Chris Abani
Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.
Mahatma Gandhi
If the sand on the road to Ijesha can be used to teach a child to walk, it can be used to teach us all to walk gracefully.
Yoruba proverb
I grew up in a culture rife with proverbs. Proverbs, as the famed Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe said, are the palm oil with which words are eaten – referring, no doubt, to the ways in which proverbs, and their reliance on pun, wit, and referential thinking, create play with and within language. Proverbs, while seen as part of play within language in West African culture, are simultaneously the mark of a full-grown adult from a child. To speak well, as the Igbo say, is to have a good character, because it means you are always thinking. In West Africa, good character and all its attendant values are seen as a product of proper and purposeful living, which is considered to have its root in thinking. In fact, the Yoruba word for human is Eniyan, the thinking ones. The idea that a proper command of speech, and therefore of language, is essential to one’s character is an interesting idea.
I heard so many proverbs growing up that I started to sound like a Zen compendium when I spoke. Nigerian proverbs range from the profound (is it the stone at the bottom of the river that shapes the river’s flow or the river’s flow that shapes the stone at the bottom of the river?) to the practical (never challenge a gorilla to a wrestling match) to comforting (patience can cook a stone) to the absurd (a flowing river is not a lake) to the obvious (a man who is lying on the ground need fear no fall). There is even a proverb for proverbs – trying to find a proverb to sum up all of life is like trying to tie a knot in water.
Proverbs are remarkable because they are themselves elisions, elisions of stories that reveal a complex way of life, a cosmological concept, a human foible, and so forth. In the way that Aesop’s Fables were stories about the moral complex of early Greek culture, proverbs function for Nigerians in the same ways. In Afikpo, my town of origin, there is a proverb that is simply a sound, saaaa! It refers to the sound a hot needle makes when dropped into sand point first, sinking with ease, an elegance that is stunning and awe inspiring. So when someone makes a profound point in a seemingly quotidian conversation, someone else may counter with saaaa! Or when a child is frustrated and resorts to anger to express itself, a parent may make the sound, which is both a warning about an impending spanking, a reminder to find a more suitable approach to the problem they are facing, and also in a strange way a very comforting sound. This is part of the power of these seemingly simple expressions – that they are both Zen koan (forcing us to rethink the way we approach the world), a mnemonic device (for people to remember complex histories, cosmologies, and concepts), a way of code switching that facilitates multiple levels of conversation simultaneously (as in one’s ability to understand what is being said is conditional on knowing all the contexts and referents of the proverb – not unlike Sesame Street), a way to be elegant in speech and thought, a way to give graceful exits from arguments, a way to teach young people to think inferentially.
This inferential aspect of proverbial thinking is crucial to the development of individual creativity and even, one can argue, the performance of a kind of improvisation within language, culture, identity, and thought that have been assigned by the larger culture. The concept of the individual in Afikpo thought is slightly more complex than in, say, western thought. In Afikpo, the individual negotiates a space for themselves not in conflict with the needs of the communal, but rather in symbiosis such that the individual needs can never overwhelm the communal good and, likewise, the pressure of the communal will cannot overwhelm the individual drive. A kind of communal individuality, in which the personhood of everyone is a reflection of the collective will and the collective will itself is a reflection of the individual.
With this kind of delicate navigation, language becomes very important as a way to negotiate things gracefully, to say the very least. This reminds me of the thought that struck me when I moved to the United States – that when people say they want a community, they mean they want people who think like them, agree with them, and with whom there is very little apparent conflict. I am more used to communities that are as fraught with daily negotiations as one might find in modern Jerusalem between an Arab, a Jew, a Christian, and perhaps even an atheist who are neighbors and friends.
Language in these circumstances becomes the only way to hold complex and contradictory thoughts and emotions without any violence resulting and with all parties able to move forward in total function – ideally. The kind of linguistic thinking and repartee needed in such situations is possible only with inferential ways of speaking and negotiating, and proverbs fit that bill.
