wanting to come into the world. She, in her
letter, avoids her husband’s kind of offensive language, shows her pregnant
daughter that she cares, and encourages her to rise above her situation,
instead of thinking that she is ruined and finished. Hers is the use of
language as a balm, not as a weapon, unlike her husband.In fact, we witness
this right from the beginning of her letter. Unlike her husband who addresses
the girl as just “Dear Daughter, “ her
own is “My dearest daughter,”dearest child, “ and “dear child.” What a clever
way to disarm her and to reassure her? It is clear that she tries to draw
closer to her to make her feel loved, and to ask her to minimize this
psychological distance created. She writes:
(16)First of all as your mother I
embrace you with lots of greetings, concern and love. And this, dear daughter,
I am doing in tears. Your absence from this home is something like your
death to me. If only I could see you for
a minute and touch your head! It is my hope that you are well, and if you are
well, I am still anxious about your health and state of mind (p. 19).
Juliet draws his father’s attention to this
refusal to provide that psychological power of love, that welcome and healing
from parent:
(17) But I fell into grief and even you,
my true father, cannot console me!Never mind, the world will console me. An
orphan calf soon learns to live on grass and stand on its own. Life must be
lived, be it bad or good. ....Father, I expected some understanding from
you.... (p. 53).
Private
letters, tenor-marked, give the
impression that they are strictly for a specific audience, even when fabricated
or written as a literary rhetoric. Well, but those privacies may be undermined
when cross-reference or quotation (as evidence) is made. Today, is the letter
written many centuries ago by Paul to the people of Corinth not read in a
Nigerian church as if the writer is just one General Overseer at Cannanland,
Ota. Juliet refers to her father’s offensive letter in her reply to her mother.
And that is for a good reason:
(18)I do not know whether you are aware
of the letter that father wrote to me. It seems as if he is just as hot in the
head as he always was. The letter was very mean and nasty. Many people would
have burnt it immediately, but I didn’t.
I want to kept it as a piece of history and perhaps when my child has
grown up I will show him the kind of letter his grandfather wrote to me after
learning that I was pregnant. It is actually very difficult for me to
understand father – very difficult. (p. 34)
Yet, she
would not want her father to know that she has been communicating by letter
with her mother (and discloses to her that she has replied her father); her
mother wants a minimal distance; her father wants the maximal! She is her
confidante (as many mothers would) but he is her terrorist, pretentious
fanatic, and hypocrite, both in language and in action. In fact, in her reply,
in which she avoids insulting him back but confronts him with the facts, she
draws his attention to how his offensive language amounts to deliberately
pushing her away:
(19)Father, if you thought it in order
to call me a sensual pig instead of telling me, at least, something to back a
little hope to me – then I wonder, what I am in your eyes! Father, you were my
only hope on earth besides my mother. I had been thinking I had a home when
things went wrong , I could come for shelter. ... I didn’t know what it felt
like to have no father. Now I do. And I tell you father, it is not easy for me
to live like a child who has no father, when I know that my father is still
alive somewhere.... (p. 46)
Juliet, in
her reply to his letter, responds to the offensive references in (4) to (13)
above, showing how each does not truly capture her dispositions. The root of
the problem is her gender difference, her education or father’s investment in
her, a purely economic thing. Even her pregnancy is a man’s opportunistic
sexual exploitation of a young girl deceived into believing that the young man,
who has gone for further studies in the United States, would marry her. Indeed,
she is torn between disappointments in the hands of two selfish men!
Although
Juliet tries not to use the same offensive language of hate deployed by her
father in his letter, he nevertheless reveals to him (if it would shock him)
that she is aware of the following misdeeds of his:
(a) Impregnation of a girl early in life
and refusing to marry her (the daughter of Luusa) and many other girls that
came his way;
(b) His promiscuous love affair with
Nziva, a barren widow; and
(c) What happened to his first wife!
As we would
expect from a normal human being, she does not hide her objection and feeling
to the father’s offensive language, especially the denial of her paternity:
(20)Why did you think I am not a child
from your blood, and that, possibly, my mother was raped by a drunkard who
should have fathered me? What a statement! Did you have to write any
vomit that came into your mind?You did not even try to choose the right
word to write to me.If my mother was raped by any drunkard at all, that
drunkard was you because I look like you! (p.55)
It is indeed a vomit, no matter where it has come from! Her reasoning about the
drunkard being her father is well in order, her evidence verifiable. But what is
particularly important is that she is teaching Obadia her father what he should
know: a loved one or loving one is absent in his choice of language in his
letter. Relatives writing to relatives or friends writing to friends try to be
present lovingly in the language they use. It is from this language they can
imagine them and construct a good or loving relationship. Hard formality,
distancing , or hurtful remarks erase loving presence from these intimate forms
of communication. A wife who receives a letter from her husband is right in
looking for him in his choice of words, and vice versa.
Interestingly,
Juliet’s closing address indirectly accuses him and leaves him with regret. She
concludes by identifying herself as “Your loving daughter”! Which love is still
there, you could ask. Well, she still loves her father. What is obvious in her
attitude and reply is that she tries not to respond in a way to warrant him
hanging on a justification that she is, indeed, a bad daughter, but gives him a
surprise through a different style to make him live with regret.
Reference
Maillu, David G. 1976.Dear Daughter. Nairobi: Comb Books.
