There will be hope But the heart must cope First with a season Of conflict sans reason This moon is long faced And tied to a dead sea Rolling scrolls misplaced By startled history. You must be patient Time is clairaudient It hears your heart beating And your footfalls repeating The dance to victory. Che Chidi Chukwumerije Poems from the inner river
Of Death
AGE OF DAMAGE
This is a war that has been waiting to happen They don’t love each other and never did They are not forgiving each other deeds overlapping Generations whose hatred they never hid They send missiles to greet each other The way you and I send words to one another When we’re angry and pain does not bother To differentiate between strangers and brothers It is the age of damage The stage of rage and carnage Angry birds in an iron cage Trapped in rampage. Che Chidi Chukwumerije Poems from the inner river
COMRADE
There was an eagle in your eyes
In your gait
In your voice
In your words
In your deeds
In your mind
In your Heart, Daddy –
It was you. Your spirit. Your essence.
That eagle is flown away today
Six years ago
But the arch of its flight is still imprinted
In my memory
Like daylight in the nighttime.
A Comrade in life
And a Comrade in the afterlife.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
In Memoriam:
Comrade Uche Chukwumerije
11.01.1939 – 19.04.2015
Ugo Mba 1 Isuochi
Dike Ogu Ndi Igbo
Convinced Socialist. Proud Panafricanist.
Father. Teacher. Comrade. Enigma.
MIND THE MOMENT
Your time will always pass
And it will pass at a time
Least convenient to you
Just as it came at a time
Not quite expected by you
And lasted for a length of time
Unappreciated by you.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
BOYS TO MEN
The older I get,
The more I miss my father.
The more knowing I grow,
The more I miss him.
The more I know him.
The more I understand him.
We live life forwards,
But understand life backwards.
When it‘s too late to change anything,
That’s when we understand everything.
The young shall grow.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
(I just feel like remembering today)
JEMILA’S JOLLOF RICE AND CHICKEN
Jemila Ibrahim 25.04.83 – 26.02.05
“Jemila, this your jollof rice and chicken is too sweet oh! Chai! How did you make it?”
“You that can’t even fry egg, how do you want me to start explaining to you how to make jollof rice and chicken?”
Chizo, who was listening, started laughing.
“You people don’t know we are in Africa where you can’t be laughing at your senior anyhow, abi.”
Of course this only made them laugh louder. So I had to take up the challenge.
“OK, next time you want to make rice and chicken, just call me. I will watch, take notes and learn it by force.”
Their laughter became uncontrollable.
Chizo said, “Please, let it be on a day when I am here oh. I have to witness this spectacle.”
It was early 2004. I was abroad most of the time, doing my Aviation Management course. I had given up my flat in Apapa, and anytime I was in Lagos I stayed at Aunty Uzo’s place in Maryland. Jemila, her daughter, had a bad case of sickle cell anaemia. It had taken a slight turn for the worse and she stayed at home a lot. She had bad days on which she lay around and did not say much, but you saw the pain on her face. But she also had her good days. On the good days her voice was loud and her laughter was bright, she would go into the kitchen and cook and there was no end to her cheeky rejoiners and replies to everything she heard. But, good days or bad days, every Sunday she tried her best to get up and go to worship. She prayed a lot and had a pure simple childlike faith. She was 20 years old.
Well, the day finally came. One of her good days. Chizo was there, visiting Aunty Uzo and her younger cousin Jemila like she often did. And I was in the country. I took my notebook and joined Jemila and Chizo in the kitchen.
“So what do you want to learn now exactly?” Jemila laughed.
“That your jollof rice and chicken you made the last time.”
“Everyone makes their own differently oh,” she warned.
“Just that particular one you made, that’s the one I want. It was too delicious.”
“Okay oh. So how do you want to learn it.”
I brought out my notebook and pen.
“Just be doing, I will be watching and taking notes. Anything I don’t understand, I will ask you.”
Chizo had been trying her best to hold back her laughter. At this point she exploded and settled against the doorpost.
“Ngwa nu, let’s go,” she said.
