Today a young girl decided the World had won
She wept a while then she took a cold blade to her vein
She cried and prayed and watched her life flow out
When nothing was left and no one had come she lay dead
The World hadn’t won, we had failed.
Everyday we saw her and everyday we looked away
She sat alone in a corner, sad, looking at nothing
She cried in her room with her hand over her mouth
She stood alone in a crowd, saying nothing to anyone
The World saw her everyday in despair
She reached out to a neighbor while he reached for another
She spoke but nobody replied, not even with a glance
She sat at the steps of time but change never arrived
We had our own problems and vanities so she faded into the background
The World sent despair and He found her uprooted
A simple girl with simple hopes and dreams
She hoped for friends that would share her fears
She dreamed that in despair we would pull her out
In silence despair is deafeningly loud
We need to speak in that silence.
By Chinazom Lizzy Izuora
Dreams Deferred
winner KEN SARO WIWA Prize for prose, 2009
Friday, October 22, 2010
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The Sceptre is Mine
Before the milk dries in my breast,
Let lightning clouds billow and quiver
And hefty teardrops
Mop up cries of widows
Who watch arid plains puking their guts.
My milk, steadily pouring,
Will be couch for wandering souls
Seeking succor in privileged gutters ;
Will nourish; adorn; recreate
Emblazon our days in glory
I squeeze my guts that life may flow
I die on a smile; laugh vice to scorn
My womb bourgeons with indestructible fruit
I leave a trail marked in blood
I return and the scepter is mine!
21st June, 2010
Let lightning clouds billow and quiver
And hefty teardrops
Mop up cries of widows
Who watch arid plains puking their guts.
My milk, steadily pouring,
Will be couch for wandering souls
Seeking succor in privileged gutters ;
Will nourish; adorn; recreate
Emblazon our days in glory
I squeeze my guts that life may flow
I die on a smile; laugh vice to scorn
My womb bourgeons with indestructible fruit
I leave a trail marked in blood
I return and the scepter is mine!
21st June, 2010
Saturday, July 31, 2010
US
It’s dusk
I stumble along
Life’s busy road
I see
A man
Tall, brawny
Hands in pockets
Braced against the current
Postulating
With the assurance of youth
I don’t hear the words
My heart knows them
A girl
Comely, full poised
Leaning
Into the man
Praying to fall
So to be caught
Hands stay firmly tucked
Deep in pockets
Of resistance
I’m a passer-by
I do not tarry
The girl
I have been
The man
I recall
But refuse to relate to
When I leaned
Into you
But you stayed
Unmoving
My Gibraltar then, I thought
To salve
My bruised pride
Now I see
A rough pile of mud
Would’ve done okay!
Ozioma Izuora (24/ 02/ 09) Prize winner at AWF Literary Competition, 2009
I stumble along
Life’s busy road
I see
A man
Tall, brawny
Hands in pockets
Braced against the current
Postulating
With the assurance of youth
I don’t hear the words
My heart knows them
A girl
Comely, full poised
Leaning
Into the man
Praying to fall
So to be caught
Hands stay firmly tucked
Deep in pockets
Of resistance
I’m a passer-by
I do not tarry
The girl
I have been
The man
I recall
But refuse to relate to
When I leaned
Into you
But you stayed
Unmoving
My Gibraltar then, I thought
To salve
My bruised pride
Now I see
A rough pile of mud
Would’ve done okay!
Ozioma Izuora (24/ 02/ 09) Prize winner at AWF Literary Competition, 2009
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Evidence
My friends call me Evi. I am Evi Okoye, a final year medical student. Everybody says I have a lovely name, albeit, unusual, for the part of Nigeria I come from. Funnily, hardly any of them bothers to ask what my full name is.
Evi is short for Evidence. Yes, my parents, my father, to be exact, named me Evidence. I am the evidence of all sorts of attributes. Of faithfulness and faithlessness. Of love and hatred. Of passion and cold-bloodedness. A lot more I can name, if I care to.
But I’ll answer your question, my sweetheart, since you ask. Not like many a village woman who got their answer without asking questions; or many a neighbour who generated a story that satisfied the curiosity of those who looked up to them to know about my origin.
You know my brothers and you wonder how I fit in with them. They are dark, really dark. The richness of their mahogany contrasts sharply with my paleness. The darkness of their eyes, a thousand miles from my blue. So you wonder.
I am the last of a family of five. I could pass to the uninitiated eye as white. Yes, my mother was a full-blooded Nigerian. Oh, she was fair and pretty. So fair you’d almost think she was an albino. But she could never make a blue-eyed baby with my father, a man of such intolerably possessive dark genes.
That’s how I came to be called Evidence.
My mother had won an award sponsored by the British Council, to do a diploma in epidermology. She was a nurse at the Teaching Hospital at the time.
The Council had a policy against giving awards to single ladies. Many a lady had either absconded on setting foot on the British soil or got married to anyone who had a right of stay, and never came home to be useful to the government for whom the Council had undertaken the burden of training them.
Married women were preferred, especially if their husbands had engaging means of livelihood or ones so lucrative it would be unprofitable to abandon altogether. The Council could never be sure with the men. With women, they always knew where they were taking chances. The deciding factor in each case was whether the benefiting country realized just how indebted to the British Council they were. If Nigerian government begged for it long enough, the Council would count that as one more feather to its cap and send off another lucky devil.
Now, my mother had four sons. Any married woman who could boast of a son was sure to come back. Her place in her husband’s family was fairly stable. With four sons, the likes of my mother were prize cows. She was sure to come back. All the Council had to worry about was whether or not she was pregnant at the time of departure. The British government was getting damned tired of acquiring citizens by default. They’d even started to snigger about the American government that claimed as citizens, even children born in their air space of some undesirable ‘barbarian’ parents!
There was no doubt in the Council official’s mind after persistent questioning, that my mother was, indeed, sure of her last menstrual date and could not be unknowingly pregnant. Satisfied, they’d given her clearance to collect a visa off the British High Commission. Never mind that she couldn’t pick an airline of her choice. It was clearly B-Cal. She had to be grateful, after all, she would still have chosen it if it came to down to a choice between Nigerian Airways and B-Cal. Patriotism was for the comfortable. For those, also, whose governments had welfare policies. A government that only begged from other governments would be asking for too much if it so much as muted the idea of patriotism.
My mother was billed for a one-year diploma. She went for it. She behaved herself and came back exactly on schedule, twelve months later. She was a dream British Council Fellow. While there, she mixed so well; so eager was she to drink in all of the tenets of the glorified British heritage. She came back, in some ways, more conservative than your average Briton. Even her tutors had not intended for her to take them quite as seriously as she had. But my mother was an exemplary student, so in all things, she practised what she preached and what she was taught to preach.
Her stiff upper lip, for instance, was so unbending that it took little for me to start an unending spate of chain reactions.
So you ask: how did I come about?
My mother’s class was a balance of all self-respecting and contributing member countries of the British Commonwealth. As expected, various shades of both colours and opinions came into play. As these ambassadors had not gone all that way for a purely Commonwealth conference. A handful of the promising generation of Britons was occasionally thrown in to rub minds with the aided countries. Hopefully, they would help to bend the minds of the ‘rustics’ towards the more desirable pear shape.
Excellent students immediately caught on. My mother did. There was Tony Matthews. He, with his girlfriend, Fiona, sought to immerse my mother into the mainstream of British upper class respectability. Mother attended cocktails and dinners in fine restaurants. Or visited families. And paid heavily to visit interesting countryside. Not for my mother all those second-hand clothes and shoes that fascinated her peers who always checked up the current rate of the Naira before they spent a pound. If she couldn’t name the shop in some elitist conversation – the kind she now delighted in – she was not interested. My mother was proper. So proper that she had thrown away any item that would have constituted excess luggage when she was returning. She shunned all those shameless Nigerian women whose hand luggage were so enormous they would render flight impossible for the big bird, but for the foresight of aeronautical engineers. When she got down at the international airport in Nigeria, you could pick out my mother from the furthermost end of the waiting lounge. She stood apart from the rest, her dressing screamed prim and proper!
Her luggage was brief and to the point. Not for my mother, the endless trips to clear goods and bribe a thousand and one officials of the Customs and Excise Department and those of the Immigration. The Police and the Army too. Then the local security at the ports. Etc, etc. She was not a businesswoman. Anyone who used their stipend as they should was not expected to be able to afford enough to buy anything that was worth shipping. My mother was not greedy.
