The Face- Cartography of the Void Read online

  This Is True

  My dead father and I look alike. I wear his face.

  My father tried his whole life to be a good man.

  My father was generous to the world and to strangers.

  My father was stingy at home, with money and his emotions.

  My father made strangers laugh.

  My father and I have never laughed together.

  My father cheated on my mother constantly.

  My father grew up poor. His father was a houseboy for Catholic priests.

  My father wore his father’s face.

  My father barely spoke to his father.

  My grandfather tried to keep my father from taking the scholarship the Church offered him.

  At twenty-three he had never been more than a hundred miles from my town.

  At twenty-three, my father left for the University of Cork, Ireland and later Oxford.

  My father was the first university graduate from my town.

  My father came back in 1956 with a white woman.

  My father married that white woman in 1957 in my small town.

  My father beat my mother. Often. I still carry the guilt of my helplessness.

  My father, outside of monogamy, was the most honest man I have ever known.

  My father made me the man I am today.

  My father loved me even though violence was his preferred mode of affection.

  My father was raised to be a warrior.

  My father was a school principal.

  My father was a member of parliament in the first republic.

  My father was a state superintendent of schools.

  My father was the federal commissioner for public complaints.

  My father was a customary court chairman.

  My father was not required to be a warrior in any of these roles.

  My father brought the war home to us every night and fought his demons.

  My father’s demons were his family, apparently.

  My father tried to self-medicate, but the alcohol only made it worse.

  My father educated me.

  My father kept me on the straight and narrow.

  My father taught me that, even when it hurts you and others, loyalty is absolute.

  My father tried to beat the creative and artistic leanings out of us.

  My father wanted us to have sensible jobs.

  My father played jazz piano at Oxford.

  My father is easier to love as a spirit, a ghost, than as a man.

  My father’s face stares back at me from the mirror.

  My father has been forgiven.

  This Is Not A Sitcom

  To say it is important in Afikpo for a man to have children, male children in particular, is to understate things. It is in fact essential. A man’s progress in Afikpo culture, the various titles he can take and the honor they bestow, is only possible through sons. Sons are so important that if a rich man doesn’t have a son he will “borrow” one, a surrogate, pay for his initiation into manhood, and thus advance his own status as a man who has birthed a warrior. Since girls in the old days were often married off early, the idea of lineage is only possible with sons. A woman who has sons is important; her marriage may fail, she may be a bad cook, but with sons she has status amongst women and respect from men. And so my mother, a foreigner, a white woman, became a favored adopted daughter in my father’s lineage when she gave him four sons in succession.

  When a son is born, it sets off a series of rituals towards manhood. Events which not only advance the status of the son but also bring prestige to his father.

  Traditionally children are born with the mother kneeling or squatting low, and the newborn touches the ground on its way out of the birth canal, cementing the connection between the birth mother and the All mother, the earth. Childbirth is an exclusive arena for women in Afikpo. Not even male herbalists or priests attend a birth unless it is absolutely essential. It is the exclusive work of women, not because it is demeaning; on the contrary, it is because it is elevating. The ability to give birth in Afikpo cosmology elevates women to the level of the creator. It is a moment of primordial connection with the holiest mystery, and men are considered unable and unworthy to stand in the full presence of God. A secret ritual unknown to anyone but the mothers is performed at birth, and the umbilical and placenta are buried in the family compound to place the child under the protection of the earth and all the ancestral lineage of that child.

  Only when the women send up the call—“Okokoriko!”—the call of the rooster, are men allowed to visit. The rituals of manhood begin almost immediately, but these would take a whole book to explain. Suffice it to say that I was born in a hospital, after my mother had been in labor for nearly seventy-two hours. She lost so much blood that she nearly died. And by the time my umbilical and placenta had been taken back to the homestead and buried, my father was already unhappy with me. I was a son who nearly killed his mother. And to make matters worse, I was not even the son of honor (the firstborn) or the son of war (the second son) or the son of the farm (the third son), but the fourth son, with a destiny of either ordinariness or the power to become the diviner, which made me both useless and terrifying at the same time. To be the unremarkable fourth son and potential mother-killer was enough to make me useless in my father’s eyes.

  That I was born just weeks before the civil war arrived in our town cemented his disregard. “You should not have survived the flight from the war,” he told me when I was a teenager. “You should have died then.” It at least would have given him a son who died an honorable death. Later, as I grew up, I sensed that the four-year gap between my immediate elder brother and me had not been caused by careful planning but by a possible abortion after a pregnancy from an affair. So even though I was the spitting image of my father, I might have also looked like the man who cuckolded him. This was the relationship I believed I had with my father—the son whose every choice would disappoint. One could even argue that I excelled at this disappointment and that I continue to disappoint because I always choose my own path. A path marked for me by my Owa, not by expectation.