———- ———- ———- ———- ———-
It is 14 years later, I am going through some of my old books and papers, like I am sometimes wont to do. I pick up a little notebook that I have not bothered with for longer than I can remember. Idly I flip open the first pages and suddenly … I freeze. The shock of reawakening memory hits me like a blow. Sadness and joy seize me simultaneously. Slowly, as if in a trance, I start to read:
JEMILA’S JOLLOF RICE AND CHICKEN
1. Put Chicken in small pot with assorted seasoning: e.g. curry, thyme, onions, dried pepper, maggi (1 cube), small salt, any other chicken seasoning. Put everything on fire without water for 2 minutes, turning and stirring. Then add a little water and cover pot on fire. Leave to cook until it gets soft. Along the way keep adding water. Be tasting the broth along the way, adding any seasoning whose taste is missing (e.g. salt, maggi).
– Soft Chicken takes about 10 minues to soften
– Hard Chicken takes about 30 minutes to soften
2. While waiting for Stage 1 to complete itself, grind (or blend) tomato and pepper. Wash the tomatoes and cut them first (if blending). Wash and cut onions also and put into blender. Wash and open fresh pepper (tatase). Wash and remove seeds from Tatase (don’t touch with hand, if possible: tatase seeds peppery). Then cut up and put in blender too. The Tatase is just to make it red, that’s why the seeds have been removed.
We’re cooking 3 cups of rice.
Use e.g. 8 or 9 fresh tomatoes, 1 onion bulb, 2 Tatases, 5 to 8 fresh peppers.
We could have used more Tatase, but because we’re also using tinned tomato, which is very red, 2 Tatases are enough.
NOW BLEND UP! BELND UP!
3. Wash rice. Put in a pot with water. Put on fire. We are parboiling it, maybe 5 to 10 minutes; so it doesn’t get soft, just white. (It may last 20 mins…).
After parboiling, wash again and drain water away (with sieve, if available).
4. Break Maggi into parboiled rice. Put thyme and curry and also any other seasoning you have into the drained parboiled rice.
5. Make sauce in another pot:
Slice a quarter onion. Put enough oil into new pot on fire.
Add sliced onions and little salt.
(Salt helps onion not to burn quickly – CHIZO’S THEOREM!)
Add tinned tomato. Add blended mix of STAGE 2. (Keep stirring all the while). Now cover pot and leave to cook on fire until it boils – might even dry up a bit – because of pepper and tomato. Also add Chicken Broth!
After some 10 or 15 mins, add a little more thyme and curry.
Add a little more water and then transfer the parboiled rice into the ready sauce. Add also a little more oil (groundnut oil oh!). Cook until it cooks fully. (Never turn)
6. While cooking is on, say about 15 mins before end, slice carrots and green pepper.
Add 2 more maggi cubes, soften with tiny water. Slice the carrots lengthwise and breathwise.
When rice is soft, introduce carrots and green pepper. Now turn, stir and mix. Taste for weak seasoning, e.g. salt, maggi, etc. If needed, add, mix.
Turn off fire.
7. WACK UR GRUB.
———- ———- ———- ———- ———- ———-
Quietly I close the notebook and sit still for a long time.
If Jemila were still alive, she would turn 35 today. I remember the picture Yvonne and I took of her. It was at the end of 2004, at Azuka’s wedding. She looked happy. If she was in pain, she did not show it. She was shy, smiled and looked down when she saw the camera. She looked older than she was. A beautiful moment. Our favourite picture of her.
The year after that, in 2005, the bad days came more often. Her face would be contorted in pain. An unending crisis. One round of dialysis after the other. Her eyes wiser, much wiser, than her age. On the 26th of February 2005 , she left. She was 21 years old.
The deepest memories are sometimes stored in the simplest of things.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
In loving memory of Jemila Ibrahim: 25.04.83 – 26.02.05
THE SPLIT
I’m quiet tonight
Never mind that it’s morning
I’m still dreaming
I remember a friend
We had high hopes for his future
Yet he chose the Easy
Now I’m all alone
On the road we once chose together
Watching it grow longer
This pain I keep inside
Greater than death, worse than loss
Treachery’s dungeons.
