Knowability and Unknowability of the Ancestral Spirits in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

By

Obododimma Oha

In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, we are presented by the intervention of mmanwụ the masked spirit of the ancestor, which the author in his dialect of Igbo calls egwugwu, in the settlement of a quarrel involving spouses and indeed the entire community. But in the intervention, other important issues surface. Among them are the idea of the presence of the dead (the slippery community constituted by humans and spirits), the inner religious colonial structure in which spirits dominate and rule perpetually over humans, and the idea of the knowable and the unknowable in philosophy of the culture in which spirits can be present in the world of humans and have the final say in the affairs of humans. The idea of what is knowable and what is considered unknowable in the culture is an interesting one and does engage one’s attention. This essay tries to engage this discourse on knowability which the mmanwụ brings up in the settlement.

When the masked spirit asks: “ụzọwulu’s body, do you know me?” and ụzọwulu, answers: “How can I know you? You are unknowable,” the spirit is trying to test ụzọwulu as a member of the culture who should know what is not knowable and what is not. In other words, it is a kind of riddle, the kind that the Sphinx is likely to ask. In addition, ụzọwulu as probably an initiate of the mmanwụ cult should know its verbal signification presented by the mmanwụ and how to respond. Either way, he is face-to-face with the idea of knowability in his culture and needs to answer appropriately.

In another preceding blog article, I had examined signification as the central thing in Igbo masquerading and its communication. I had pointed out that being an initiate means being fully educated in the signifying practices of mmanwụ and meeting its communicative competence as an insider. The test from the masked spirit was therefore mmanwụ signification at work at the ilo with initiates and noninitiates present.

Achebe in the narrative tries to assist readers by adding that masked spirits in the culture address humans as “body,”hence, “ụzọwulu’s body” as a usage. So, that person deixis should be clear to us and to ụzọwulu. The real problem he must tackle is in the other part of the interrogative act: “...do you KNOW me?” Two things in the problem: the verb “know” and the object “me.” If ụzọwulu can tell or differentiate between this "me" and other “Mes,” he has safely  crossed the bridge. So, the knowability hovers around “me.” Or how can “me” be decoded?  ụzọwulu should know that it is referring to the masked spirit of an ancestor, which cannot be said to be known in the culture, even if he had helped somebody he knows to put on the mask. Achebe even points out that one of the spirits has a springy stride like Okonkwo, such that his closest friends and wives could tell if he is the one. But none says that it is Okonkwo.

In French, a distinction is made between the know of “savoir” (know as see, to be aware of something, to reason out; “connaitre,” or cognitive recognition, to recognize and “faire ” (knowing as being able to distinguish. That divergence in the little French lesson (lecon), should not disturb us! The main issue is that  our fictional friend is challenged to say if he can say everything he can recognize. If he can say everything he recognizes, he has stepped into greater trouble and would have a problem with the spirits, too. His saving grace is denial, this meaningful to the cult members.

Chinua Achebe is doing something there, other than just show us how ancestral spirits get involved in indigenous conflict resolution. Readers of the novel need to look at Achebe’s sub-text on indigenous clandestine semiotics involving ancestral spirits. It is power and identity staged at the slippery site of the sign.

Sculptures and the Idea of Lifelessness

By

Obododimma Oha

There is something about sculptures: they tend to suggest the idea of lifelessness. If this is a confession of a phobia, well, let it be. For your information, I started having that impression right from childhood. Faces of masks that people wore in secular masquerading, which were popularly called “okporompi” in my part of Igboland, scared me for they resembled human faces; in other words, they were projects of mimicry, of resemblance and analogy in the visual mode. But apart from this, there was that morbid resemblance between the lifeless human face of the mask and the face of the person lying in state. I was frightened by lifelessness in them and this dread was extended to sculptures of human figures (you know death is frightening!). In fact, an uncle had a wooden form, called “nwagoro oyibo” and it always frightened me, in spite of the oyibo attached to it. To meet Nwagoro oyibo in my dream was terrible. I always made sure I woke up, but, of course, I held the person sleeping next to me tightly.