  I had no evidence for believing that my father didn’t truly love me, no real way to prove a lack of paternal affection. Violence alone was not proof. In a culture where kids are punished with beatings, it is not seen as abuse or lack of love. Perhaps the position my father’s generation found themselves in, not in line with the old ways and teetering on the edge of the new, was the culprit. In traditional Igbo culture, beatings were followed with reaffirmations of love; it was not unlike the joke here in the United States about parents giving us the belt and the line “This is going to hurt me more than you.” There was never the balm of soothing words for me post-beating. There was only the affirmation that this had been deserved and was a result of my own lack. Maybe. Maybe it also lay in something unique to me, the betrayal of my own expectations of how I wanted to be loved, a desire that was unfair to put on someone.

  Growing up middle-class in Nigeria at the time that I did created conflicting expectations. My father’s generation was the first to transition en masse from a more rural, traditional culture to the middle-class elite realities of post-independence Nigeria. He struggled to balance out the warrior training he had grown up with against the new possibilities and demands of being his town’s first graduate, and from Oxford no less. My generation struggled to reconcile the often conflicting, schizophrenic expectations of our parents’ old-world ideals and punishments with the equally schizophrenic Western ideals of parenting we saw on television. These came to a head with the Cosby Show.

  I said to my father, “Dr. Huxtable tells his son, ‘Theo, I love you,’ and all you do is yell at me and tell me how I fail. How I embarrass you. How I betray you.” He was eating. He paused and looked up at me from the plate and said
, “Shut your mouth before I rearrange your stupid face. ”

  Again, the face. That face. Always.

  Text Message

  Brother: Why did the pig have ink all over its face?

  Me: I’ll regret this, but why?

  Brother: Cause it came out of the pen.

  Me: I can’t use any of these.

  Brother: Fine. But here’s another. Did you hear about the witch who went to audition for TV and was told she had the perfect face for radio?

  Me: Look...

  Brother: One last one. You have the face of a saint.

  Me: Which one?

  Brother: St. Bernard. Hahahaha.

  Me: Googling again?

  Brother: How can you tell?

  To Chew Pepper

  This is how boys are presented to the world at birth. This is the name of the ceremony. To chew pepper is to be a man. To be able to withstand the rigors and complexities ahead, to be fortified against defeat, against life. To chew pepper is to have dominion over the earth. This ceremony is the greatest gift a father can give his son. It is usually reserved for the first son, but those fathers who can afford it, those who want to, those who secretly care about their other sons, perform the ceremony for every male child.

  Even though we follow a double-descent paradigm in Afikpo, the pepper-chewing ceremony is only for the patrilineal line. The men gather in a circle in the family courtyard and the oldest male, who is also the priest of the family shrine, sits on a stool in the center with the child on his lap. Then the child’s father brings the following items, and the old man presents them to the child, intoning:

  “Here is mma ji (yam knife/warrior knife). May whatever you grow flourish. May your enemies fall to you.”

  “Here is opia (a bush-clearing knife/headhunting knife). If you go out to the field, may your right hand be up, may you be the first man to cut, may the bush and your enemies fall at your feet.”

  “Here is mpana (farm knife/sword). The work of growth is hard, that of killing fast. May you grow more than you kill.”

  “Here is arua (a thin, three-foot long spear). Hold it true, skewer your gain, be it meat or man.

  “Here is agbo (thick fiber belt for climbing trees). May you climb to any height and not fall.”

  Then the old man takes the hot peppers the father passes to him, chews them with dried fish and yam, and places them on the child’s lips. The burn wakes the child up, as it does the gods, fortifying him, making him able to face any difficulty in the world.

  Then everyone prays for the child, for his long life, for his success, for his uprightness, for his good character, for him to be serene of face.

  Then the old man takes water (representing palm wine) in a calabash and pours it on the slanting roof of a nearby house. He does it four times, each time touching the calabash to the child’s feet and then to the ground. The upward thrust of the calabash is to make the boy fearless and unafraid, the water running down the roof is rain and the fecundity of life, and the ground is the mother that roots him always. And in this way the boy is introduced to the world, to both the sky and the earth, the father and mother, the very heart of existence.

  I have eaten peppers all my life.

  I must be a woman. I must be a mother.

  I must be a man. I must be my father.

  This is your father’s face.

  Wear it.

  Lavender

  For years there was a scar under my bottom lip, one I wore with pride. When I was maybe four I fell running in a park in Burnham and drove my two top teeth through my bottom lip. There was blood everywhere. And as I trembled in shock, a kind and suave Englishman with a cane picked me up and pressed his pocket square that smelled of lavender to my wound. “Who’s a brave chap,” he asked. “Brave chaps don’t cry, alright old boy?” I nodded, pressing the square of fabric into my chin as my mother came rushing up. As she grew frantic, the man put his hand on her shoulder and said, “It’s alright, he’s a real gentleman. Gentlemen are always alright.” And he was gone. Every time I try to summon his face all I see are pocket squares, a gold signet ring, and a cane, and there is also the lingering smell of lavender.

  I didn’t know this, but for years this was the shape of my yearning for a different father. I was eighteen months old when we fled Biafra, and I had no memory of my father. Still, I must have been searching for him. And I found him in that scar and that smell.