If I doubted reincarnation
This life has taught me a bitter lesson
For I must come again
The work is unfinished
The cards will be reshuffled
I will come again.
Then I hear, so soft
The sounds of morning dawning
The past is over now.
Those words, those strange words
That baffle the minds of politics
Of culture and science
You can call me Fool
You can call me mad, and yet
You too will come again.
– che chidi chukwumerije.
BIAFRANS AND NIGERIANS, YOU AND I
The Crack was so loud
We actually failed to hear
The piercing cry
We are dying even whilst they die
You struck me hard
You were hellbent on killing off
All the love in me
So that you could point at my corpse, my heart
And me the coffin housing it
And declare:
You see! He was dead all along!
And everybody will nod wisely
You cannot murder a dead man.
Africa vanished like smoke in the wind
And left Africa behind
Battling the barrenness you and I…
Strangers stood back
Watched us tear one another to pieces
And when we’re through
They’ll step in calmly and calmly pick up the pieces
And build anew an other Africa again
Their Gain
Empty of all Africans
Biafrans and Nigerians
Hutus and Tutsis, Zulus and Xhosas.
Holy Warriors,
Nationalists, Traditionalists, you
And I
And all that will remain
As a memory of a people that once was
Are the poems and songs we
Left behind…
Even the slogans will be forgotten.
– che chidi chukwumerije.
SUNRISE
THE BEGINNING is the end.
Dawn is just about to break, I awaken from a deep sleep. The sleep was dark, I dreamt of demons and devils running after me. My life is at its lowest ebb. I am unhappy.
Tired I rise to my feet, slowly limp out of my hut, into the little dirt track dragging its way across the outer hamlets far away from the nearest, secluded, village. Dim twilight prevails. My head hangs and the story of my life briefly replays itself in my memory.
I remember the child, carefree, sanguine. The happy family that was its home, the humble abode that housed their love. The carefreeness.
I remember standing up like an impatient tree into manhood, searching for the sun, but my crown got lost in the dizzying clouds, pregnant with temptation. Then came the fall.
It was not the bacteria that killed my wife, it was the aching heart that closed its eyes to me, full of regret and disappointment. It was not the whispers of untrue friends that led my children astray, but the missing guidance of a self-absorbed father. It was not my friends who abandoned me, but I who abandoned what I could have been. Even my foes deserted me, they have nothing left to shame. Twenty years later, I emerge, destitute, beggar, soulless, lifeless, into the cool dark morning before the sun…
Dawn is for new beginnings. The hour before dawn shall be my coronation. Death. And should dawn come before, then let me start anew on the other side. These are my thoughts this morning, dark fruits of that dream. For once in your life be a man, and put an end to it.
Wearily I return into the hut. For some reason I wait until I smell it. Then I re-emerge into the slow brightening twilight of fore-dawn, a dagger in my hand. Why exactly have I come out into the open to do it? I do not know. Maybe simply because I want to die facing the sky, the big all-seeing eye.
Poised and ready, one last time scenes from my life rush like a highspeed freight-train across the charred landscape of my memory, then I raise my blade, firm, gripping with both hands… point it towards my innards… I close my eyes.
No last prayer awakens in my soul. No final thought. No closure. All I want is the deep dark plunge, the sharp pain, the flowing warmth of exit, the blurred eternity of death.
That moment when you are about to say goodbye to a familiar place, when you stand on the hilltop like Lot’s wife, knowing you should hurry on, don’t look back, yet unable to resist the last goodbye. It is the moment of betrayal that brings about the reversal of fortune. How long did I perch on the brink of that moment, looking at the end of my life?
Everything drew itself into one spot, like a raincloud, and suddenly it was time. I bend my knees, steel myself for the hard, fast plunge into the lightless waterfall. Did I breathe in or out? …
Dimly, as though from far away, I hear footsteps.
Footsteps?
