By
Ike Anya
 |
|
Achebe
|
I am sitting in a
meeting in a room at the Oval, it is a cold March morning, the sky overcast and
as I listen to the third in a series of presentations on the new arrangements
for public health in England, my phone buzzes in my pocket.
I sneak a discreet
peek. It’s a text from Izu, a friend in Nigeria, asking if it is true, the news
about Achebe. The room blurs as I hurriedly send back the words I hope
not, but from then on, I struggle to concentrate, compulsively flicking
through the news pages, Facebook, Twitter, on my phone.
The more I browse,
without seeing any confirmation, the greater the little flicker of hope that it
is all a rumour grows.
It is not until another friend from
Nigeria sends a text confirming the news that a deep darkness, a leaden sense
of loss descends on me. I look round the room and wonder how we can still be
talking about public health, giving Powerpoint presentations, when it feels as
if a deep gash has opened in the fabric of the universe.
I was six years old, when I met him.
First in his book, Things Fall Apart, and then later that same
year, in person, when his family moved back from the United States into the
house next door on the university campus in Nsukka where I grew up.
Even before
I had read his books, his name was commonplace, thrown around by my older
cousins, aunts and uncles who were reading his books as they were set literary
texts in secondary school as a signal of erudition, of intelligence. Are you Chinua
Achebe? they would ask of a friend who was boasting of their intellectual
prowess.
I do not remember Things Fall
Apart as particularly life-changing at that age, I simply loved the story,
this recreation of a world that seemed entirely familiar, that echoed the
stories that my grandparents told. A few years later, I read No Longer
at Ease, a I realised what an extraordinary gift he had given to
us, creating a space for us in the world, allowing us the chance to say: We too
are here.battered early edition, missing a cover, illustrated by Bruce
Onobrakpeya, the famed Nigerian artist some of whose etchings hung on the walls
of our living room.
I was unimpressed then by the non-realistic etchings with
their stylized depictions of human beings but was utterly captivated by the
story of Obi Okonkwo, who could easily have stepped out of one of my parents’
photograph albums. I imagined him in a fedora hat and suit, being met at the
port on his return from England by his town union, the way my parents and many
of their friends had been.
Along the way I also read his books for
children, first Chike and the River, then the allegory of abuse of
power How the Leopard Got Its Claws, co-written with John
Iroaganachi and his collection of short stories Girls at War, which
again resounded with familiar stories from my parents and their friends of
their experiences during and just after the Biafran war.
And then I read Arrow of God and
felt something deep and primal about the tragedy of Ezeulu, understanding for
the first time, the power of literature to recreate a world, to present
humanity in all its flawed glory.
Reading his novels, I could hear the
Anambra Igbo dialect echoing through the English words and sentences, and over
the years, as I read and reread them, I came to appreciate the skill that
allowed him to write Igbo in English.
Over the years, I returned again and
again to his books, so often that the characters began to seem like old
friends. His books told the story of my life, the story of my family’s lives,
but it was not until much later that I realised what an extraordinary gift he
had given to us, creating a space for us in the world, allowing us the chance
to say: We too are here.
To mark his sixtieth birthday, the late
Professor Edith Ihekweazu, then Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Nsukka invited
the world to tour small sleepy dusty town to mark his 6oth birthday in the
fittingly titled Eagle on Iroko celebration. For a few heady days, it seemed
that the centre of the literary world had moved to Nsukka and I like to imagine
that a young Chimamanda Adichie watched too and was inspired.
Growing up in Nsukka we were also
privileged to witness his utter devotion to his family, his quiet yet fierce support
of his wife and children, his investment of time and resources to ventures like
the literary journal Okike which often featured writing from people that I
knew, people who lived near us. Reading their published poems and stories
helped me believe that writers and artists were not otherworldly beings that
they could be the uncle or aunt down the road and inspired my first feeble
attempts at writing.
He was the antithesis of the Nigerian
Big Man: softly spoken, thoughtful with a quiet dignity that echoed in his
work. And he could be trusted to speak out when there were difficult things
that needed saying. But they were also delivered with a dose of the subtle wit
and humour that illuminated his being and his work.
All day I have fielded calls from distraught
friends in different parts of the world. In tears, they echo my thoughts, our
shock at the suddenness, our illogical hope that he would be always be here, a
sudden wrenching feeling that something huge and irreplaceable has been lost;
his passing a painful reminder that we are losing a generation of wise elders.
Who will speak out for us now? Who will
ask the hard questions of us and the world that he did? Where are the drums and
the flutes to dance a great masquerade on his homeward journey?
We will take solace in the words that
he has left behind, words that will live on long after we have all gone, words
that hopefully will continue to inspire us to acknowledge each other’s
humanity; to be greater, to be more.
That will be his legacy.
Ike
Anya is a public health physician. He co-edited the Weaverbird Collection,
an anthology of new Nigerian writing, and is co-author of
nigeriahealthwatch.com
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