The Face- Cartography of the Void Read online

  Igbo is a tonal language; the tonality of words define meaning, but they also allow punning, which is one of the linguistic ways the Ehugbo have of trying to account for the worldview of simultaneity that marks it—no pun intended here.

  On the one hand, Ichi can mean to lead. Or to collect. To gather. Or it can mean to be in flow or accordance with your indwelling spirit, the spark of the creator we call Chi. The word, even when its tonality marks it one way, can and does, also refer to all the above meanings. As we say in Afikpo: asusu bu uwa, language is the world.

  Ichi were marks of status and rank, the mark of Igbo aristocracy, of the apex of both temporal and spiritual power. They were an immediate visual marker of extreme courage and endurance. Not all endured this form of extreme scarification, and succumbed to the effects of sepsis—sometimes losing an eye or both, sometimes a nose, sometimes their lives.

  No one wearing Ichi was allowed to do any menial tasks, and they were never challenged or molested in any way. Even when the British colonized the country and met resistance led by those who bore Ichi, they never placed them in handcuffs when they arrested them but treated them as nobles.

  Ichi was linked very much to the sun, and the marks were a way to wear the sun on your face. In Igbo the sun is called Anyaanwu, which means the eye or aura of the sun. The sun, anwu, was an entity that no one could behold with mortal eyes and was considered the material expression of God’s creative aspect, or the spiritualized notion of matter. The sun symbolized the highest form of light and purity and power, both spiritual and physical, such that it was a very high honor to wear it on your face. This is at one level what the scarification rite of Ichi meant.

  The artist would cut the first line from the center of the forehead down to the chin. This was known as oyi agbara, the caul of the holy spirit. The second line was cut horizontally across the face, right to left, east to west, and was called ije enu—life’s journey, the journey of the sun across the sky, the journey from life to death, and, as with the rising of the sun the next day, the resurrection and also reincarnation. In fact, in Afikpo the traditional morning greeting is Nnaa, to which the response is nnahicha. These are elisions of a larger saying: Nnaa is from the question “inahri onwu?” or “Did you escape death” (as sleep was seen as a small death), and the response, nnaicha, is from “anahichari’m,” “I escaped well.” It is believed that to make the journey in full consciousness from birth to earth and to come back (either from sleep, trance, or meditation) with knowledge of the other side made one a great person. It is important to note that while most of those who wore ichi were men (as it required being a warrior too), women who were warriors (dike nwanyi) also could wear ichi. To wear ichi marked you as one who had lived a full life regardless of age, and one who by symbolic death and resurrection had become a living ancestor, one who it was believed could reincarnate parts of themselves while still alive.

  The two first marks met at the bridge of the nose, oke igwe or the bridge of heaven; the cross, the place of balance. This pattern was then repeated sixteen times, sixteen being a number for creation, which created eight crosses, uwa’m uwa’m asaa, “my world my seven worlds,” seven being how many incarnations it took for one complete human cycle (the eighth being the one being lived). The resulting pattern looked, in many ways, like the spread of an eagle’s feathers, with the other figures being variations.

  But besides marking a person into nobility, which was based not only on land and wealth and martial accomplishment, as is so often the case, ichi signified character and spiritual disposition. It served to a) obliterate the small human ego or facial identity and allow the spirit behind to shine through all the time, and b) form a mask (not unlike the beaded crowns of the Yoruba Obas) to protect the rest of the community from gazing into the pure power of the living ancestral spirit, much like the sun’s rays form an aura to protect us from the true sun.

  To cut ichi is to be reborn in light, in the path of true visions, to be held to a higher morality because it was impossible to hide the face, to disguise oneself and commit sins and crimes.

  Onyegbuluchi refers to one who has cut ichi. It can also mean one who has killed (overcome or mastered) their spirit (chi) or destiny (chi). Like I said, to be Igbo is to live in convergence and simultaneity. To wear ichi was to wear your responsibility on your face. To wear your status as an elder, to always live up to the ideals of the community. Talk about stress lines!

  Ironically I am writing this in a new spring in Chicago, where the sun barely comes out. I stand sunning by the glass doors to the garden as often as I can. To sun the face. To wear the sun on the face. My grandfather was right: ejigi enya amaka ahu ime ogo, one cannot comprehend mystery with the outer eyes. Ihu umma bu ihe eji eje ali mma: the face of spirit is what we wear to the land of spirits.

  This Is Hope

  That I can change.

  That I can overcome my DNA.

  That my nature will overcome nurture.

  That I will leave a trail of love when I go.

  That I will die trying to be a good man.

  That all the hate dies with me.

  That my face, and my father’s face, and his father’s face before him will blaze in an unending lineage of light and forgiveness.

