Eneh Akpan Writes: Ibibio people

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Amassing Graffiti

An old model Toyota Liteace gives the heads up through a yellow painted “Back to School” label. A VW Vanette rejoins with an offbeat “Mummy’s Pet.” Yet, a beat up Nissan Urvan serves up a terse comeback with an in-your-face “Back to Sender” sticker. There are a string of buses with the “God” graffiti on them, mostly stuff like “God First,” “God is Great,” “God Pass Them,” “No King as God,” “God’s Time is the Best,” “No Be God?” “God is Good,” “Man No Be God” (pidgin version of “Man ain’t God”) “God Dey” (pidgin version of “There’s a God”), I watch, a trifle amused as a kept up VW Caravelle marked with the label “H₂O” negotiates a turn, early on I spotted an old model Toyota HiAce tagged “Big Fish.” I visualize these drivers hanging out on the same team—some inane variety of a mobile EPA where the story ends with the tuned up “H₂O” gobbling up the tacky “Big Fish.” But life doesn’t work that way and folks gotta maintain up in the game if family’s going to have food on the table. Probably, why the owner emblazoned the rear window of this bus I’m riding (which is a copy of “Big Fish”) with two words; a no fuss phrase which carries in it all the authority Lagos drivers need to “Carry Go” as one useful pointer hacked in chicken scratches says, it is uncomplicated yet delivers its import like a decree when it states “No Story.”

“Have a problem with my driving? Call 08099999999,” reads the inscription on the company truck speeding past my morning ride. Such CTAs (call to action) are commonplace, these days. You will find a hundred variations of it painted on transports especially, on the back of school buses. A friend once boarded public transport which showed off similar message on its body. He committed the number to memory before climbing on the bus and decided to humor the driver (or whoever had drafted up the phrase) so he called him up. And guess who picked up? It wasn’t the driver but it was just as well. Someone who was probably home or about her business several miles from the scene of incident answered the phone. And said, “Hello. My husband is over speeding again, isn’t he?”

Large red letters of “Remember six feet” marks the bus leading this one. The rear window of another (a yellow old model Volkswagen Transporter) preaches “One Love” in daring, bold letters. Several other buses wheeze past flaunting some ambiguous graffito, many in local dialect and I’d rather not go there. I wouldn’t want to spend the whole day acting interpreter unnecessarily extending the length of this post. You see, Lagos drivers are a little religious on an entire level. A Volkswagen Vanette riding along beside my bus boasts, “I Love this God!” As we drew near the other auto I am offered a close up of the guy behind the wheel. I struggle to imagine this fellow as a bible holder and can’t turn off the image of a thug lord in a suit, wielding a bible like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat.

The sticker of the American eagle dappled with the red and blue stars and stripes has by unanimous consent, become the secret transit code of Nigeria’s highways. You hardly fetch a commercial bus not wearing the gummed label like some Restricted Area access sticker. Besides, there are other writings I can’t quite place in a category like the ones above. “Holly Mary” (could be same as Holy Mary, who knows?); “Psalm 140 v. 1” (Get your bibles, folks); “Empty” (Now why would anybody scrawl this on public transport?); “Superstar” (I feel this guy); “Backward Never” (Amen to that, bro); “It pains you, why?” (I got this one off the cowl of a Volkswagen Beetle). And so on and so forth like that. Long before I started collecting bus graffiti, I ran into a certain brilliant one-liner. It was drawn on the rear of one of those huge Marcopolo passenger vehicles. It seemed to have found me just when I could use a breathing spell and here’s what it said, “No Competition in Destiny.” It never slips my mind how that one-liner rearranged my entire mindset.

Talking about graffiti calls up an early childhood memory about a story I overheard my father talk over with a relative who bunked with us. He told a tale of a battered public transport which, threw bystanders into a fit of hee-haws when it passed by. In time, the driver designed a method to the madness. It was in a sense, his way of saying you can laugh all you want but wait until you see what I got written up on the rear window. See who’s laughing then. On the rear window makeshift glass, a spread of polyethylene held fast with adhesive tape, he had scratched two words in Ibibio, my native dialect. These words: “Asak Uka” which by interpretation means, “Yo Laughing at Yo Mama!”