  There are other scars on my body, caused by or shared with my real father. I’m proud of those too. There is a six-inch scar that runs down my left shin, a curved centipede of a thing. Twenty-six stitches when I was just six. I had slipped and fallen on the jagged point of a broken bottle. The glass cut to the bone. As he rushed me to the hospital, my father was torn between his fear that I might bleed out and his exhortations to keep my leg off the cloth seat of his pristine Peugeot 301.

  And the scars on the back of his right hand that he told me were caused by shrapnel from a grenade he caught to save a small child. My mother later told me he got them in a drunken fight with his brother, Emmanuel, who cut him with the sharp end of a broken beer bottle. These were the same scars I sank my teeth into, drawing blood, when he slapped me for the first time. I was five. That bite earned me a left hook to the side of the head, but it was worth it to know I had left a mark on him. The next day I lost three milk teeth. It was an endless bargain of violence.

  And the scars on his back cut deep from the initiation whips and the manhood rite of Iti Osiosi (literally “to beat sticks”), a rite in which all young men, myself included, participated. We would strip to the waist and gather in the communal playground. Submit your back to be whipped, and if you didn’t cry out or shed a tear, you won and your opponent had to present his back to you. The first to cry was out. To prove how brave we were we jockeyed for the right to present our backs first. In my father’s day the scars were as severe as the whipping. But we were gentler with each other, and so the scars were so slight that they quickly faded to psychic imprints. But they never leave you—the cut of the chili-and urine-soaked whips that ripped flesh, the snarl of pleasure on your opponent’s face, and the tears blinked back for your manhood. That was the journey for me: give and take, whip and be whipped, skin for blood, blood for skin.

  Scars and the lingering smell of Old Spice. Our lives are a series of losses and gains.

  The Terrain

  It is dim in the museum in Auckland, New Zealand. Even dark, and moody. Light filters into this room in a hush, as if afraid to disturb something that lurks inside the shadows of the replica wharenui sitting in the middle of the room.

  A wharenui (big house) or whare whakairo (carved house) is the focal point of a Maori marae, the communal space marked off for ritual and sacred ceremonies. Inside and outside of the wharenui are stylized carved images of the iwi, the tribe’s ancestors. But the wharenui is itself an ancestor too, perhaps the primordial founder of the tribe. I confess my knowledge here is limited, but if the wharenui is an ancestor, the koruru, or gable, at the front represents the head; the maihi, the diagonal baseboards, signify arms; the tahuhu, or the ridge beam, is the backbone; the heke, or rafters, signify ribs; and the central column inside, the poutokomanawa, is the heart.

  I stand there and I don’t just breathe in the wood smell and the acridity of new wood polish; I am also reminded in this moment that all old cultures are more alike than not.

  Here I stand before the Obuogo, the men’s sacred house at the center of the Ogo, in my hamlet of Amaha. It is the same principle, the same idea. Just as the wharenui is for the Maori, the Obuogo (the spiritual heart of the Ogo) is the center of the space of mystery and ancestral worship (Ogo), and the insides are lined with carved and sculpted ancestors. The two main differences are that Obuogos are made of mud walls built around wood frames with a raffia roof, and that the heart of the Obuogo is not a pillar but a room with an
even smaller room inside it. The outer room houses the ancestral masks for the masquerades and other such paraphernalia and even, in some cases, the kamalu pots of the men, our ancestral lineage pots. The smaller room houses the secrets of Egbele and Okemma, the spirits that only the priests can know.

  In the museum in Auckland, I reach out to the ancestral archetype closest to me. I am reminded of the role of this performative awe, which is to stress our links to both the living and the dead and to remind us that our identity is as much about the dead as it is about the living. In that mote-filled room I touch the ancestor’s carved wooden face. If the docent sees me, he makes no attempt to stop me. On this trip I have been frequently confused for a Maori, even by Maoris, and it has led to some tense moments.

  The wood is surprisingly soft. And oily from the polish I smelled earlier. In Amaha, the faces are covered in oily soot from fires and palm oil and rituals I cannot reveal here.

  My finger travels the longest carved line on the face, the thickest welt, up that face. From the base of the jaw all the way up the cheek, stopping just short of the abalone shell eye. These lines cut into the wood are meant to mimic the ancient facial tattoos that marked these ancestors as men, as warriors, as worthy of carrying their lineage back into the place of death and yet forward into the place of tomorrow.

  In that thought I was no longer in this museum in Auckland standing before a facsimile of the past but back in the small fishing and farming town of Afikpo and even smaller, back in the hamlet of Amaha, to be exact.

  As the sun came through a cloud and lit up a face with carved teeth bared, lips curled back, tongue hanging out as though caught in a haka, the wooden lines become the scarification lines in the faces of my people, of a select few elders, ndegburuchi, those that cut ichi.

  Practiced more prevalently among the northern Igbo of Nri descent, Igbuichi—literally “to cut ichi”—is an old practice that has mostly died out. Legend has it that it came to Afikpo with the Igala warriors who settled in Amachi (the hamlet of God) around the eighteenth century.