In the US, we are so used to direct thinking and speaking that we often reduce language to its mostly transactional levels, stripping it of symbolism and a constant dialectic juggling, but we have made it easier on ourselves by not often having to wrestle with concepts and thoughts and even prevailing cultural norms and the problems of communal living, such as racial, gender, disability, and other forms of difference that we would otherwise have to negotiate more directly – a kind of inferential directness, if I may play for a moment. Entire cultures, Black and White, are reduced to comedic stereotypes so we can consume quickly and never have to think why or what, or to question our own received narratives. Certain faiths are not that, but simply fundamental amalgamations based on fear and safety and so forth. Of course, the sad and inevitable collapse of dialogue and negotiation in many modern African states also clearly points to the failures there too.
So the question for me as a writer is how to keep these levels of language alive, to play, and to improvise, but to do so with the full understanding of the simultaneous power and impotence of words. To use language to create narratives that push the envelope for our moral limitations but yet remain ethical and retain integrity. Words create narrative, and narratives become populated with textual bodies. I am fully aware that textual bodies are not real bodies, but we must never forget that what we write, what we speak with, while powerful, and while fully capable of affecting the fate of real bodies, are in the end mere words. And as powerful as these words are, they are still limited to ideas. However deeply we can philosophize about the conceptual notions of death or loss of self in the sense of technological amputations, children in Sierra Leone are losing actual limbs. Not conceptually, but real blood and gristle. The textual body, words in other words, can be a seduction that locks us out of all sides of the truth, which is that words can obliterate real bodies. But still, if we must be limited, as it were, by the sway of sand, why not make the limitation a thing of beauty?
This is my struggle – I am a believer in words, in story. I’ve always believed in the power of stories. They shape the world, they shape things, bring presence into focus, give it form, give us a way to negotiate the space between the body and the world. They also give us a way to connect to each other, a way to build a common, shared imagination. Why would a shared imagination be important? Because it is the surest way to flex the muscle of empathy, the immersion of ourselves in a fragile and vulnerable humanity, an immersion that develops compassion, and compassion precedes every selfless act in the world. Even when we are not aware of it, a compassionate imagination is of more comfort to those that do the imagining than to those being imagined. And the aim of this compassionate imagination? To drive selfless acts in the world, selfless acts designed to ease the passage of others, acts which in turn make our lives richer and thus better. Action is hard, especially when it is selfless. For us, these acts reinforce our humanity, a difficult-to-define attribute, but one around which we have built religions and civilizations.
The South Africans say it is ubuntu, the idea that we not only learn how to be human from each other, but that we are hardwired to be this way. If being human is based on mimicry, on others reflecting back to us what is good, then we can say that our humanity is not separate from action. This suggests that it is through action that we come to know ourselves. Of course, the other side of this is that action itself can proceed down unfortunate and often violent paths. Paths that are less than good for us as individuals and also as a collective entity.
The hardest journey we have to make is a conceptual one, one that ensures that the action we generate is affirmative. It is a struggle, and the path to it is not littered with Hallmark Card sentiments, but rather the difficult negotiations of our fears and failures and limitations. And so in approaching this conversation today, I am hoping that I can raise questions rather than present answers, offer ways to accept vulnerability rather than soothe fears. Please indulge me as I attempt to bring words to what there are often no words for.
In Afikpo, when very young children are learning to walk, they are brought to very sandy places. Here they can practice safely knowing the sand will cushion their falls. But also their parents know that the very instability of sand forces the child to develop very quickly the small muscle responses needed for balance, needed for function, needed for walking. It also very quickly bonds a child to the earth, the ground beneath their feet in both symbolic and actual ways; it creates a sense of ownership, of place, of belonging, and thus of responsibility.
In the first three to five days after a child is born, their feet never touch the ground. Children are born traditionally with their mothers in a kneeling position so that they make contact head-first with the ground – gently, of course. This first prostration, oforibale, to the earth is their first introduction to their mothers – the earth and their biological mother who fetches them up. Then between three to five days later, the child is brought out of the house into the world, a diviner is summoned and he spreads iyerosun, the powder from the camwood tree that resembles sand, on the divining tray and the child’s left foot is placed into it, firmly. This is the esentaye, their first footprint on the world. Only after this can they be named and so forth.
Then follows over time the walking with sand.
Since walking is inevitable, a thing that must be done, then it should be done well. In other words, that functionality should never be devoid of grace, of elegance, of the need to question the action, to refine it, to elevate it. In this way, there is nothing without grace in our lives. This is the basis of all African art and craft.