Keep your pens bleeding!

Akpan

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

On Identity

If you talk to a man in a language he understands that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

—Nelson Mandela

If you don’t define yourself for yourself, you’ll be crushed into other people’s fantasies of you and be eaten alive.

—Audrey Lorde

My childhood home was the twisted variation of a family guesthouse; we always had some member of a distant family crashing with us. They came and went in a randomized fashion ultimately concocting nature’s own nonpareil interludes. Once, a long time ago, when we were just kids, Sir told my brothers and me, “You ought to make something of a habit out of conversing in your native dialect at home. English of course, should come easy enough in school.” Sir always had one such thing or another to say when he was still around. “It’s vital that you preserve your heritage,” he’d say. “And besides, since I don’t want to play your interpreter when you visit at the village, I would recommend you get the hang of your patois.” ‘Sir’ was what we called our father.

To the relatives we bunked, because he wasn’t their father (though old enough to be for some) and to demonstrate their sense of gratitude and respect, my father became Sir. That is typical Ibibio practice. “Sir” is a monosyllable but we somehow managed to override the laws of phonetics and made the word come out in two syllables. I grew up to observe folks around my home call Father that and I got hooked on it like a drug. Sir didn’t do much by way of setting us straight. I guess he figured it didn’t pretty much matter one way or the other what word repped “father” as long as the attitude clicked.

Sir was a big fan of local dialect—“a man ought to master his own language before any other”—and he stood by his belief until his translation to glory in 1995. (“translation to glory” I think that’s a refined way of depicting death, don’t you?) Through the years, I’ve bumped into sizeable opportunity to reeducate myself on its peculiar and dead level candor. And I make no bones about it but Sir’s opinion makes an intrepid kind of sense.

The kind that feeds its voice into customs trapped beneath the lid of the coffin of a flung way of life and makes them scream out in a sort of energetic shout that shatters the woodwork like a strong morning light piercing the horizon.

I was a Calabar boy in Lagos. I suppose if you were Nigerian, you’d enjoy poking fun at me about how with those seven words you knew my entire story. Yet, you’d be several miles wide. Looking back, I realize I‘ve always been like an actor in a struggle to identify his role in a play filled with casts who shared apparently similar parts. For me, the idea has been, when my turn comes to make an entrance, not to wind up as an archetype or worse, a flat character. Sir was probably trying to save my brothers and me the unease that trucks with the horde of out-of-placeness among people of our own tribe when he had us learn Ibibio. But you see, when you have to climb life’s ladder while trying to dig three make that four, languages at the same time, the heat is tuned up to the nth degree.

Growing up in Nigeria has not exactly been camping out on Easy Street. I’ve spent a large chunk of my life trying to define who I am in a multi-cultured, multi-layered society. The challenge has not been without its out-of-the-usual-run-of-things type of fun. On the one hand, the Nigerian school system pitched the British English as its official language; on the other hand, I had the American movies, literature and hip-hop that I grew up with. I’m better acquainted with the American version. I even take a sense of pride in the fact that I speak Yoruba to a degree that I make original speakers question my true origin sometimes. But I am the son of my father cause I speak his language; I’ve dipped beneath this black body and fetched up who I am.

A couple of years before, I usually got stuck in a pretty fix when natter shifted to questions regarding my ethnicity. You’d have had to drag the confession out of me with a chainfall. (The unease sprang up from what you’d expect in a society glutted with copious dialects coupled with the reality that my patois was a minority). I’ve had a hard time trying to figure out how exactly I got along way back when I lived in denial—when I’d not yet defined myself for myself to coin a phrase. Then again, another question prays to be tackled. What happened that finally peeled the scales off my eyes and pushed realization, ripe and full across the threshold into where I lived?

Writing happened. You gotta know yourself, know what you stand for to be a writer worth a darn. In my drive to become a better writer, I turned up a knockout identity.

Yes, writing happened and it introduced me to the sense of who I am, to a sense of place. It’s consumed me with a love for words that’s grown out of a plain desire to express the me of myself to a life-long dream to write anew the details of this macrocosm through the novelty of language.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan