A Father’s Language of Hatred; a Mother’s Language of Love

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.