Friday, 24 May 2013
Things I Can’t Write/Speak About By Okey Ndibe
Okey Ndibe
Columnist:
Okey Ndibe Some Americans are fond of saying that two things are guaranteed in life: death and taxes. One is dubious about the inclusion of taxes in the equation. If you’re wealthy enough, or can afford an attorney who’s clever enough, you have a shot at avoiding taxes – or, at any rate, getting away with paying next to nothing. It’s a different matter with death. In the end, we’re all bound to die.
Yet, there are moments when death shows up in such rude, shocking garbs that we are forced to pay particular attention – even as, ultimately, we’re unable to stitch together any coherent speech.
Such a moment came last week, on December 14, to be exact. It was one of three wedding anniversaries for Sheri and me, for we had wed thrice: before a Justice of the Peace, in church, and at a traditional ceremony where we put relatives and the ancestors on notice. In my accustomed fashion, I had absolutely forgotten that it was our anniversary. It was already late afternoon when Sheri reminded me, in her ever gracious, patient and quiet manner.
By then, it did not matter. For she and I had heard accounts of one of the vilest events in our life. A young man armed to the hilt had entered an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, forty minutes from our home, and executed twenty kindergarteners and several adults. My first instinct was to protest that this callous killer had chosen our anniversary to enact his infamy. But I held my tongue, realizing in time that there can be no date when such an evil, spine-jangling bloodlust would be less shocking.
It went without saying that I had to write about the Newtown Horror. Still, I had the intimation that I didn’t know what to say. Certain forms and scales of horror are simply unspeakable. Where does one find the words; how discover a handle on which to hang thoughts? What does one say about a young man, himself a kid in some ways, pointing a gun at his mother and pulling the trigger to deadly effect – and then proceeding to an elementary school to take deadly aim at one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty innocent, harmless children?
As a parent myself, I wished I could say that I understood the pure, heart-bursting pain felt by parents, grandparents or guardians who dropped off their vibrant, energetic kids at school with kisses only to be summoned an hour or two later to brace for the harvest of corpses. But I own that it’s impossible to approach the sorrow and grief of, say, a parent who’s lost a child in such senseless, unfathomable circumstances.
I wanted to imaginatively enter the skin of the victims, to conjecture their emotions as the assailant turned his bloodthirsty ire on each confused target. I recoiled, for my powers of imagination were no match for the task.
There was something impenetrable about the whole thing. I was face to face with evil, no question; but it was evil masked, and I had no mechanism for penetrating that mask.
It was not the first time I had felt an urge to write about something so fundamentally disturbing, but lacked a vocabulary to describe the experience or to broach its emotional gravity. There was a time I watched a TV documentary on the travails of women raped by soldiers in the Congo. One woman, so thin she could have been all bones, her gaunt face sad, told the interviewer about being gang-raped by several soldiers. Then, ashen eyes fixed on the camera – and on whoever was watching – she asked, “What crime did my vagina commit against them? Was it not a vagina that gave birth to them?” Her words carried the weight of Olympian pain. They touched a region of grief that I was too scared to enter. Devastated, I cried for hours, embarrassed on behalf of those who’d brought her to the edge of hell.
Then there was the Rwandan genocide. I once read a magazine story about the country’s former Minister for Women Affairs who encouraged the mass rape of Tutsi women. One victim related how she and other Tutsi women were herded into a stadium filled with Hutu men. Then the then Women’s Affairs minister gave a charge to the ravenous, hate-filled Hutu men. “I don’t want any of you to tell me tomorrow that you don’t know how Tutsi women taste.” The men fell to in a repellent, rapacious orgy. Afterwards, the ravaged women were lined up and hacked to death, a select few of them spared – in the final evil gesture – “in order to remember.”
Having experienced such horror, how does a woman cope with bearing the burden of memory? It strikes me as one of those untenable occasions when the living begrudge the dead: when, in fact, so-called survivors wish they had the relative joy of the grave.
As a child myself, I lived through the horrors of the Biafran War, that tragic chapter in Nigeria’s history that claimed anything between two and three million lives. My parents did their best to shield me and my siblings from the more stark horrors of that war. Even so, their love and concern could not protect me from the pangs of hunger that was the lot of most Biafrans, children and adults alike. They could do nothing to stop the sudden eruptions of air raids, the incessant strafing by low-flying Nigerian jets whose engines shook the very earth and sent everybody scurrying for the shelter of makeshift bunkers. There were ubiquitous images of children plagued by kwashiorkor, bellies bloated with air, eyes sunken, skins sallow and sickly, bottoms flattened and bony.
Certain kinds of tragedy take the breath away. They stun us into silence, into shocked speechlessness. They make our voices to shake and tremble. Yet, it is in learning to speak about the unspeakable, in stuttering back to some form of speech and groping our way back to the salve of memory that we rescue ourselves from abject despair.
Yes, the carnage of Newtown, Connecticut is as difficult to write about, as impossible to grasp as the daily carnage in Nigeria and other postcolonial addresses where the poor, the elderly, the weak are daily savaged, dehumanized, destroyed. Yet, we must strive to hold on to memory. It is memory – the stubborn remembrance of the things that happened, happy as well as sad, glorious as well as horrific – that helps us to resurrect or reclaim the dead, to illuminate our paths, and to enable us to move forward and move on.