This she pointed out to the endless throngs of people who realized then that they were our friends and took out time to come and welcome her back. Many of them had not deemed it necessary to disturb our family in her absence. And anyway, it was necessary to give honour to whom it was due. For this, at least, I praised my mother. She had dealt them a blow I wish I could have dealt them myself if I was in being.
The endless courtesy calls soon ended. Name-calling began. My father was in the middle of all this. He was undecided whether to pitch camps with my mother or to give in to consanguineous sentiments and stay with his relations. Some of my mother’s too. Grandma, for one, did not understand why her daughter should visit the very home of ‘George’ and let her go to her grave in rags! There were also mutual acquaintances of my parents. Mother remained adamant. In the end, my father had to doff his cap to her. But that itself, was belittling. Mother always got her way in everything.
She had had no doubts when this scholarship thing started. The questionnaires sent by the British Council were filled in by my father. But it was my mother who suggested the words. Well, wasn’t my father free to reject suggestions? But he did not. It was not that Mother was bossy. My father would be the first to one to tell you she wasn’t. She was just lucky father didn’t object too much. She merely filled in gaps. Mother was soon bursting out of her clothes. Obviously pregnant.
‘Ah’, people speculated, ‘one for the road!’
‘A gift from Obodo Oyibo!’
How right.
I came right on schedule! Lovely, bubbly-blue-eyed-bundle!
‘My bundle of joy!’ cried my father, really meaning it.
‘My lovely daughter. The crown of my life! The evidence of my perpetual torture. No one will deny me the pleasure of the last laugh! I shall name you Evidence!’ This was one evidence my mother could not contest. And finally, my father had his way. My mother lived with her conscience. To her grave, she maintained her stiff upper lip!
Originally published in OKIKE – An African Journal of new writing (No. 45, June, 2000) pp. 3-7. This is slightly revised.
Evi is short for Evidence. Yes, my parents, my father, to be exact, named me Evidence. I am the evidence of all sorts of attributes. Of faithfulness and faithlessness. Of love and hatred. Of passion and cold-bloodedness. A lot more I can name, if I care to.
But I’ll answer your question, my sweetheart, since you ask. Not like many a village woman who got their answer without asking questions; or many a neighbour who generated a story that satisfied the curiosity of those who looked up to them to know about my origin.
You know my brothers and you wonder how I fit in with them. They are dark, really dark. The richness of their mahogany contrasts sharply with my paleness. The darkness of their eyes, a thousand miles from my blue. So you wonder.
I am the last of a family of five. I could pass to the uninitiated eye as white. Yes, my mother was a full-blooded Nigerian. Oh, she was fair and pretty. So fair you’d almost think she was an albino. But she could never make a blue-eyed baby with my father, a man of such intolerably possessive dark genes.
That’s how I came to be called Evidence.
My mother had won an award sponsored by the British Council, to do a diploma in epidermology. She was a nurse at the Teaching Hospital at the time.
The Council had a policy against giving awards to single ladies. Many a lady had either absconded on setting foot on the British soil or got married to anyone who had a right of stay, and never came home to be useful to the government for whom the Council had undertaken the burden of training them.
Married women were preferred, especially if their husbands had engaging means of livelihood or ones so lucrative it would be unprofitable to abandon altogether. The Council could never be sure with the men. With women, they always knew where they were taking chances. The deciding factor in each case was whether the benefiting country realized just how indebted to the British Council they were. If Nigerian government begged for it long enough, the Council would count that as one more feather to its cap and send off another lucky devil.
Now, my mother had four sons. Any married woman who could boast of a son was sure to come back. Her place in her husband’s family was fairly stable. With four sons, the likes of my mother were prize cows. She was sure to come back. All the Council had to worry about was whether or not she was pregnant at the time of departure. The British government was getting damned tired of acquiring citizens by default. They’d even started to snigger about the American government that claimed as citizens, even children born in their air space of some undesirable ‘barbarian’ parents!
