My Journey to Memoiristan (2)

Engagements by with Chidi Amuta

In Nigeria today, the market of memoirs is now a field jammed with a buffet of titles by political mammals. And politicians in these parts have a penchant for poisoning most things they come into contact with. Anything hugged by Nigerian politics never remains the same. It is mangled, disfigured or rendered unrecognizable. Politicians’ memoirs are either rehearsals of the onset of the next campaign or a catalogue of regrets and blames heaped mostly on others. It can even be an undisguised campaign for yet another chance in a new electoral cycle. 

But whatever else it pretends to be, a memoir must be readable. It must arrest the attention of the audience not only in the curiosity of the life and things remembered and chronicled. The style of its delivery and rendition must appeal and retain attention. A good memoir must not be a narrative terror, a punishing tale or  humdrum lifeless storytelling. Nor should it be a series of linguistic atrocities unleashed on a hapless audience. In my view, the reading public has committed no offense for which it has earned the excruciating punishment of atrocious writing paraded as memoirs.

The obligation to enrich public discourse through a memoir deserves a refreshing style and elegant narrative.  The experience that gives birth to a memoir as in real life itself often lives in two modes. The life story itself is often a straightforward narrative . It is the trajectory of a life lived in prose which is typical of most life journeys. But the personal private experience of the voyager is a series of reflections that capture the inner poetic essence of man as ‘spiritual’ being. We tend to elevate our experiences to the level of the philosophical and poetic when our experiences touch on the mysteries of death, coincidence, providence or the inevitable encounters between mortal man and what Shakespeare calls “the more than man”. This is perhaps why we resort to poetic quotes from Holy books or classical literature when we are overwhelmed by the imponderables of life. The bare life story is a narrative in prose but one that is at best animated by the poetic essence of life when we encounter bumps that are beyond our normal comprehension. No life  worth memorializing can escape the realms of the mysterious and the inevitable. War, natural disasters, death of loved ones, epidemics and inexplicable occurrences happen in most life times. It is these unknowns of a normal life that invite the poet or philosopher in us all. As America’ s poet laureate  Robert Frost  puts it, “Poetry is when an emotion has found thought and thought has found words”

Reputed Indian-born writer, Salman Rushdie, elaborates on the duality of the language  of the memoir as follows: “The journey across the frontier from poetry land into proseville seems to go through Memoiristan “ In other words, Memoiristan as memory land is the abode of all memoirs and it lends itself to this duality of expressive possibilities- prose and poetry in fluid interface. 

Rushdie correctly identifies the memoir as an emerging art form with its own increasingly distinctive generic attributes. “Memoirs …have become  a major art form , allowing our perceptions of the present to be remade through the personal life experiences , the extraordinary lives of memoirists…”

HOMAGE is therefore my attempt to mediate the duality of the prose of my life’s story and the poetry of my inner reflections on what I have been through. 

 It is more. In this book, I wade through a forest of linguistic and stylistic possibilities and provinces. At times, I am a story teller, narrating my journey. At other times, I am a poetic subject overwhelmed by ancestry and origins through the timeless imagery and metaphor of the ancients. Some other time, I am the historiographer relating personal experience to the progress of national history. Still at other times, I am the journalist interrogating world leaders.

I must confess that HOMAGE is an experimental book from a linguistic and stylistic perspective. It seeks to fuse the methods of prose, poetry, journalism and history without losing the centrality of my life’s story. 

I must also confess that this mixture reflects my diverse disciplinary exposures over the years as a literary scholar, political history student and journalist with over three decades of experience in the last field. 

The original compulsion to do HOMAGE came from my family and friends. My children could not quite understand the contradictions in my life: A father who trekked over five miles a day to go to primary school and now has to drive his kids to the best private schools in an air-conditioned Mercedes; a father who grew up in the bush village of Umuguru thrilled by the drumbeats of native festivity but whose musical taste is now universal and contemporary, ranging from Beethoven to Mozart and Strauss; from Rex Lawson and Victor Olaiya to the best Western R&B, from The Beatles to Hugh Masekela, Daddy Lumba, Flavor to Davido,  WizKid and Burna Boy.

My reminiscences of the war years fueled their curiosity about Nigerian history even further. Till this moment, my children even in their early adulthood cannot understand how anybody could have survived the Hades of blood and fire to earn the cushioned life in which thy grew up.  More demand pressure for this memoir came from friends and relations who have followed my career and writings  in various titles over the years. They were eager to gain insights into “‘where you are coming from”. These followed up with occasional reminders from people like Prof. Charles Okigbo, Yunus Mohammed, Chido Nwangwu and Darl Uzu. I am not sure if HOMAGE meets these high expectations and curiosities. Some of my friends waited anxiously for this memoir to be completed and published but are now gone: Biodun Jeyifo, Emeka Obasi , Ngozi Anyaegbunam and Doyin Abiola deserve post humus acknowledgment. I heard your yearnings loud and clear. This offering is a homage to your illustrious spirits and abiding friendships.

To the rest of you, especially the youth of our nation, who will find time to read and share these memories, this is also a HOMAGE to you and to the future of the nation that has given us all so much.