I Am Still with You
By Emmanuel Iduma
I set out first to Afikpo, the town in northeastern Igboland where my family is from. It was a trip planned with little preparation, during my first month of being back in Nigeria. I kept most of the luggage I’d returned with in Ayobami’s flat. Yet while settling into my leased apartment and having some time to spare, I wished to know all that was known in Afikpo about my uncle. I hoped to pick up fragments of his life story from my father’s relatives, who were likely to welcome me once I mentioned my father’s name.
I say that I am Igbo, and my people are from Afikpo, yet I confess that, due to how often we moved as a family, I am estranged from this town and that ethnicity. I have never lived here, only visiting when prompted by an occasion in the family. Yet at twenty-two, right after university, I went unaccompanied for the first time. I stayed in the house of my father’s close friend, who was the secretary of one of the traditional councils and had reams of unpublished historical accounts in a back room. I spent idle hours hunched over piles of paper, realizing that I felt inclined to study Afikpo’s past more than its present, as though my chief method of belonging to the town was historical, not filial. This time, I was going to Afikpo without the illusion that my ancestry was remote.
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The earliest bus on the morning of my departure was scheduled to leave the terminal in Lagos at six. Several dozen people waited beside the buses, sat under a shade, or clamored for tickets in the ticket office. All seemed uneager for dawn. They were silent or groggy. Those who weren’t passengers, wearing red T-shirts and helping to load buses, or the drivers themselves, folding their arms and barking orders to the porters, appeared even less keen for movement, disaffected by habit.
I feared I was late, but nothing in the manner of the man who handed me my ticket indicated a sense of urgency. Outside the office, I saw the minibus described on my ticket, a Sienna, parked close to the farthest area of the terminus. I walked to it. I was journeying east, to the fringe areas of Igboland. Owerri would lead me to Okigwe, and Okigwe to Afikpo.
Despite my anxiety, I was the first to stand beside the Sienna. A man arrived with an older woman a few minutes later. “Is this the car going to Owerri?” he asked, and I said yes. “Okay, Mama, let me go,” he told the woman in Igbo. “Take care of my mother,” he said to me, with the faint hint of a plea. He dropped her suitcase beside me and walked away, hurrying off to work or to get more sleep. It was the least tender of farewells, I thought. But Mama, who was likely in her midsixties, nodded at him, without a scowl or drop in her jowl to show that she judged him uncaring or absentminded.
Around me, others were also practiced in minimal affection, unwilling, as it appeared to me, to be suspected of sentimentality—such as the three men who arrived after Mama, two of whom were older and one young enough to be a son to either man. Father and son, I surmised, traveling home after a visit to a brother/uncle, who had driven them to the terminal. The uncle, perhaps in his late fifties, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and holding car keys, counted some money, handing a few notes to his nephew, then to his brother. Right away, the father passed the money to his son, as though embarrassed by the gesture or the paltriness of the sum.
“Uncle, thank you,” the young man said. The older men, brothers, did not look each other in the eye.
The Owerri-bound man looked older by a few years. “You have done well,” he said to his host in Igbo.
In that moment, I wondered how my father might have looked at my uncle, if they had lived to the age of the men I now observed, after four or five decades together. The small arch of an eyebrow during a glance, the graze of a palm against a shoulder, the midsentence interruptions: gestures that were so natural to them they failed to be irritated or amused by them. Only when they were looked at or listened to by others did their similarities become apparent. Just as it is often remarked to me by those who know both of us that my brother and I sound eerily alike.
Around six thirty, we made our way out of the terminus. There were six of us in the Sienna. We headed toward the foot of a bridge, then made a U-turn onto a road that led out of Lagos. But when the driver got to a roundabout less than a kilometer away, he circled it, and headed back to the bus station. “You guys have to be strong,” he muttered. He made no effort to apologize. He returned to the bus station knowing what was wrong with the minibus and knowing, too, that he was unwilling to put himself at risk on behalf of his employers. No one in the minibus said an angry word to him. Perhaps I also admired his cunning, feigned attempt to drive us to Owerri.
But if we spared the driver our frustration, we directed it at the manager, who arrived with a fussy mix of apologies and snappiness. “There is another bus going to Owerri,” he told us. “We’ll put you on it and give you the change from what you paid for the Sienna.” He seemed unprepared to handle a sudden shift in the character of his day, a half dozen begrudging customers.
“Oga,” I told him, “there is a reason we paid to go with a Sienna. You knew your car was bad, and you put it on the road!”
He began to walk away, waving his hands in the air. His paunch hung from his shirt, as if he remained committed to wearing his outgrown clothes. I took my eyes away from him, and, for a second, wondered why I had become so upset as to snap at a stranger.
This was the first impediment in my journey. I considered calling the trip off and beginning my investigation into my uncle’s fate another time. I was worried about the difficulty I’d face if I arrived in Owerri too late to look for lodgings in a town I was unfamiliar with.
That belied my real anxiety. Ten months earlier, my father had been buried in Afikpo. I was returning for the first time since then.
Excerpt from “I Am Still with You” copyright © 2023 by Emmanuel Iduma. Published by William Collins (UK)
About the book: Emmanuel Iduma never met his uncle, his father’s favourite brother and the man for whom he is named. The elder Emmanuel left home in 1967 to fight in the Biafran War and was not seen again. Around one hundred thousand others who fought in the war share a fate like Emmanuel’s uncle, though there are no official records of these losses. There are no monuments or graves. Instead, a collective remembering that remains, for the most part, silent.
I Am Still with You sees a young Nigerian return to his place of birth. Travelling the route of the war, Iduma explores both a national history and the mysteries of his own family, finding both somewhat scarred and haunted, the memories warped by time and the darkest parts left for decades unspoken.
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Born in Nigeria in 1989, Emmanuel Iduma studied law at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and received his MFA in art criticism and writing from the School of Visual Arts, New York, USA. He is the author of the travelogue A Stranger’s Pose (2018), which was longlisted for the 2019 Ondaatje Prize. His nonfiction and criticism have appeared in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, Granta, n+1, the New York Review of Books, the Yale Review, and other publications. In 2022, Iduma was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction. He is married to the writer Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀.
You can read our interview with Emmanuel Iduma here