Don’t think that I was the first to draw attention between the iconic visual image and lifelessness. The thinker, Michel Foucault, was there before me. He was interested in photography and saw the still-life capturing of the image by the camera as similar to death. The image is a transformation and trans-fixity into deathly or deathsome lifelessness! At the time the person takes a pose for a photograph or is adjusted  by a photographer to have a particular pose, the transformation has taken over: the living is becoming the dead!

In Nigeria, this lifelessness is coming back to frighten me in Rochas Okorocha’s commissioning of sculptors to sculpt his friends in government. First, he commissioned the sculpting of Jacob Zuma, a later discredited president of South Africa. Why Jacob Zuma? Some people were wondering. What has he or his government done for Imo State? But as destiny would have it, Zuma was removed in South Africa and coincidentally, his statue was pushed down in Owerri, Imo State, as if being forced out of government was a kind of death signified by the fall of the statue. See Figure Three below. 

Figure One: Sculpture of Jacob Zuma. (Source: Facebook wall of Dada Babatunde Seun)

Zuma was disgraced out of office in South Africa, a symbolic fall for the sculpture too, I repeat!

 With the exit of Zuma, Okorocha was not yet done with sculptures, and particularly the sculptures of the controversial. The sculpting of Muhammadu Buhari and the  planned commissioning of the statue at a time Buhari’s government is accused by Nigeria’s South-East of being unkind to it and discriminatory, is only very provocative, even insulting. See Figure Two below.

Muhammadu Buhari's sculpture to be commissioned. (Source: Facebook wall of Franklin's Chinedu)

Let us hope the sculpture, which has also made my phobia for  the scuplted image become updated and epidemic, would not be violently pushed down and smashed when Rochas leaves office and when Buhari follows.

Humans register their inevitable mortality and lifelessness in sculptures. Or, to put it differently, sculptures are good narratives of our mortality. There is time for everything, says Qoheleth’s Rhythm. There is time to narrate mortality in sculptures and there is time to see the mortality of both the sculpture and the sculpted. There is a time for sculptures to stand erect and time for sculptures to take a plunge, a Zuma plunge.

Figure Three: The symbolic plunge of Zuma's sculpture. (Source: Facebook wall of Adebayo Olusola)

I like lifelessness of sculptures, although it frightens me that the boundary between the living and the dead, as narrated by them, is slim. Sculptures tell us about lifelessness, now and after. Sculptures indicate that death is our nearest neighbour, always.

Photographers: Historians or Creative Artists?

By

Obododimma Oha

Sometime ago, I updated my Facebook wall and indicated what was “on (my) mind” as whether Facebook was fast-turning into an electronic album where, if we buy a new Christmas costume, we want the whole world to see it and commend us. It was not only the costume that was the only focus of attention in that update (although it would seem so). The focus was also on the author of the image, the photographer. The need to focus on the image-maker came up a while ago as I was reading up Facebook updates and saw one that featured the representation of photographers as “historians.” Yes; we are familiar with that. We could think of photographers as telling stories in the visual mode. They are not just there to mimick the images seen by the mediator, the lens. Haven’t some of them left their mounted cameras before to adjust your neck, this position or that? That flying attire or this background? Surely, they are intervening in the way the lens would see what it sees and for the camera to record or tell part of the story.  That intervention is a choice, a  creative selection from options.

So, you cannot climb over the photographer to view the image. In fact, the photographer joins the camera in telling the story, but the photographer is also part of the story. The agents of the making of the story are also part of the story. Remove the photographer and the story changes!

Yes, the photographer matters in the way a photograph tells the story. Sometimes, some photographers enter the act of image-making fully, even creating an impression that they are the ones giving the image as it is. Do you blame them? That is maximum involvement. In fact, I like watching them act, whether they are armed with the ubiquitous Android phones or JVC or some of those cameras that make you wonder whether the shot is a real shot and a bullet would come flying  or a rockect is launched at the target. Stop terrorizing me, camera makers, and confusing shot with shot!