There was no doubt in the Council official’s mind after persistent questioning, that my mother was, indeed, sure of her last menstrual date and could not be unknowingly pregnant. Satisfied, they’d given her clearance to collect a visa off the British High Commission. Never mind that she couldn’t pick an airline of her choice. It was clearly B-Cal. She had to be grateful, after all, she would still have chosen it if it came to down to a choice between Nigerian Airways and B-Cal. Patriotism was for the comfortable. For those, also, whose governments had welfare policies. A government that only begged from other governments would be asking for too much if it so much as muted the idea of patriotism.
My mother was billed for a one-year diploma. She went for it. She behaved herself and came back exactly on schedule, twelve months later. She was a dream British Council Fellow. While there, she mixed so well; so eager was she to drink in all of the tenets of the glorified British heritage. She came back, in some ways, more conservative than your average Briton. Even her tutors had not intended for her to take them quite as seriously as she had. But my mother was an exemplary student, so in all things, she practised what she preached and what she was taught to preach.
Her stiff upper lip, for instance, was so unbending that it took little for me to start an unending spate of chain reactions.
So you ask: how did I come about?
My mother’s class was a balance of all self-respecting and contributing member countries of the British Commonwealth. As expected, various shades of both colours and opinions came into play. As these ambassadors had not gone all that way for a purely Commonwealth conference. A handful of the promising generation of Britons was occasionally thrown in to rub minds with the aided countries. Hopefully, they would help to bend the minds of the ‘rustics’ towards the more desirable pear shape.
Excellent students immediately caught on. My mother did. There was Tony Matthews. He, with his girlfriend, Fiona, sought to immerse my mother into the mainstream of British upper class respectability. Mother attended cocktails and dinners in fine restaurants. Or visited families. And paid heavily to visit interesting countryside. Not for my mother all those second-hand clothes and shoes that fascinated her peers who always checked up the current rate of the Naira before they spent a pound. If she couldn’t name the shop in some elitist conversation – the kind she now delighted in – she was not interested. My mother was proper. So proper that she had thrown away any item that would have constituted excess luggage when she was returning. She shunned all those shameless Nigerian women whose hand luggage were so enormous they would render flight impossible for the big bird, but for the foresight of aeronautical engineers. When she got down at the international airport in Nigeria, you could pick out my mother from the furthermost end of the waiting lounge. She stood apart from the rest, her dressing screamed prim and proper!
Her luggage was brief and to the point. Not for my mother, the endless trips to clear goods and bribe a thousand and one officials of the Customs and Excise Department and those of the Immigration. The Police and the Army too. Then the local security at the ports. Etc, etc. She was not a businesswoman. Anyone who used their stipend as they should was not expected to be able to afford enough to buy anything that was worth shipping. My mother was not greedy.
This she pointed out to the endless throngs of people who realized then that they were our friends and took out time to come and welcome her back. Many of them had not deemed it necessary to disturb our family in her absence. And anyway, it was necessary to give honour to whom it was due. For this, at least, I praised my mother. She had dealt them a blow I wish I could have dealt them myself if I was in being.
The endless courtesy calls soon ended. Name-calling began. My father was in the middle of all this. He was undecided whether to pitch camps with my mother or to give in to consanguineous sentiments and stay with his relations. Some of my mother’s too. Grandma, for one, did not understand why her daughter should visit the very home of ‘George’ and let her go to her grave in rags! There were also mutual acquaintances of my parents. Mother remained adamant. In the end, my father had to doff his cap to her. But that itself, was belittling. Mother always got her way in everything.
She had had no doubts when this scholarship thing started. The questionnaires sent by the British Council were filled in by my father. But it was my mother who suggested the words. Well, wasn’t my father free to reject suggestions? But he did not. It was not that Mother was bossy. My father would be the first to one to tell you she wasn’t. She was just lucky father didn’t object too much. She merely filled in gaps. Mother was soon bursting out of her clothes. Obviously pregnant.
‘Ah’, people speculated, ‘one for the road!’
‘A gift from Obodo Oyibo!’
How right.
I came right on schedule! Lovely, bubbly-blue-eyed-bundle!
‘My bundle of joy!’ cried my father, really meaning it.