  Pater Nostra

  Okpa ihu nnaya—one who has his father’s face. This was the affectionate term that my aunts on my father’s side greeted me with. And yet I couldn’t help thinking that under all that affection was an accusation. To have my father’s face was to have taken it, stolen it perhaps, and refuse to give it back. It also hinted at, I thought, a certain dishonesty on my part; rather than wear or reveal my face, I was hiding behind my father’s. Other times I was called Ogbonnaya. Ogbo is a complex word; it means a male friend in the general sense but can also refer to a male friend who is specifically within one’s own age grade, making them part of the same expression of time as you, bound by a communal obligation that lasted for life. Age grades in Afikpo and some other Igbo cultures are how things are governed. So to be ogbo nna, part of your father’s age grade, that unique expression of life, could imply that you were in fact your father’s clone. So closely did you resemble him that life had “stuttered” and created the same being twice. Of course the other part of this word, the friendship and ease, had to be present. You weren’t just your father’s clone, you were his favorite son, the closer one, the one who would be his confidant and, as much as was possible in Afikpo culture, his friend. It involves an active participation by the father. In my case, not so much. If others saw me as ogbo nnaya, my father saw me as his missed opportunities. As a doppelgänger that could and very well might take the road less traveled, which he had wanted but felt he couldn’t choose because of family obligations. He felt that he could very well watch me live the life that he had wanted, that he felt he deserved. With much compassion and understanding, I have come to realize, years after his death, that it was a thought he just couldn’t stand. They say babies resemble their fathers at birth because it kept early humans from eating their own children. An evolutionary survival mechanism. My father didn’t get that memo.

  To wear the face of someone you can’t help loving even as you can’t help hating them, is to be caught in an infernal struggle for your own soul.

  The Architecture of Loss

  My face is the mirror of a dead people—an extinct people. There is nothing left of my father’s people, the Egu, other than a few ancestral masks that no one really understands anymore, a style of pottery that is still in use but accredited to another group, a few scattered and abandoned homesteads overgrown with weeds, and a few place names.

  I touch my face in the mirror. Stubble. Acne scars. I am thinking of my father and his face. The sound of him shaving in the mornings, his cheeks, hardened over time, take the scrape of the razor with a wooden echo that I could hear down the hall. The deep black of his skin. A face, like mine, all che
ek and jowl. The way it would shut down into a sullen mask. Or twist into anger. Or the way his eyes would hood when he looked at you so that sometimes it was hard to tell if they were open. And the way sometimes that hooded look would carry menace and danger. These are all things my face does.

  Every family has a hierarchy of pain, of loss, a narrative that each sibling holds—who got hurt most, who got left out, who never received enough love, or any of the love for that matter.

  Every sibling will tell you that they had it worst growing up. These claims usually follow an age hierarchy, the eldest siblings claiming that parents were the strictest with them, the hardest on them.

  In families with experiences of trauma, whether caused by external factors such as war or by internal factors such as a violent parent, the competitiveness is heightened. Which parent was more violent and to whom. It doesn’t matter whether there are facts to be substantiated; emotional truth is all that counts in this game.

  I had a defined mythology about my father and about how much harder he was on me, how much he hated me. I was clear about the ways in which he tried to destroy me. When I told my uncle that my father didn’t love me, he looked at me confused. “But he has no choice,” he said. “It is not a choice. He is your father.” I have come to learn that there is truth to this. I have also come to learn that the other side of that truth is that your father can hate you for the ways in which he cannot help loving you. We are complex equations: fathers and sons.

  And for many years I thought myself so different than he was, so much better. I prided myself on this difference. But everyone called me oyiri nnaya, the one who resembles his father. It chafed.

  Then one day in my mother’s small flat in Burnham, miles from him and years since I saw him, I was making dinner with my brother Greg and we were ribbing each other, and I laughed. My mother called out my father’s name, Michael, and came stumbling into the kitchen with a dazed look on her face. “God, Christopher,” she said. “You sound just like your father.” I see it now. In my face, in my hands, in my gestures. I am just like my father, and twelve years after his death I can say it with pride, with an ease. I resemble my father. I am my father’s son—and yet still there is a seed of doubt, and the texture of that doubt is the texture of my face, smooth but for the resistance of stubbled cheeks. But when I shave there is not the sound of a blade carving ancestral wood masks.

  Afikpo is a double-descent culture. We are descended from both our matrilineal and patrilineal lines—Ikwunne and Ikwunna. It is a way of locating ourselves in an ever-changing world. So we claim descent in a double helix, like the DNA that forms us. We are from the lines that intersect, that liminal place of genetic encoding. My grandfather’s people are Omaka Idume Chukwu, and my grandmother’s people are Ajayi Mbeyi, Igbo on the first hand and Egu on the second.

  The Egu were an aboriginal people, a root race that lived in the area of Afikpo from Neolithic times. A gentle people, it was said. Trusting but strong when they needed to be and fierce fighters. But they were also farmers and potters. Artists. They were a people with a complex cosmological relationship to the universe. A people whose elders, upon attaining enlightenment, wove a rope long enough to measure the day and the night. When they found the exact midpoint, the door to heaven, they threw the rope up and climbed it into the very heart of God, the rope dropping down, the clues of its weave the gift of the measure left for generations to come. Or so we’ve been told.

  They were the first people, before others came. It was Egu, then Nkalu, then Ebri, and then Ohaodu. Then finally in the seventeenth century, Omaka Igbo Chukwu, using subterfuge and infiltration, conquered and assimilated the Egu.

  No one knows anymore what the true meaning of the word Egu was, since the language of that culture was lost or subsumed in Igbo. But Igbo is a tonal language, and pronounced certain ways, Egu means hunger, and with another inflection it can mean a desperate hunger, starvation almost. A hunger that can birth a world, drive us forward from the Stone Age, and then stutter into extinction and assimilation. Those who wouldn’t join Omaka Igbo Chukwu were massacred—men, women, and children. A half-mile from the house I grew up in was a stretch of abandoned land that had been proclaimed an evil forest. Its name was ogbugbu umuruma—the slaughter of children. The last of my Egu ancestors was named Aja Mbeyi, and the first of my Afikpo ancestors was Omaka Chukwu.

  By the time my great grandmother was born, they were just a legend. Nobody told me about them until I was a teenager and I had a strange dream. I was fourteen. From the corner of my room a woman emerged in a green mist. She was very dark and wore white and her teeth were filed to points and she said in a hiss, “Wake up. Don’t you know you are Egu?” It was so real that I searched for her when I woke. That was the first time I heard the word Egu. I asked my father and he said, “All that is in the past. We are not Egu. We are Ehugbo Omaka Ejeali.” But Egu blood runs deep and the traits are still there. I wonder how much, though. They say about four percent of genes in people from Asia and Europe trace back to Neanderthals. What does it mean to walk and talk with the genes of a people that Homo sapiens exterminated, or as some claim, even ate into extinction? Neanderthals were so strong it is said their muscles bent their bones. All that strength and they were unable to save themselves. And what of Egu? Why couldn’t they save themselves? It is true, though, what my father said; it’s all in the past, but I can’t help wondering if I am part of an unbroken chain of purpose stretching from 10,000 BCE to now. Is that what a people are?

  My grandfather laughed when I told him my dream. He said God put human eyes on the front of our heads so we could see only into the hope of the future and not linger in a past we no longer understand. But he did say this: the oldest mask we wear in the Isiji manhood rites, abstract and carved from calabash shell, the only one of its kind, is from the Egu. Who we are, Omaka Chukwu or not, and how we become who we are is a gift of Egu. That’s why we call that mask mbubu: the first one, after the first people. Egu came up from the ground here, then Nkalu came, and Ebri and even Ohaodu. Long before Omaka Chukwu.

  We are called Ehugbo Omaka Ejali because Omaka did a big sacrifice to own the land, but his atonement is that all his descendants wear the face of the dead. Ihu gu bu ihu mma, your face is the face of the spirits. That is what Egu are.

  I touch my face. I feel for stubble. I find some. I shave again. Put down the razor. Splash water on my cheeks and look at my misted image in the bathroom mirror: ghostly.

  This May Not Be True

  I am a better man than my father ever was.

  I have none of the anger for myself and the world that damaged him and his entire generation.

  I have never cheated on a woman.

  I have never slept with a married woman.

  I haven’t spent my life trying to make up to women for all the hurt my father caused my mother.

  I am nothing like him.

  I am exactly like him.

  I do not have his temper.

  I love that my face is his face.

  I have forgiven myself for being a bad son, for being his son.

  Truce

  And who doesn’t yearn for their father to love them? And who doesn’t decide how or when they should be loved and what the proof of it is? But in the end, who can control it? This yearning kills us all in the end.

  But who can say what love is in the end? Is it my father saying the words I love you? Is it the ice cream he would buy us as a treat and forget in the car while he sat drinking in a bar? The same ice cream he would bring home, now a bowl of sugary milk? And wake us up to eat in the light of flickering storm lanterns? Even though it is full of red ants who have found it in the car and who drowned trying to feast? Even though we have to pull them out, rubbing their corpses into a red blur on napkins, careful not to ingest them? Is that the measure of love?

  Or a hand striking your face, or a ring drawing blood wh
en you were rude? A stunning blow to protect you from finding blows later in life that might kill you? A stunning blow that aggregates over time with other blows, physical and verbal, to make you reckless in the world? To seek out precisely the blows you were meant not to? Like that moment in a bar in Benin City where I got into an argument with a scarred up gangster and smashed a bottle to menace him with. I remember the lazy smile as he leaned back and asked, “You break bottle for me?” I remember the languid way he drained his beer before breaking the bottle. I remember the small shrug and chuckle before he drew the jagged edge of his own bottle up his own arm, cutting a three-inch gash. “You see this?” he asked, pointing. “This is the least I will do to you.”

  I suppose that too is a kind of love.

  Coda

  Brother: I’ve got something for your book.

  Me: Yes?

  Brother: Yes, it’s a joke about your face.

  Me: Let’s hear it.

  Brother: How’s your face feeling?

  Me: Fine, why?

  Brother: Cause it’s killing me. Hahaha. [Pause.] It’s good, right?

  Me: It’s a bit tired.

  Brother: Fine, how about this one? Doctor, why are some jokes so painful?

  Me: [Sigh.] Why?

  Brother: It must be the punch lines.

  Me: It’s not about the face.

  Brother: It will be when I punch you in the face, hahahaha.

  Me: [Sigh.] I have to get back to work.

  Brother: Fine, go be boring. [Pause.] Like your face.