Well, let us return to a safer zone and talk about photographers as historians and creative artistry. I have said that the photographers are agents of story-telling that are interestingly part of the story. How can one be writing a novel and yet be a character in it? Amazing, but there are such stylistic twists. Technology is even further providing a very “problematic” twist through photoshopping software which extends the creativity brought in by the photo story-teller. The photoshop further brings in the flexibility of iconicity of the image, so that reality and truth are greatly undermined. What you see is just a matter of possibility, not certainty; the image is worth a thousand words but that is practically an image created by you. It reminds one about creation itself. We also try to recreate ourselves and our world. We are not satisfied with the way things are, or everything existing is just a raw material. We can adjust it, at least  a bit and have a different reality. So, photoshopping is a philosophy, a philosophy of the images. And creation is about images of images (not just a simple matter of turning a photograph into a hand-drawn representation, asking technology to move backwards a bit).

Photographers tell their stories visually, but that is not the end of the story. When the framed photograph gets home, the wife or whoever cares would pick it up, ask it to be part of the visual story on the walls. She has the story all worked out in her head. She knows the positions for the photo (you could say the plot of her story) and the company some would have to keep. Some photographs could be placed nearer others to maintain a rigid visual syntax. Some images may even be iterated, thanks to more photographs coming in from weddings and other social occasions in a country like Nigeria. Don’t ask me how the numerous commercial photographers know their targets! Anyway, do not attempt to tamper with the way she has planned and executed her visual story. You could be taking a great and grave risk. She has told her story and she is also part of the story; on a page that is the parlour.

She is a visual historian (the same way you have the oral historian in the raconteur), but she is also a creative artist. She has creative plans, the photographer too. In fact, she is only following in the footsteps of the photographer in the image-making project. But this essay is not about her; she is only a proxy and related things somehow matter to us. The photographer, the major figure she represents, is the focus. I want to join my Facebook friend in recognising this figure as a historian, but provide an extension: that visual historian is also a creative artist!

Recognising the Simple Jesus in a Modern Attire

By

Obododimma Oha

 Figure One: A popular artist's impression of Jesus Christ. Source: biographyonline.net

It is obvious that some leaders of Christian churches have started confusing the form with the substance, a represenation with the real thing. Images of personalities like Jesus that we see are just artists’ impressions; they are twice removed from reality, just as some accounts that we have in the Holy Bible were first oral traditional narratives told by people (from mouth to mouth), each teller adding salt and pepper here and there to make the telling sweeter. Have we just forgotten that images of Jesus Christ we see are the impressions by artists who felt that the white face they represented looked like it? What if Jesus had been black or blackened (from all his wanderings and travels)? Would his universal adoration have been the same? Well, let us leave that to theologians to chew and quarrel and fight. But what is central to this article is the depiction of the dressing of Jesus, just as he chose to come in human form, eating like humans do, drinking, going to toilet, urinating, sleeping, waking, etc. Being in human form was why he even died on the cross. And the one we hardly think about: he had a skin like us and so his number one covering was human skin!

Figure Two: Another popular image of Jesus Christ. Source: amazon.com

In the time of Jesus Christ, of course there was no photography (not to talk of photoshoppping software). There were only sculptors and some leaders like Rochas Okorocha of Imo State, Nigeria, who would want to commission the sculpting of important personages, as he did once upon a time for Jacob Zuma of South Africa. If Jesus lived in the time of Okorocha, perhaps a sculpture of him would have been erected to grace the Imo State capital and tell the heroic story of his miracles of several exotic cars and numerous investments. A sculpture was a chief means of telling the story of an important person like Jesus Christ, a real historical figure, even though there were scriveners and griots who used language aesthetically to narrate him and his deeds.

What develops out of this? In our  new hero-worship, we forget the humanity of Jesus and that he liked it. Also, his dressing was not permanent. Jesus wore what each artist gave him, but in reality his dressing was in conformity with his time. He wore the Semitic long gown, yes. Sandals, of course. Maybe he would have worn Cortina shoes if he had been a child going to school in my time; caned by his teachers if he was naughty sometimes.

Yes; he would not always wear that recognisable Semitic long gown and sometimes appear bare-footed. His hair style, too. Maybe as my school mate he would wear “brush head” but if a modern child he may choose to wear one of these shaggy hairstyles and have his ears wired, listening to his favourite rabbi or popular musician playing religious hip-hop. He could even see the General Overseer of the temple once in a while.

But, if he chooses to shift from a semiotic stereotype of him, maybe wearing these, or tattered jeans pants, T-shirt, and baseball cap, I am sorry for him when he wants to enter the temple, not to talk of going near the altar when the archbishop or General Overseer is celebrating, maybe taking the microphone and announcing himself as “Jesus Christ!” Won’t the ushers quickly grab him and he could be seen as a terrorist waiting to strike? Do you blame them? Think of the Sri Lanka church bombing!

Figure Three: A Very Modern Jesus. Source: funnyjunk.com

Do you see why and how visual representations of Jesus Christ have to be permanent or stereotyped, even if they are artists’ impressions, far from reality? Was it not how the mermaid (momiwata) in Nigerian worship turned out to be a pretty Indian woman in Nigeria in those days and as a religious fraudster received all the encomium and sacrifices? That of Jesus is particularly disturbing becuse the top echelon of Christianity already intoxicated by power and Roman procedures of worship brought into Christianity would not recognise him as their leader if he chooses to come simple, modified in any way by our age, and not ready to respect constituted authority again! It is even the leadership of the church that would crucify him themselves, not the Roman soldiers.

Human beings have courageously used human language in signifying God and his actions. We have to think of God through what we can understand. In a similar way, they have to represent Jesus in the ways that suit them, but forget that he is free to put on something different but fashionable, i.e. in conformity with the present time.

Figure Four: A Black Jesus Christ.Source: ghostprintgallery.com

Figure Five: Jesus Christ the Spiderman. a modern Jesus. Source: pinterest.com

“The Gods of Our Land”: A Nollywood Common Expression

By

Obododimma Oha

A common expression one hears in many Nollywood films focusing on indigenous Nigerian life is “The gods of our land.” One does not need to be an expert in African Traditional Religions to understand that this sounds like a local self-enslavement to the supernatural, or a kind of fatalism in which the divinities have the final say. In this case, human beings just leave their affairs in the hands of the supernatural, but we know as viewers that it is humans who eventually take the decisions on behalf of the unseen entities. If it is banishment pronounced by the “king” against a widow accused of witchcraft, or an abomination pronounced by the chief priest, it is all in the service of “the gods of our land,” or it is “the gods of our land” who have “spoken.” The innocent widow has to be banished, chased out of the community, by a rabble that cannot think on their own. So, in this essay, I briefly look at how humans mortgage their interests with their expression or acts attributed to unseen divinities. What does this imply for human society in its relationship with the supernatural? I consider the interpretation of human actions as the action of the supernatural and how this makes the society susceptible to tyranny.

The expression, “the gods of our land,” first of all points to a triadic relationship: humans relate with humans, but they are not alone. As in many African situations, the world of humanity is seen as being intertwined with that of the supernatural which is populated by gods, goddesses, as well as other divinities. As I pointed out in another blog essay, the supernatural that are privatized or attached to the community are means of constructing identity and may even be weaponized. The primary role they play is to protect the community (since they belong to it) against another. But we know that when they fail in this role, they could be replaced. Chief priests as spiritual merchants may recommend and install other deities as being more responsive and powerful. Do you blame the local people? The deities are not just there to consume sacrifices but cannot make one community win a war against another. They have to transform into shells, fighters and bombers and even light weapons. They have to fight the enemy at the spiritual battlefield.

This then means that a deity could be transplanted, and as such, there is really no indigenous deity, no “gods of our land.” The postmodifier, “of our land” is just because their conscription or new identity for the moment. “Gods of our land” could become “gods of their land” and it is always “them versus us.” That is to say that the divinities have a social identity that is tentative. Communities that insist on permanent social identities for deities are disadvantaged.