Footsteps? I have never heard footsteps down in these deserted outlands, at such an early hour, before. Am I sure? Have I heard right? I wish to set off on my journey into solitude… in solitude.
I listen. For a long time I hear nothing. My resolve is not brittle, it turns around again and refocuses on its way. But, softly, I hear them again – slightly louder. Footsteps. Yes. Frozen like a statue, I manage to blink a few moments later when he appears… an old man with a walking rod, his head completely bald. I recognise him. It is the hermit.
My knees are still bent, the cold steel still points to me, the sacrifice, when he reaches me. He stops. He looks at me in the grey twilight. I see a look of surprise grow on his face.
“Son?…” he asks, starled. “What are you doing?”
I look into his eyes. Within me something akin to emotion refuses to stir. Serenely I say:
“I am about to kill myself, oh hermit…”
“To kill yourself?” I hear the surprise also in his voice. “But why”
Serenely still, I reply:
“My life is empty, meaningless. I have lost it all, wife, family, everything. Friends, money, life’s work. With them went my will to work too. Now I too must depart.”
It is an odd feeling to speak into eyes that steadily grow softer the harder your words become. It is quite distracting, because you begin to wonder why.
“My son, are you satisfied with this decision?”
“Indeed, oh hermit, I am.”
He smiled, as though he were the keeper of a secret.
“But child – “
“You have lived twice the length of my life, it is true, yet call me not child, for I do know what I am doing.”
“It is not knowing what you are doing that matters, my son, but knowing why you are doing what you are doing.”
Thought is the enemy of blind resolve. Why is he talking to me? Obligating me to a logical answer. A trap. I cannot kill myself until I free myself from it. For conviction, standing on irrefutable clarity, is my justifier. This proud I am, and he knows it. I see it in his amused eyes watching mine, challenging me to convince him too. I mustn’t, I know. But it seems to me the last duty I owe a failed life. I want to die proudly. Nobody had ever asked me this question. I want to find the answer to it before I go, not for him but for me, that I may go in peace. Everybody might plain know what he is doing – but the deeper reason? Did I not know it?
I am a bit irritated by the fact that no clear-cut answer jumps out of my observant soul immediately, and that I have to think it out. It makes me a bit uneasy, such a simple statement.
My arms lower under the weight of thought, I raise them up again, reposition the blade. I wish I had not done that, for he notices everything, down to my thoughts and the movement in my heart. I can see it in his curious eyes.
“But I know very well why I am doing what I am doing, oh hermit.”
“Why, child?”
“I have already said it all to you, but I will flesh it out now, father. You see, I had a beautiful childhood, a quiet youth, the journey of manhood began well. I married a beautiful woman. I had no reason to stray from the path. But I did. In the beginning I had life, now I have lifelessness. I have heard that the beginning is the end, but not in my life. My life ends in nothing. My beloved wife is dead, she died from the inner loneliness and pain into which I thrust her. My sons and daughters are monsters and thieves. My people have ostracized me, my friends deserted me, my wealth squandered, my fame evaporated.
“Even enemies… Hermit, do you know what it means when enemies no longer concern themselves with one? That is the ultimate mark of meaninglessness.”
“Don’t you think you can start all over again?” asks the hermit tenderly. “Start afresh? Pick up the threads? Build anew?” His tone, though tender, is conversational, as if we were talking about the weather.
I shake my head, I’m not sure if wearily or angrily.
“No, hermit, there are no threads to pick up. There is no foundation upon which to build anew. I must go. These reasons suffice.”
“Life is a gift, my friend,” says the hermit. “Measure it not according to what happens on the outside, but by the forces within your soul. And there is so much life in your soul, my son. This I see.”
His words are getting too close to home. I am trying to block them out, but it is not easy. They are penetrant, threatening to inject into me a dose of reflection. Seeds of new life, warmth, vitality. But I don’t want the pain that comes with the warmth. I don’t want the exertion that the vitality demands. I don’t want the new thoughts of reflection that a fresh lease of life would bring. I am afraid.