‘My lovely daughter. The crown of my life! The evidence of my perpetual torture. No one will deny me the pleasure of the last laugh! I shall name you Evidence!’ This was one evidence my mother could not contest. And finally, my father had his way. My mother lived with her conscience. To her grave, she maintained her stiff upper lip!
Originally published in OKIKE – An African Journal of new writing (No. 45, June, 2000) pp. 3-7. This is slightly revised.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
No Water! No Fuel! No Hope! – A telephone Conversation
Ring! Ring!
‘That’s the phone! Hello!’
‘Is your mother home?’
‘No Auntie, she’s not.’
‘And your father?’
‘He’s not home, either!’
‘Anybody I can leave a message with?’
‘Only me, Auntie.’
‘How old are you?’
‘I’m six.’
‘How can they leave you at home all by yourself? Where have Mummy and Daddy gone to?’
‘Mummy went to look for kerosene. She says she can’t afford gas anymore, even if she finds it. Daddy has gone to the ‘Black Market’ to look for fuel. My brother and sister went with our house-help to look for water. Nobody wants me to go with them because I’d slow them down.’
‘My dear, you are bright for your age. I’m sure you can take a message. Tell Mummy Auntie Alice phoned to ask if she has found a station that has kerosene. I have looked everywhere and I can’t find any. And if your Daddy comes back with fuel, I am interested in the location of his ‘Black Market’. As for water, tell Mummy I’ve found a clean gutter. That apart from the thrash that house-helps occasionally throw into it, it doesn’t seem there is anything toxic in its water; that if I’m able to keep the brats off long enough, the water settles. I’ll tell her how to treat the water when I see her. She should ring me; we’ll talk about it.’
‘Okay Auntie. Em…but Auntie, she can’t ring you.’
‘Now why ever not, my child?’
‘Our phone, it’s on toss.’
‘Goodness! You wouldn’t know if Daddy has not paid the NITEL bills, would you?’
‘Indeed, I know! He’s been grumbling about NITEL’s inefficiency. They were supposed to take us out of toss two weeks ago when Daddy paid the bills.’
‘Hey, poor child, how can you be a real six year-old if you get saddled with so much adult worries?’
‘Mummy and Daddy tell us everything, so that if anything should happens to them before we’re grown up we’d know enough to survive. If they don’t tell us anyway, we’d still know it, Auntie. The hourly news on both the radio and television would be full of it. Besides, I only got to know about kerosene about a week ago when Mummy bought the stove. When I asked her what it was for, she told me about how gas has risen from 25 Naira to 350. I can’t even count that far yet. Again, we’d never eaten anything that was not bread and tea for breakfast, now we’d have to do without it.’
‘Poor, poor child.!’
‘No Auntie, I don’t think I’m poor. I know poorer children. They eat what’s thrown into garbage bins and gutters. I’m not poor, Auntie.’
‘But it’s not fair for your Mummy to tell you so much about these things!’
‘What things Auntie?’
‘For instance, why should they talk about what will happen if they die?’ Why should they die?’
‘Don’t you know? Daddy says it’s by God’s grace we’re alive today. He says that the reason for so many obituary announcements of young men and women is the harsh economic, social and political situation the country is in. Daddy says that every grown-up person in Nigeria ought to be very sad. And he says that sadness can kill more than cancer.’
‘Good God!’
‘Yes, and Auntie, Daddy says that any grown-up Nigerian who is happy, really happy, is either a rogue or is not capable of thinking. That to think in present-day Nigeria is enough to give one a heart attack!’
‘Your Daddy says all these things to you?’
‘Yes Auntie, and much more!’
‘Your vocabulary is certainly not that of a six-year old!’
‘Thank you, Auntie.’
‘I don’t mean that as a compliment.’
‘What’s a compliment?’
‘Never mind!’
‘Auntie Alice?’
‘Yes, child?’
‘Will things ever get better? I mean the way they do in films?’
‘I don’t know, child, but we could pray. We just have to pray that God takes control. Our leaders are certainly incapable of doing anything about anything. We’ll soon be needing special license to import breathable air!’
‘Auntie, now you sound like my Daddy!’
‘Yes, poor precocious dear. Tell your mother I’ll call her again. And don’t forget to pray for our country!’
First published in OKIKE - An African Journal of New Writing (No. 37, October, 1997); pp 3 – 5.