The expression also makes community logic very prominent. In that relationship I talked about earlier, they are privileged, in the sense that they are the final arbiters. The members of the community must defer to them in everything. But there is a contradiction! Whether through the Afa divination (Ifa in Yoruba) or through the mouth of the king, the pronouncement deploys the human to be actualized. That is, it is the human that decides, deploys their logic, in deciding a case!

This has serious consequences!

First, consequences for the deities: errors or right actions could be attributed to them.

Second, humans could very easily smuggle in their own sentiments and claim that  such are the wills of the deities. Don’t tell me that they cannot do this! They can and sometimes do. They can smuggle those in so to feature human wickedness as divine action, since they know that naïve members of the community would swallow every spittle that is labelled as the gods’.  

The second above creates room for tyranny. People already enslaved to the supernatural can easily be mentally manipulated and deceived. They can easily do anything that they are told, since the directive is supposedly from “gods of our land.” In that line of thinking, they can submit to the worst form of leadership in the world, in the name of doing the wills of “the gods of our land.”

Now, the expression also represents the fatalistic logic of the community as one source of the community’s problem.  The community cannot possibly develop beyond its fatalistic logic. The logic is its norm. The logic is its future. Really, it has no future. If it has a future, it means it has to change its system of thinking – and, inevitably, “the gods of our land.”

Anytime I hear “the gods of our land” while watching a Nollywood film, one of the things that come to my mind is that the film is in a genre of traditionalism in which the bad could be the good. Although not all films in the genre surrender human logic to culture, it is often the case that the arbiters are above our heads and we are invited not to bring our logic with us. The “gods of our land” will have the final say, even if they are pursuing injustice. That may be part of the war they are conscripted to fight!

Many may be enjoying the film (as superstition can be so commodified), but I am worried that populations are exposed to a dangerous ideology: they are made to believe that they can suspend their own logic as community members in discourse, and depend rather on a ready-made thinking that may be against their interest really. That imposition, too, may come from “the gods of their land.”

Village-square Wisdoms and Facebook Pugilisms.

By

Obododimma Oha

I like sharing Igbo proverbs on Facebook  and one of the challenges I face in doing so is to negotiate audience beyond those who can read and understand the language. Of Course, I mostly use standard Igbo, but even if my primary intention is celebrate Igboness or Igbo thought in language. I am aware of the fact that not many of the present speakers of the language can read it. Readership of a language like Igbo is still very low, some quarreling with the variety of Igbo used or the orthography. Well, the most important thing is that I have to get many people (Igbo or non-Igbo) to celebrate the proverb. And in getting many to appreciate the sharing, I find the need to translate it into English, which remains dominant on the Internet. Perhaps in widening the audience (hopefully) through English, I also get many non-Igbo to appreciate Igbo thought in proverbs! Other things I am able to achieve are:

(a)   Commenters provide variants of the proverb in their own languages or cultures, further assisting my learning of other languages, dialects, and cultures.

(b)   Commenters make observations on the translation of the proverb and may offer better translations.

(c)    I inadvertently mount a Focus Group Discussion, actually coming close to the idea of the use of Facebook as a context of research.

I know that Facebook is many things to many of its users.

(a)   It may be understood as a playground. As a playground, it may have bullies. Some may like to bully others through useless argument or argument for argument-sake, even when they have realised the sound points that others are making. They may just wrestle with the other, for the sake of displaying their intelligence (which amounts to their idiocy!).

The bullying could be in various forms. They may bully the other through tortuous reasoning. In this case, they are merely taking the other in a Tom-and-Jerry race round the house, breaking things and breaking relationship networks.

They may choose to bully the other through language, especially professional variety that isolates the other, or makes the other a stranger to the new world of knowing. It may be a profession that likes sprinkling latinisms on the English text. OK, you are using English but you can’t understand me. You won’t understand me. Learnedness requires an initiation through language. You are an outsider, therefore a non-knower. A non initiate. It may even be post-structuralist language. You are simply alienated again, even in the periphery of peripheries. There is a difference between those who have mastered this language and those who are tied to porous peripheral expression. It is English but not the same English, my friend!