Afraid. Surprised I gaze at this recognition, almost amused, wondering how and why I missed that point all along. Quickly following upon the trite amusement is seriousness, as I feel my consciousness slip into the pool of fear in which my subconscious has been drowning all along. I am afraid. I had all these things before and I wandered away, into the darkness. No. Let me alone. I don’t want life that will remind me of my sins, and demand that I atone, and put me back on the crossroad where I fell before, demanding that I choose again.
Oh, no. I fear.
Leave me alone in my pitifulness and self-pity. Leave me in my dejection and self-pity. I don’t want responsibility. My inner life is weak. I don’t want to take another shot at life. I might lose again. I want to die.
Like bolts of lightning, flashes of clarity, these thoughts, these intuitive perceptions surge through me, shaking me. Goodbye and welcome. He is smiling, the hermit! I have to face him one last time.
“Let me be, Hermit,” I breathe out wearily. “I am a nobody, a nothing, life has passed me by, I am finished. Depression and despair are all I have now. The deep clear confusion of seeing no way forward. “
“If you see no way forward, then stand still… but don’t plunge into the abyss.”
I shake my head. “I am tired… of life.”
Now he shakes his head. “I would put it differently. I would say that you have merely decided that you are tired of life. Is that not so?”
For a moment our eyes remained locked on each other. Then, without warning, he turns back to the road and begins to walk away, continuing on his journey. The sun is pushing up from the valley, the hermit reaches the hill’s zenith and then quickly begins to descend. I watch him disappear, the sun appear.
Now I look down at the knife which I still hold in my hand. Curious, but I’m suddenly wandering why exactly I picked it up in the first place.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije..
THE OLD BOOK
I SOUGHT MY daughter whom I had not seen for hours now. It was already at the start of that unfailing daily event called Sunset. I sat down outside the little bungalow; well, I call it a bungalow, I’m sure there are some who’ll call it a hut. I was happy, but a certain restlessness stirred in my soul. Maybe she was playing in the woods downhill; I could imagine her admiring and memorizing the shapes and colours of all the wild flowers and little insects in the bushes, her enduring passion. She would soon be back.
The sun, setting, was beautiful. I saw him playing with the clouds lazily travelling by. The wind tickled the whispering grasses, and I was alone.
I liked this new bungalow of mine, perched on this hilltop, giving me a true view of the entire countryside, the village, and those ancient forbidden caves in the distance of which all kinds of impossible tales are still told even until today; yes, this hilltop and this bungalow up here had a strong hold on me, unlike the old hut further down in the valley where I had been born, where I had grown up.
I missed my wife and longed for her return. She had travelled a hundred kilometers away to care for her sick mother for a few days, leaving our daughter and me alone until she would return.
My mind slipped to my childhood back in the old hut. To my brothers and sisters, my parents and old friends. Everybody was gone now. The old ones had died. The young ones had grown up and moved away. Only I had remained here on these hilly south-eastern plains. Now I lived with my wife and daughter in a new bungalow, well to be honest, a big hut really, on a hill, not far from the old one, the last keeper of our culture. For some reason, my heart just could not detach from these environs. Born freely to farm my village lands, I did just that everyday, walking down into the village, then beyond it, to our ancestral farmlands. This week had been a quiet week, though, as I stayed at home with my daughter and waited for my wife to return from her mother.
It started to grow dark. My thoughts came back to the present. I began to worry. Where was my daughter?
Then she was there…
I saw dimly her fragile lithe form slowly mounting the gentle slope, a small basket clutched to her side. Normally she ran, hopped and skipped. I hoped she was not feeling ill.
I let her come to me. I heard her footsteps. Then I saw her face – drawn… her eyes wide, starring… – something was wrong.
“Neanya!” I gasped, springing up.
She walked on straight towards me, her widened eyes never leaving mine, as though searching for answers, a hold, something. What? And then suddenly, a few paces away from me, she abruptly stopped. I walked quickly up to her, bent down, held her; just eight years old; she stood stiffly; her eyes were white.
“Neanya,” I whispered, “What’s wrong? Did something happen? What happened? Tell me!”