In Afikpo, pottery was a mainstay of the culture, and these pots were fired in open-air kilns called ohuhu, simply, the roasting or the firing. Over time, an area of firing would be abandoned to give the earth time to recover. The old site, full of clay and pottery shards, would take years to lose its heat-capturing capacity. Between the ages of eight and twelve, children would be taken to these old kilns, strips of road now, and armed with a small cup of water, at the height of the noonday heat, when the sand was scorching, they would be made to walk as slowly as they could, with as few squeals of pain as possible, and with the judicious use of the small amount of water. And over time, it was believed, one learns to walk gracefully and elegantly, always with composure and beauty through even the most difficult moments of life. Hence the proverb at the beginning of this chapter.
Fresh from London, a returnee after the Biafran Civil War, I practiced this with as much drama as my scared and sensitive heart could muster. I would slowly strip my socks, then my sandals, looking as forlorn as possible, more sad than any dead man walking hoping to inspire a reprieve. No such luck. These were my early lessons in craft, in creativity, in the composure both internally and externally that would later serve my art.
In western thought, composition creates beauty. Perspective. Symmetry. The Golden Ratio. An impossible one-sided ideal. In West African thought, composure creates beauty. Balance. Equanimity. Serenity. The essential nature of a thing. Its ase.
In Yoruba, we say Iwalewa is beauty and it means the beauty of truth or even the beauty of existence. The word Iwa is best translated to mean existence, an eternal state, to be outside of time. Reality is held in Igba Iwa, the calabash of existence. Iwa is connected to an old idea that holds that immortality is the perfect existence or, better, timelessness. It suggests that all temporality has ramification in an eternal cycle of existence – at an individual level, at a communal and lineage level, at a cultural level, and in many ways at a planetary level. Everyone’s Iwa is always part of the Igba Iwa, and the perfect balance of all depends on the singular balance of each.
Ewa, in Yoruba, is a word that means beauty. But beauty is a complex thought in West Africa. It doesn’t refer only to the visage of things. In Igbo, beauty, nma, is also the word for good, meaning that what is beautiful is good as well. But with a slight inflection, it is also the word for knife or even machete – a warning. On one hand, good is a behavioral matrix, and on the other, it is an appreciative matrix, but in both cases it is a communal process. Beauty is not a concept that works in isolation. One cannot be good or beautiful without the participation of others. But there are concepts of beauty in Igbo that are valued even more:
Asa Mpete – a beauty in movement, in being, in face, completeness
Nganga – grace, poise, elegance
Oma – self-awareness, collected, balance
Ewa doesn’t refer to composition in the western sense of the word. It refers to an essential conformity to an inner trait. Hence driftwood is beautiful because it conforms to its inner trait; it bends with its ase. So beauty is a state of existence. Iwalewa is to exist in and as beauty. Since Iwa refers to the eternal constant of a person or thing or even sometimes a place, to create beauty (or even to perceive it) is to capture (or see) the essential nature of the thing. Beauty in West African thought lies in recognizing and respecting the uniqueness of all things and all people. To do this, in Yoruba it is said one must cultivate patience, suuru. Patience is the shape respect takes and this is a necessary practice because it is important for West Africans that we understand the essential beauty of whatever confronts us before revealing ourselves or acting. So this respect that might be better thought of as a thoughtful restraint is twofold: self-respect and the respect of others, and it is itself a form of Iwalewa. So to be beautiful is to be able to comprehend the essential beauty of everyone and everything around us and we in turn become beautiful – or as the Igbo say, ugwu bu nkwanye nkwanye – “respect is reciprocal.” For the Igbo, beauty that is external matches beauty that is eternal such that the eagle, a common idea of beauty, is beautiful as much for the way light shimmers through the water in its feathers in flight as it is for the totality of the eagle. To see beauty is to be beauty; therefore, it is about coming into an understanding of one’s own Iwa, or essential nature – the practice of which involves Ifarabale (calmness), Imoju-imora (perception and sensitivity), tito (gentleness), oju inu (insight), and oju ona (originality). To be an artist in Yoruba culture is to possess a cool and patient character (iwa tutu, ati suuru).
Look at the faces of Nok terracotta sculpture and see the composure of being-ness – serenity, calmness, and equanimity. Even warriors on horseback gaze into infinity with a patient calmness.
