I last saw Uncle Mai in March. He was on the veranda of his faded house in Abba, which used to be my grandmother’s house, sitting on one of those slant-backed chairs that spoke of lazy afternoons, propped by a shabby cushion. The afternoon blazed with heat. I stood behind him and fanned him with a newspaper, his back covered in a white sheen of talcum powder. He was shrunken and shrivelled by cancer. My father’s only brother. My favourite uncle. A few years before, I was startled to realise that he was almost 70 because his arms, so firmly muscled from years of farming, so robust and able, made him seem much younger. Now his wrists were thin as twigs, his ribs stared through papery skin, his face had lost its flesh. He was a gaunt, grimacing stranger. ‘Obibia gi julum afo ka nni’, he told me. ‘Your visit has filled me like food’.
I often sat with him on that veranda over the years, talking until dusk fell, our conversations interrupted by laughter, by neighbours who wandered in, by the bleating of his goats in the backyard. When I was researching my novel about the Nigeria-Biafra war, he sat opposite me on that veranda and made sounds to mimic the bomber planes. Once, he pulled up his shirt to show me where he had been wounded while fighting with the 21 battalion of the Biafran Army. Sometimes he laughed aloud, short joyous bursts, at his own stories: how my grandfather had refused to leave our fallen hometown and had instead dug a hole in the front yard and climbed in with his rusted Dane gun, how he, Uncle Mai, was so filthy and soap-deprived towards the end of the war that he climbed into a stream and bathed with raw unripe cassava, although he was not sure whether the cassava made him even dirtier. And as he spoke, I thought of the word ‘grace’. He was an easy man to like, a man who forgave easily. He was also a man who believed easily. In the months of his illness, many purveyors of health trooped through his compound gates: Pentecostal prayer warriors, traditional herbalists, self-styled doctors. They brought him specially cooked meals, or they lit candles and prayed all night or they claimed to unearth the cause of his illness in the soil beneath the ube tree.
Once, years ago, he was telling me about a relative who was very ill, and he added, in English, that the illness was ‘man-made’. ‘Uncle, people naturally get ill’, I said. He looked at me as though he was sorry I did not understand. ‘No’, he said gently. ‘It is man-made. We know somebody did it’. When he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, the doctors recommended surgery. My father arrived on the morning of the scheduled surgery to take him to the hospital, and Uncle Mai refused to go. He had disliked his past hospital visits, the harried care of indifferent doctors, the pills and injections. To him, an operation was an invasion, an alien thing synonymous with death, unlike the stories he had heard of people curing cancer with prayers and herbal medicine. And so, that morning, he told my father, ‘If I have this operation, I will die’. I imagine the scene: my father, the rational professor, worried and upset, standing beside the car, and Uncle Mai, usually deferential to his big brother, now stubbornly resolute, in that ancestral compound that holds my family’s history.
They were close. When they traded childhood memories, Uncle Mai would sometimes correct my father, because my father had often been away at school. He liked to tell proud stories of my father, the academic star, the one who passed his exams and had his name published in a newspaper. Uncle Mai’s formal education had stopped at secondary school. (He treated books with great respect, the few he owned were carefully, almost lovingly, wrapped in protective paper.) He had been an average student, uninterested in the academic life my father loved, and full of inchoate plans for his future; he would end up settling into a slow village life, subsidised by family and subsistence farming, in a place where serious illnesses were ‘man-made’.
I called him ‘my darling uncle’ (pronounced dah-lin as though it were an Igbo word) and he would smile, a smile full of delight and amusement, as he also did when I complained about the patriarchy of Igbo culture. ‘Why can’t I bless the kola nut?’ I would ask him. ‘Why can’t I go to umunna meetings, since I am actually more interested than my brothers?’ He ignored my protestations with that smile, as though he enjoyed my ramblings but remained clear that things were simply as they should be. Once, in the middle of telling me a story, he proudly said, ‘Women from our town never did igba nrira, like they did in some of these neighbouring towns’. Igba nrira was the custom of a woman initiating divorce by simply leaving her husband and going to another man’s house. I thought this progressive. ‘I wish our town had done it’, I said. And he looked at me, shook his head and burst out laughing. His impossible niece. The one he humoured.
I could tell how much he loved that I loved his stories – of his childhood, of my grandfather, of the lost masquerade dances and pottery-making techniques he remembered observing as a child. He was my link to our past. He died in April.
In the weeks after his death, I would stop suddenly in the middle of talking, or eating, or working, and feel struck by this: Uncle Mai has died. The realisation would come as a surprise, as news, as though I had not earlier known. Perhaps this is grief, a series of forgetting and remembering.
The last time I saw him, sitting on that veranda, he looked at me and said, ‘I bu so mma’. You look beautiful. I began to cry. ‘Stop crying,’ he said, ‘I am almost well now. You should have seen me a few weeks ago when it was bad.’ I stared at him, his ravaged body, his collarbone jutting out sharply, like something obscene.
‘I would like a motorcycle for when I get better,’ he said. ‘Not you alone, from all of you’.
‘Yes’, I said. ‘We will get you the motorcycle. Just get well’.
I no longer remember the last thing we said because I had magically convinced myself that I would see him again, and so I resolved to do nothing sentimental. I did not look back as I was driven away from his compound. I told myself that since I did not look back, the universe would ensure that I saw him again.
