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.
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
Posts
