Photo highlights of our Nigeria trip.

Hello everyone,

We were in Nigeria for three weeks and two days and boy do I have a lot to tell you. It was Tot’s first time and my first time in six years, so it was really special. I enjoyed seeing the world through Tot’s eyes, his delight and lizards and geckos the dusty, dusty roads in Awka (Willie was working!). The rest of Anambra’s roads were like glass so I am inclined to believe the slogan.

Here are some highlights from our trip.  Will update the blog with more stories and photos soon. As soon as I get my speech for SOAS’ Igbo Conference out of the way. (Oy. I am trembling. I have 40 minutes to speak. FORTY MINUTES!! Why me, lord?)

Pretending to have a beard with his travel pillow. En route to Awka from Abuja by car. A whopping 7-hour drive!

Playing shadows at his grandma’s house in Lagos. It was not even noon yet.

 

This used to be the site for Polo Park when I was growing up. It’s one big mall right now which broke my heart but the park had been run-down for years with no support so…Oh look. They kept one ride.

Campaign posters were EVE-RY-WHERE in Awka (and Nigeria in general)! A visual riot. And so much littering. I took the photo because of the guy in the barrister garb opening his eyes. His slogan was ‘Shine your eyes’. LOL!

One of my mother’s ‘customers’ in Nnewi. Her hair is made from strands of rubber thread. Highly flammable but also very exquisite. I saw so many differently styled isi-owu’s made with the same shiny rubber thread. Much more intricate styling to when I lived there.

She was kind enough to turn and let me take a back view. I took both with her permission.

 

Macjew table water! MACJEW! HAHAHAHOHOHOHEHEHE! *Dead* My people will not kill me. Taken en route to Awka from Abuja. #Theheightofsophistication #Scottish #Jewish

 

 

 

In defence of (my) Igboness

This blog is NOT about a hatred of Igbo people and things, especially Igbo men.

I do not hate being Igbo.

As a child I didn’t necessarily know I was Igbo. Yes, I spoke the language and I soaked in the culture as if I was a sponge, but when you grow up with everyone singling you out as ‘Nke a muru na obodo oyibo’ (the one that was born abroad) and making it out to be something special, you start to feel you are – somehow – above being Igbo. It’s not something you think about with a conscious mind. You don’t sit for hours pondering your uniqueness. It’s something that thrives in the warmth of admiration but has nothing really to do with who you are. Much like being able to grow your hair past your shoulders or being a lighter shade of black.

I was black. To a large extent, I was white – colourless even; the books I read, the music I listened to, the voice of my subconscious: white, white, white. (If you were born into the middle class and upwards before the mid-90s you understand what I mean. Let’s not get bogged down.)

It took moving abroad to make me appreciate all the things I took for granted growing up; unique forms of expression, smells, sounds. It was like my I-chromosome had been activated. This didn’t happen immediately – nor consciously, at first. It’s true that if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. If you let people, they will define you. In my case, many tried.

Yet there is no one definition of Igboness – how can there be?  (I am aware of the irony because the blog seems to hold up a certain type of Igbo as the norm.) I took exception to condensing my life to its purest igbo droplet.  Did this mean I could no longer (unashamedly) enjoy 80s Brit pop? Motorcycles? Spanish culture? Rollerderby? Travel? Trdelnik? World literature? Did this mean I could no longer admire or date anyone not from ‘our side’?  Does discovering other sides to myself make me any less ‘Igbo’?

I don’t think so.

If anything, it has helped to appreciate being Igbo more. I no longer take language for granted, ‘Oh it will always be there’, because it is constantly changing, evolving. More than half the words my maternal grandmother spoke when I was more interested in charging around than listening no longer exist. The paradigms of beauty have shifted so that my dark-skinned paternal grandmother whose teeth were sharpened into points to offset her cheekbones might no longer be considered stunning.

I stopped caring where I was born years ago and considered where I was raised. I know that the English fox is crafty but that the Igbo tortoise is craftier. I know that an Akpu tree is not the same as a cassava plant although they both share the same name. I know what to do with a ripe head of Ukwa even if it is a bloody tough job. Burning tyres will always remind me of New Year as opposed to lynching. I cannot hear ‘Kom Kom’ without being transported to ndi uzu oka. I am from Oba of the nine villages, and my village Ezelle is the youngest, responsible for keeping Idemmili in priests. I can forgive you if there is no ojii when I come to your house, but if you sweep my house at night you are my enemy. Why are you sweeping away my wealth?

I belong.

I do not hate Igbo people. I can take the mickey out of my brothers and sisters, out of my culture because it is mine. I can see our flaws and I can laugh at our mistakes. This does not mean I do not appreciate the beauty of who we are.

After all, you do not throw your baby away just because it has bitten you on the breast.

P-square news-es

UPDATE: HUH. Ifite Dunu, not Ifite Awka. I must read properly (but in my defence I’ve been having a fever for three days now.)

Flavour gini? Biko he’s too far away!

I must be SERIOUSLY slacking in my life because I did not know that P-Square are from Awka. My very doormout. How could I not know? I need to hand my National Union of Journalists badge back because I am a disgrace to the profession.

Anyway, if you’re done drooling, the boys whose mother died on the 11th of July five hours after heart surgery in India will be in Ifite-Dunu to bury her on the 2nd of August.

May God be with them at this time. And I mean that in every way. Some people are just coming to ‘chop their money‘.  They need to go to the Imo-Owka oracle and  kee nkwucha (also known as a spiritual ‘Tuck n’ Tape) otherwise plenti plenti girls will have their bread buttered for life via child support payments.

Nostalgia: Why I can’t go ‘home’ again.

I remember going to our hometown from Awka.

My father, bless him, was always excited on these trips. He would enchant us with stories of walking long distances in bare feet to fetch water and swimming in rivers, the games they played along the way, the palm kernels he collected, shelled and sold for pocket money. Sometimes there was a new story and at other times it was simply a rehash of ones we had heard many times before. His voice pitched in the juiciest parts of the story, he swivelled his head to ensure we were listening to every word. My mother would cut him off with a reminder to keep his eyes on the road.

These days I know the journey took all of 45 mins to an hour tops, but it seemed much longer then, especially when we got stuck in Onitsha traffic.

I passed the time watching for shapes in the clouds; here a rabbit, there an elephant’s head, and God’s hand waving. Sometimes, they just reminded me of pounded yam made from the newest, whitest tubers, the kind we ate during New Yam festivals. My stomach would grumble and I would focus on hawkers tapping on the windows of our car and take the deep breath needed to interrupt my father.

My mother always bought sensible things like loaves of bread and bunches of bananas with their accompanying groundnut parcels for people in the village. If the traffic jam was particularly bad, we could have some Gala to stave off hunger. There were always sweating bottles of water in the car which had started out the journey a little more than cylinders of ice. We weren’t allowed to have the ‘omiyo-omiyo!’ sweets that their sellers announced with piercing whistles.

Soon, we would leave the bottleneck behind, my father speeding to make up for lost time. We were allowed a respite from trapped air behind windows wound up to dissuade theft, my mother resting her fingers from clicking the air conditioner on and off.

The breeze would lift the hairs on my arms and make me smile. There was always a thick liquid sliding down my arm from having whichever sister was near me at the time resting on my shoulder; I never slept in cars. I didn’t mind the saliva by then. My mind was on the one thing which my dad never failed to get us: a local snack from his childhood. The hawkers sold it straight from the fire in front of the failed airport leading to the Igwe’s palace in our hometown.

He called it ‘Ie-iee’. They were the larvae of palm tree beetles roasted over a wood fire.