Well, the bully can bruise your nose because it is hide-and-speak, even if the person armed with an android and is online is a mere beggar, literally. But the bully can bruise your image in many other ways: it may be just to undermine your fellowship of friends – make some begin to dislike you. You have been bruised. You have bought it cheaply! Yes, at the playground where a fight can be a play because the very teeth the dog uses in fighting are the ones it uses in playing. No other. It doesn’t go borrowing other harmless teeth!

So, be careful when you are on this playground. Maybe you shouldn’t be here and do not know how to be here. Maybe you still have your physical reality, your importance, all around you. Look, ilo Facebook, as Pa Ikhide calls it, does not recognise your “sir.” One reptile somewhere (or even a virus) can throw sand at you or into your eyes. This ilo Facebook could be a leveller. You get into problems when you want to bring your real-world conditions into this virtual ilo!

(b)   Of course, I have not forgotten that ilo Facebook could be and has been used by some as a marketplace. Sellers and buyers. Sellers of buyers. Buyers of sellers. But like any marketplace, you need to de-babelize; the buyers and the sellers have to understand the transaction fairly well.

(c)    It is in this comprehension of transaction that my proverb lore is smuggled in. Oh, smuggled in? It must be a contraband that Customs Service is sniffing around for along Lagos-Benin highway in Nigeria! And sometimes, it is seen as one. You have to see us and the road before your lorryload of proverbs can  pass!

 Generally, the sharing of proverbs to friends who could be from different cultures and languages could be seen as an infringement on their right or desire not to be imposed upon, what more when the proverb is understood as a symbol of identity or pride. You see, Facebook as part of social media helps advocacy. Political advocacy. Human rights advocacy. Language advocacy. Cultural advocacy. Religious advocacy. Et cetera. In this case, proverbs from a given language or culture may be shared to a group or friends as a way of advancing a common interest or a targeted interest. It is placed in our faces or gaze where we can see it! So, it easily becomes an imposition to those not interested!

(d)   Of course, as noted earlier, the ilo is also a context of research. I could turn my writing on proverb lore on Facebook into a survey, either asking a question directly and using the comments or supply a link to my survey instrument. To make it brief, while some are bullying and giving the other a red nose, I am carefully collecting my data.

But, let me return to the issue of sharing proverbs (created by the sharer or taken from a  culture). Is the sharing of a proverb or of any material not an argument? If it is specifically a proverb, I must have constructed or presented myself as a kind of revered knower. Indeed, every person is gifted with the ability to think, to produce thought that is considered profound. No proverb has come from Heaven; it is part of the software installed into the human head at creation. It is an evidence that we can think, and tied to our signifying system. Indeed, we share something with our Maker and should give it full attention. When I share proverbs, therefore, as part of the polyglossic nature of my medium, I am doing something with knowledge with people. I am presenting myself as a knower and inviting others to that deeper part of our signification.

When there is the credit and testimonial (maybe of cultural origin of the proverb), this presentation of the source as thinker is advertised. It is a group that is the author or it is used in building up the image of the group. This is not that bad, anyway. Did anyone prevent you from presenting that of your group, so that the local will forever have a presence in the global? Did anyone debar you from being able to read your own very language? Look at you asking for a translation! Into English! So that forever the imperialist can argue its relevance: “You see, I am the imperialist but the unifying factor!” United through deprivation. A Justification of colonisation! And by the way, your ancestors waited for the colonialist to look for an orthography and to start writing your local language for you!

So, I may be helping the linguistic other to understand the proverb that I have shared on Facebook, but I am not really helping the other. Maybe I am helping so that the grave would be deeper and more challenging. Maybe I am helping mental laziness through translation. Maybe I am fighting on the side of the colonizer without knowing it!

When next I share and translate Igbo proverbs on Facebook into English, think about that help that I must be giving you at the playground, whether it is not a red nose!

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.