Remember those days before the GSM?
‘That’s the phone! Hello!’
‘Is your mother home?’
‘No Auntie, she’s not.’
‘And your father?’
‘He’s not home, either!’
‘Anybody I can leave a message with?’
‘Only me, Auntie.’
‘How old are you?’
‘I’m six.’
‘How can they leave you at home all by yourself? Where have Mummy and Daddy gone to?’
‘Mummy went to look for kerosene. She says she can’t afford gas anymore, even if she finds it. Daddy has gone to the ‘Black Market’ to look for fuel. My brother and sister went with our house-help to look for water. Nobody wants me to go with them because I’d slow them down.’
‘My dear, you are bright for your age. I’m sure you can take a message. Tell Mummy Auntie Alice phoned to ask if she has found a station that has kerosene. I have looked everywhere and I can’t find any. And if your Daddy comes back with fuel, I am interested in the location of his ‘Black Market’. As for water, tell Mummy I’ve found a clean gutter. That apart from the thrash that house-helps occasionally throw into it, it doesn’t seem there is anything toxic in its water; that if I’m able to keep the brats off long enough, the water settles. I’ll tell her how to treat the water when I see her. She should ring me; we’ll talk about it.’
‘Okay Auntie. Em…but Auntie, she can’t ring you.’
‘Now why ever not, my child?’
‘Our phone, it’s on toss.’
‘Goodness! You wouldn’t know if Daddy has not paid the NITEL bills, would you?’
‘Indeed, I know! He’s been grumbling about NITEL’s inefficiency. They were supposed to take us out of toss two weeks ago when Daddy paid the bills.’
‘Hey, poor child, how can you be a real six year-old if you get saddled with so much adult worries?’
‘Mummy and Daddy tell us everything, so that if anything should happens to them before we’re grown up we’d know enough to survive. If they don’t tell us anyway, we’d still know it, Auntie. The hourly news on both the radio and television would be full of it. Besides, I only got to know about kerosene about a week ago when Mummy bought the stove. When I asked her what it was for, she told me about how gas has risen from 25 Naira to 350. I can’t even count that far yet. Again, we’d never eaten anything that was not bread and tea for breakfast, now we’d have to do without it.’
‘Poor, poor child.!’
‘No Auntie, I don’t think I’m poor. I know poorer children. They eat what’s thrown into garbage bins and gutters. I’m not poor, Auntie.’
‘But it’s not fair for your Mummy to tell you so much about these things!’
‘What things Auntie?’
‘For instance, why should they talk about what will happen if they die?’ Why should they die?’
‘Don’t you know? Daddy says it’s by God’s grace we’re alive today. He says that the reason for so many obituary announcements of young men and women is the harsh economic, social and political situation the country is in. Daddy says that every grown-up person in Nigeria ought to be very sad. And he says that sadness can kill more than cancer.’
‘Good God!’
‘Yes, and Auntie, Daddy says that any grown-up Nigerian who is happy, really happy, is either a rogue or is not capable of thinking. That to think in present-day Nigeria is enough to give one a heart attack!’
‘Your Daddy says all these things to you?’
‘Yes Auntie, and much more!’
‘Your vocabulary is certainly not that of a six-year old!’
‘Thank you, Auntie.’
‘I don’t mean that as a compliment.’
‘What’s a compliment?’
‘Never mind!’
‘Auntie Alice?’
‘Yes, child?’
‘Will things ever get better? I mean the way they do in films?’
‘I don’t know, child, but we could pray. We just have to pray that God takes control. Our leaders are certainly incapable of doing anything about anything. We’ll soon be needing special license to import breathable air!’
‘Auntie, now you sound like my Daddy!’
‘Yes, poor precocious dear. Tell your mother I’ll call her again. And don’t forget to pray for our country!’
First published in OKIKE - An African Journal of New Writing (No. 37, October, 1997); pp 3 – 5.
Remember those days before the GSM?
WELCOME!
Here's one place I hope I can bare my mind from time to time in creative thoughts. My short short stories and poems, published and unpublished, as well as human interest articles will feature here. I hope you will enjoy sharing these. Your creative views are always welcome.
Be of good cheer!
Be of good cheer!
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