A cursory glance at the Ife and Benin bronze sculptures reveals this attitude to beauty. In all Yoruba sculpture, the head is always out of proportion to the body, not through any lack of artistic ability, but to emphasize philosophical and spiritual concepts of the head, Ori Ode being the house of the eternal spirit and mind, Ori inu, and thus the arbiter of human destiny. Iwa in Yoruba and Uwa/Owa in Igbo are key to the understanding of beauty and the self.
The gulf in perception or worldview or, should I say, in the conceptual premises between Africa and “the West” can be best understood even by the process of naming, of how being-ness comes about. Consider the naming of a child: in the West, names are nominal, but in West Africa, they are phenomenal – i.e., names in West Africa are arrived at via consultation (divinatory, oracular, or by consultation within family), and the name chosen reflects the essential character, Iwa or Uwa/Owa, of the new person. It also becomes a performative talisman to constantly manifest that state.
For instance, in Igbo, to be named Ihuoma (good face or beautiful face) does not just refer to the physical features, but also implies that goodness and beauty lie ahead for this person if they cultivate the right “face” to manifest this.
So to make art, it seems, requires character, but not character in the moral sense; rather, in the sense of composure, the sense that what is being done deserves the highest attention and the deepest insights possible.
All of this implies a great responsibility that walks with creativity, a certain ethics. But the ethics of literature is not just for writers, but also for the reader. The work of art, whatever it is, requires a triangulation between the maker, the work, and an audience (even an audience of one) in order to become complete. No painting is truly understood, not even by the painter, until a viewer looks upon it and has a reaction. In that way, by extension, we can say that no work is complete until this happens, because in order to exist, a thing needs not only intent and vision (the artist) or material embodiment (the art), but also witness and confirmation (positive or negative) by the viewer (the receiver). So we can argue that literature only truly comes into existence when someone reads it. Reading is not a passive act; therefore, it is an intervention in itself. How we read becomes an indicator of the level and quality of literature in a particular society; it is also a litmus test for the emotional intelligence and health of any society. Any society that does not embrace the full spectrum of the emotional arc in its literature, including and perhaps particularly, is not a healthy culture, nor are its readers fully human.
The ethical charge, then, is to confront our lives daily via the vehicle of literature and art and creativity, not to soften the blows of our complex world, not to look away from difficulty, but rather to transform it all into the act of empathy. To witness another person’s grief, without looking away, but without the need to protect ourselves from it, is how we become deeper and more beautiful beings – yet also, in equal measure, this happens when we embrace the silly, the satirical, the funny, the sentimental, and the romantic too. It all needs balance, needs that intricate walk over hot sand – grace, elegance, and an occasional trot and squeal of pain.
We, as readers, must approach the world and the narratives it holds with a humble acceptance and the knowledge that while we may not agree with each other’s points of view, we will learn to live in communities where difference and disagreement become the very fractious fabric of harmony.
We must also give up reading about others as though we are forensic anthropologists attempting to find the cause of everyone else’s pathology while the fact remains that this drive is primarily responsible for our deficiencies and lack of growth as a culture. Ethical reading forces ethical writing, and we soon find that the work we make becomes the beautiful balance: We want narratives that allow for the unrealistic swashbuckling of action and quests without making us bend to others’ superiority, but rather that affirm us all as knights and Jedi warriors. Narratives that allow women to be as fragile and genteel and feminine as they want without fostering masculine senses of entitlement to their bodies, to their domination, that don’t create in college women a complex acceptance of a growing rape culture. Narratives that don’t make all Black men killers or gangsters or even cool, but allow for those of us who are nerds and like to build Star Trek replicas of ships and Cosplay. That allow rap and hip-hop artists to create beautiful songs without the pressure to perform such exaggerated masculinities. Narratives that don’t make all middle-class White men racist. Narratives that don’t mean that hate precedes most peoples’ actions.
This is the power of a creative culture, of creativity. The symbiotic relationship between the dreamer and the builder, the maker and the recipient. If we must read, then we should do so gracefully.
I was born in December 1966 in a small Igbo town in southeastern Nigeria called Afikpo. My father would claim later that my mother’s protracted labor was a catalyst for the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War that began that month, that year. A small, rather obscure fishing town at the end of a dusty road going nowhere, Afikpo became important in that war because that dusty road ended in the third largest river in the country and offered the perfect secondary access point to the Igbo homelands, allowing the Nigerian troops to pincer them between the hills of Nsukka in the north and that river, the Cross River in the south.
