For My Father, Chukwudera, on His Birthday.
As I grew older, I came to understand my father better. But of course, not before the great misunderstanding of the age of rebellion, a topic for another day. And the epiphanies that have led to me coming to understand him more, are things that drew me closer to him in a new way.
Countless times in childhood, my father told me how he named me Chiedoziem, “God has repaired me.” I had been born in the middle of a brutal military dictatorship, and he, a young man was going through very difficult times. Then I was born and, in his words, it felt like God had changed something inside of him and everything was good again. That was beautiful, except that I did not fully understand the story until I was 25. I met a friend who lived in Lagos, with who I talked on the phone regularly. And one day, she asked me what my name meant. And I told her. And I began to recall the story of how on the day I was born, my father had been in the long queue in the fuel station, and things were tough, and through the vision of what I was going through at the time, I began to appreciate the difficulty the man must have been going through. And the significance of my birth hit me with a clearer lucidity. What did it mean for God to repair a man? It meant of course that the man must have been broken in some ways that needed fixing. It took me five years of difficulty as a young man to understand properly, how difficult life could have been for Joseph Chukwudera as a young man that when fatherhood called, he felt repaired.
In Asaba I joined a book club where we read short stories and poetry twice every month, and one day, we read, Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” a poem about a young man reminiscing about his days as a very little boy, with a very caring father whose affection, he took for granted as a child. In the poem, he was looking at it through the eyes of memory as an adult and it haunted him. So much did it haunt him that he wrote, “But what did I know, what did I know of love’s lonely and austere offices.” It reminded me so much of my father when me and my brother were much younger, about 20 years ago. My brother and I — my brother especially — would wake up in the midnight, hungry. “Daddy I want to drink tea,” me or my brother would say. Father would wake up, get hot water from the thermos flask, make us tea, and give us bread. Then he would put the lamp beside us in the passage from where he could watch us from the bed. When at night, he sensed we were cold or uncomfortable, he either looked for ways to cover us, or he gave drugs when he sensed we were sick. Then there was the part of him being a very prayerful person, so whenever you said to him, “Daddy, my leg is paining me. I did not hit it anywhere, but it is paining me,” he would take that leg or whatever part of the body, say a short prayer on it, and blow a healing breeze. We didn’t see it as much. But as I remember these things many years down the line, I cannot help but think, “But what did we know of love’s lonely and austere offices.”
When I talk about my father, it is with a mix of so much emotions — gratitude, serendipity, a bit of pain, and admiration. The life of a parent has so much influence on their children. And bringing us up, my father did overtime to make sure that in his wisdom, he tried to raise us to the best of his ability as God-fearing and ambitious people who saw the best in themselves. In the midst of so much chaos in my childhood and hostility from close circles, my father told me, “My son, if nobody loves you, love yourself. If the world is against you, do not be against yourself.” I think in trying to drive those points, he would often tell me, “My son, you are the apple of God’s eyes.” And those words then, did a great deal for me in helping build my self-esteem. My father taught us we were the best. He has lived an exemplary life according to what he believes, especially as a Christian, teetotaler and a man faithful to his responsibilities. He is no perfect man, nobody ever is. In fact, we disagree on half the things of life, and I am not very admiring of his generation. But that we have that relationship that could fuel conversations for days on end, is something I do not take for granted.
My father was the most brilliant man I knew growing up. More brilliant than other fathers in the neighbourhood. So well-read, so intelligent, like a human dictionary he knew the meaning of every new word I came across somewhere. So well-read that he talked about endless books from Achebe’s Arrow of God to Dickens’ Great Expectation, to Munonye’s The Only Son, to Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, to the meditative books of the Bible and so forth. My father would often recall the part in Arrow of God where the chief priest sent his son to the missionaries to be his eyes there and learn the white man’s ways. It was to him an exemplary anecdote of what a father’s relationship with his children could be. My father was the first person who to my hearing, called Unoka, a lazy but wise man. After reading Things Fall Apart, I wondered how he got such insights. He is of the Opinion that Pip in Great Expectation is what a truly educated man should be because he treated both the destitute and people of caliber humanely. From my father, I learnt that stories are an arbiter of lessons and they could teach you how to live.
To be brought up by my father was to be brought up by a good man who loved knowledge. For years, I have wanted to write something grand about him on his birthday and every time I have kept failing. Perhaps, the expanse of the story is so broad that one finds it so hard to even know where to begin. Perhaps, it is the fear of writing a scattered meditation like what I have hurriedly put down this morning. But the point is to honour a father who deserves it without so much affectation. My father turns 57 today. And more than ever, I am grateful to have been brought up by such a man.