She took a deep breath, swallowed. Still these questioning eyes gripping mine. An uneasy apprehension began to grow within me. With a quick glance I briefly scanned the declining grassland behind her; saw nothing, nobody.
“Neanya…” I began again. Her lips parted.
She spoke. A whisper:
“I saw… a… strange man – ”
“Who? Where?”
“Down the hill, near the old hut, behind the forest… on that other path that leads to the farmlands…”
“What were you looking for there? I thought you were on the edge of the forest.”
“After playing with the flowers in the forest, I went to the other side, to the giant ụdara tree, I was hoping to pick some ripe and fallen ụdara berries… for you.”
I looked into her basket, expecting it to be empty. It was full of ụdara. I stretched out my hands, one reaching for the basket, the other her shoulder. She veered away, but remained standing where she was, her basket of wild berries still pressed against her body.
Silence.
“And what happened?”
“He was very sad, father. He was crying.”
“A strange man? Crying? Where?”
“By the woods, downhill, near the old hut… he was not an old man… he was crying…”
Her answers came in phrases. Her eyes still gripped mine. Something had happened. But what?
“So I held his hand – ”
“You what? Neanya! Who was he? What did he do to you?”
But she simply continued as though I had not interrupted her.
“ – and asked him why he was crying. He looked at me, father, and he was sad. And then… he smiled a little. He said… he said…”
“What did he say?”
“He said that I looked familiar – ”
“And have you seen him before?”
For the first time the starry look in Neanya’s eyes dispersed somewhat. I could see she was thinking. Eight years old; what was she thinking about?
“I don’t know, father… but he looked very familiar too – ”
All at once I felt very uncomfortable, psychically and physically, as if I was subject to a strange, invisible pressure. My throat went dry. I swallowed, took a deep breath and said slowly to my daughter:
“Now Neanya, just tell me everything! What happened? What did this stranger tell you?”
Standing as though rooted to the spot, my daughter looked at me for a few seconds with that thoughtful, questioning glow in her eyes again, and then, after what seemed like a moment of consideration, nodded and slowly began to speak.
“He said he was trapped there, that he could not move on… that’s what he said… because, he said, he said that he had been torn by guilt, he had…” She paused a while, breathe deeply once, then continued. “He had… killed himself when he was on earth, that’s what he said, that he rejected the gift of earthlife God gave him…” She paused, took another deep breath, quietly exhaled. She seemed to be thinking, yet for a second I almost had the impression… that she was listening.
Then, with a sigh, and a slight nod, she continued:
“And… and he said that amongst other things he did not stay to take care of his only child… and that now he is torn by even greater guilt… that’s exactly what he said, father… – he said he wants me to go to his child today, right away, Father, to tell his child that… that…,” she choked, stopped.
“What?” I whispered. Was this a dream? Had the imaginative powers of her mind gone too far?
“He told me to go to his child – ”
I shook my head and held Neanya’s shoulders.
“Ssssh. Sssshh. Ssssshhh. You’ve had a bad day-dream, that’s – ”
“He even told me his child’s name, father, and where I could go to find him this evening,” Neanya whispered, interrupting me gently and raising her eyes to the sky. Her eyes were suddenly old. The sky was a deep dark blue and, all around us, the night crickets were chirping.
“What is his child’s name?”
“Norondu – “
My heart stopped beating.
“Is that not your name, Father?” whispered Neanya, her eyes coming back down from distant skies and reclaiming mine. “Is that not what Mummy calls you?”
My heart had still not started beating.
… My biological father had died when I was a baby. I had grown up with my mother and stepfather and their children, my half-brothers and -sisters. I had never known what my original father died of. I only knew he had been some kind of restless adventurer travelling through the lands. I always assumed he died by some kind of accident. People did not like speaking much about him…
“What did the man want you to tell Norondu?” I whispered to Neanya.
“That the old Book of Knowledge which his grandfather had given to his father, and his father had given to him, and which he would like to give his son … is buried exactly beneath the spot on which I am now standing… – ”
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 