My mother was making lunch when my uncle came running to the house. He breathlessly told her that the Nigerian Army had landed at Ndibe beach three miles from our house and were marching into town. He didn’t think it would be a good idea if she were there when they arrived. My father was out, and so my mother gathered my three elder brothers, Mark (8), Charles (6), and Greg (4), and me (barely a week old), and as much stuff as she could carry or make the boys carry: important documents, passports, water, some crackers, a lantern, me, and an umbrella. Ah, the umbrella. As we made our way through the long lines of refugees fleeing our town, we were to see many umbrellas, as though everyone had grabbed one to protect him- or herself from the rain of sorrow. My father found us on the road to the neighboring town of Edda and the Catholic Mission there. As we drove the rest of the way, our car threading the needle of road packed with refugees, that car marked a short-lived privilege. War levels the playing field sometimes, and when it doesn’t, it changes the power plays and players. And just like that, you wake up one day and lose everything by lunchtime.
We parted ways with my father that December, in 1966, in Edda, at the Catholic Mission compound where we had gone to take refuge. My father joined the newly minted Biafran Army and stayed to fight, while we left with a ragtag party of refugees that included some missionaries. Our destination was the small western Igbo town of Uli, where the Biafran Army had turned a highway into a landing strip for the Biafran Air Force and the planes flying in with relief and aid. We would meet up with my father once more, in 1967, when he found us at a refugee camp in Mbaise. He returned to the war a week later, leaving my mother pregnant with my sister, Stella.
The journey from Edda in 1966 to the Uli airstrip in 1968, where we boarded a plane first for the island of São Tomé, then on to Lisbon, and then on to London, a distance of only two hundred or so miles, took two years instead of the three to four hours it should have. The dangerous trip was made even more so because my mother, with four young children and one on the way, was a white English woman. Two months before we got on that plane out of the country, my mother gave birth to my sister in a hospital that was being evacuated during a bomb raid.
While the rest of the patients were moved to a safer location in a primary school a couple of miles away, my mother had to stay behind in the hospital, locked in labor, as bombs rained down from the Nigerian Air Force MiG planes, attended only by the Irish nun who was the midwife, Sr. Twommey, and a terrified 18-year-old nurse who my mother remembered as Angela.
Sr. Twommey sat with my mother, drinking Earl Grey tea and eating cookies, getting up to wheel my mother’s bed from ward to ward, ahead of the bombs in a bizarre game of musical beds. My sister screamed into the world thirty minutes before the hospital was completely destroyed, and so even in moments of death, we are blessed with life and the gifts of hot tea and cookies.
Even this is sometimes the grace of walking, or surfing a bed from ward to ward.
Before she died seven years ago, my mother told me, the thing about difficult times, about loss, is that we forget the joys too, we forget that even in the falling, we are flying.
May you walk gracefully, may the sands of the road be kind to you, and may you learn not only balance, but also the art of flying while you fall. May you live a creative and elegant life.
Further reading
Abani, C. (2000) Kalakuta Republic, London: Saqi Books. (Abani’s poetry collection draws on the abuses he and others suffered as political prisoners in Nigeria from 1985 to 1991.)
Abani, C. (2007) Song for Night, New York: Akashic Books. (A novella of a West African boy soldier’s journey across the landscape of war.)
Cole, T. (2014) Every Day Is for the Thief, New York: Random House. (Contemporary novel about a Nigerian man who returns home after 15 years in the United States.)
Cooksey, S., Pynor, R., Vanhee, H., and Fromont, C. (eds.) (2013) Kongo across the Waters, Gainesville: University Press of Florida. (Originally produced to accompany an art exhibition, the volume covers objects from Kongo culture in West Africa and in diaspora.)
Ottenberg, S. (1975) Masked Rituals of Afikpo: The Context of an African Art, Seattle: University of Washington Press. (A prize-winning, illustrated volume that surveys the styles and contexts of this art form.)
Thompson, R. F. (1993) Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas, New York: Museum for African Art. (An exemplary catalog, including photos, of African and diasporic religious and spiritual art.)