Uncle Mai’s death brought to me the exquisite terror of confronting other losses and so, during the weeks that led to the funeral, I fearfully watched my father. My almost-80-year-old father. He played his role well, the stoic one in charge of things. When asked how he was doing, he would say cryptically, ‘Nobody is made of wood.’ His entire focus was on arranging the ikwa ozu. The word ‘ozu’ means corpse while ‘ikwa’ is, depending on the context, to mourn or to sew, and as a child the expression ‘ikwa ozu’ terrified me, brought amorphous ghoulish images to mind: the sewing of a corpse. It took a while before I understood that it meant a collective mourning, a funeral. The Igbo believe that if a funeral is not done properly, the dead soul roams around forever, unhappy and possibly vengeful. A funeral’s success depends largely on how well attended it is, and to plan a funeral is to navigate the anxiety of attendance. In those weeks before the ikwa ozu, my father often said, ‘Mai was well liked. People will come.’
At the first sound of the ambulance bringing Uncle Mai’s body from the mortuary, my father went silent. Then I saw my father slumped on a chair. It was as if his bones had melted, and he looked very old and very vulnerable. His reddened eyes made me feel a certain relief. ‘My only brother,’ he mumbled. ‘My only brother.’ Later, my sister would see him sitting on his bed, weeping, his head in his hands, his shoulder heaving.
Uncle Mai lay in state on a bed placed in the centre of his small living room.
I did not look at his face, because I am uncomfortable with the displaying of corpses, but watching my relatives troop past him, I understood the cathartic importance of this ritual, the tears at the sight of his body, as though something they hoped was not true had been irrefutably confirmed. As people walked in to view the body, Ekene, an energetic young man who lived close by, stood by the door, a bucket of holy water at his feet. He scooped from it in a little cup and flung the water around, at people entering the room, at the floor of the room, at the curtains. He was determined to keep evil spirits out. Watching him, I imagined the evil spirits repelled by the fury of his flinging and the fury of his faith. And I remembered how, after my first novel was published, Uncle Mai told me, ‘Keep climbing, you will not fall. But don’t eat in anybody’s house. They can put something in your food.’
Uncle Mai’s body was taken to the church for a funeral mass and then brought back to be buried near his compound gates. I stood by and watched the young men fill the grave, the red soil making dull thumping sounds as it hit the casket. After the burial, the ikwa ozu began. People brought money, rolls of cloth, bottles of liquor. They said ‘ndo’ and sometimes they took the microphone and recounted an anecdote about Uncle Mai. Different groups came, many with music and drumming and dancing. His in-laws. His mother’s relatives. The Catholic Women’s Organisation. The choir. The Old Boys Association of Notre Dame College in Abatete. The Knights of Saint Mulumba. The Purgatorian Society, whose members dug candles into the freshly dug grave and walked slowly around it, rosaries dangling from their hands, a sight I found oddly disturbing.
I was struck, on the whole, by the communitarian and celebratory nature of Igbo funerals. And by how quickly quarrels erupted. The poster announcing Uncle’s death, displayed on the compound gate, was signed by his daughter, my cousin Nneka. The men in my umunna were annoyed. ‘A woman should not have signed the poster,’ they muttered. I watched one of them, an old man, thick lines of dirt under his fingernails, as he poured some of his beer on the ground, to the left and then to the right, and slightly raised the bottle to the sky before he drank. Mostly, the disagreements were about food. Did you give that group enough food? Don’t give out any more drinks to that group. One cousin went to the backyard to argue with the caterer; she wanted to make sure her husband and his people were given a big cooler of rice and meat, otherwise her husband’s relatives would mock her later for such a poor showing at her father’s funeral.
In the evening, the compound almost ghostly in its sudden emptiness, my siblings and I sat and talked about Uncle Mai. There were things unsaid; Uncle Mai should have been there when my father passed away and as the younger brother, it was he who would then lead the way. But there were many other things said. It was comforting to me, that we did not have to resort to familiar clichés in his death – as people often do in condolence registers – but we told stories, often with laughter. Remember how Uncle would say ‘my brother’ when he was talking to us as though his brother was not daddy? We talked about how protective he was of us, how he was always eager to make plans, to solve problems, how he would always bring a little gift when he visited us years ago. My father listened in, saying little. Finally he told us how one day, towards the end of his illness, Uncle Mai suddenly burst into tears, and said he hated being a burden to his family.
We all wrote tributes to Uncle Mai. My brother, Okey, wrote, ‘Your heart was as beautiful as your handwriting.’ Uncle Mai’s handwriting was all flourishes and curves, elegant and archaic, a result of his missionary education. He was a letter writer. When I left to go to college in America, he would write me letters whenever there was somebody travelling to America who could post it. He wrote in English, with a scattering of Igbo words. After my graduation from Yale, he wrote, ‘Deme-dalu for making us proud always,’ thanking me in the Abba dialect of Igbo. Some of his expressions had the charm of the antique, of writing in a language he hardly ever spoke. (When he did speak English, it was with a heavy Igbo accent, adding extra syllables and elongating vowels.) At the end of one letter, he wrote, ‘Let’s call it a day’. In the most recent, before he signed off ‘Your uncle, Michael,’ he wrote a single word: Godspeed.
Adichie, a respected and celebrated author of the novels Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and she has recently published a collection of short stories titled The Thing around Your Neck (2009).
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