I may not be able to write/speak about last week’s carnage in Newtown, any more than I am able to write/speak about the callous bombings that maim and kill innocents in Nigeria or the Congo. Still, I must seek to remember. For it is in our personal and collective remembering that all the world’s slain innocents achieve the magic of staying alive.
May their souls rest in peace.
Please follow me on twitter @ okeyndibe
(okeyndibe@gmail.com)
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Time to Rethink!.
Submitted by Abu Sufiyyan Ibn Khalifa (not verified) on December 22, 2012 - 22:16.
Well written. Is it not high time we all should realise that we cant achieve anything whatsoever if we continue to critisize and insult our selves being. No matter how it hurts, you cant scrape the others from the planet entirely. We should learn how to accept our differences no matter what it curtails in us and to us.
And to this person, DERI, I think we should all pray for him, maybe this guy could be going through a tough time, I mean common isnt obvious, imagine how despirately possessed he is in his write-ups, at first I wanted to call him a Devil but on a second thought I think this guy maybe sick. So we should all pray for him. So Deri we will never forget you in our prayers, ok?.
This is where we are so where is tomorrow?
Submitted by AbdAllah (not verified) on December 22, 2012 - 22:00.
A beautiful piece, nowithstanding though, we are still here, still same talks, same handwriting, same meaning, same faces, but still no changes, and I ask again where do we go from here?. At times when we talk about the Joudgment day, the day of reckoning, life after death, then they complain that you being too religious. How do you come about you in this world without mentioning all these. As far am concine the world has being subdude by the devil, is only Almighty by your faith upon him will help you through this "life" full of evil.
May God help us.
Wrong Deri
Submitted by StillMe (not verified) on December 22, 2012 - 07:20.
Deri you spared wrong thoughts on Prof Okey Ndibe's attempt at empathetic article on the killings in Connecticut. You may wish to be reminded that Okey used the occasion to highlight once again similar carnage that go on normally in Nigeria. Actually, the Prof may not necessarily require more than a sentence or two to effectively hit the nail on the head concerning similar,if not deadlier, killings in Nigeria. But he did dedicate more than a paragraph this to that effect. Certainly, you chose not to notice he did.
The Prof had been harassed by Nigerian authority sometime in the past; his passport seized. Are you aware of that? Have you been harassed in like manner?
Okey needs more than spiritual protection to attack boko haram
Submitted by DERI (not verified) on December 21, 2012 - 12:13.
I will rather Jonathan becomes the president of the Ijaw nation than a rotten, lying, thieving, unpatriotic, vision-less country like 9ja. Which Lord Lugard christened in his bed-room while making love to his gal friend! From d home of d Catalans in Italy to the town where Scottish Whiskey is brewed, they are doing all in their power to break away from the strings that the Roman empire bound them together with the British. Not in Nigeria where a people who are culturally, linguistically and traditionally different would be forced to stay together in one dirty smelly rotten hole because of their oil resources-two can only walk together if they agree! A writer who cannot use his his regional articles to change our society, because of the region that he hails from, would need more than a spiritual help from a Catholic priest, to stay focused on satanic domestic issues such as the killing machine of boko haram in the Fulani North-cheers
DERI IS MAD, DOMO IS A DULL
Submitted by Absam (not verified) on December 20, 2012 - 13:29.
Have you read the news about the FEC meeting. Domo Jonathan could not take advantage of the moment to come up with something tangible regarding the many air tragedies in Nigeria etc. He went into palm wine bar story telling about Azazi the Ijaw man. Now we know that he is the president of the Ijawland and not of Nigeria. Jonathan is the best thing that would ever come out of Ijawland after Mad Deri
gen azazi was the target not gov yakowa
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on December 19, 2012 - 15:05.
gen azazi was the target not gov yakowa.henry dickson carried out the hatchet job. yakowa was in the wrong place . the detail will unfold as time goes on
okey should also spare a thought for the victims of BH attacks
Submitted by DERI (not verified) on December 19, 2012 - 13:08.
My appeal to the Okeys of these world is for them to stop being a hypocrite of the highest order! Haven't we been been experiencing these types of senseless killings in the Fulani North for years and end? Where are the articles that he has been penning to help stop boko haram from committing crimes against humanity-in the Fulani North? Speeches cant bring back the soul of the dead-no matter how eloquent Obama may sound! Besides it shows how vulnerable the american society has become-to some gun trotting satanic souls! Hence the need for Okey and Sonala among others to be told to stand up against the evil ideas that Boko haram represents in 9ja-If and only if Okey had spared a thought in his many anti Jonah articles, for the victims of boko haram attacks in the Fulani North-they would have had a change of heart, ideas or direction-in the murder of Christians including his tribes men in d fulani North! Is that too much of a request to make to a liberated soul like Okey in d USA?
okey should also spare a thought for the victims of BH attacks
Submitted by DERI (not verified) on December 19, 2012 - 13:07.
My appeal to the Okeys of these world is for them to stop being a hypocrite of the highest order! Haven't we been been experiencing these types of senseless killings in the Fulani North for years and end? Where are the articles that he has been penning to help stop boko haram from committing crimes against humanity-in the Fulani North? Speeches cant bring back the soul of the dead-no matter how eloquent Obama may sound! Besides it shows how vulnerable the american society has become-to some gun trotting satanic souls! Hence the need for Okey and Sonala among others to be told to stand up against the evil ideas that Boko haram represents in 9ja-If and only if Okey had spared a thought in his many anti Jonah articles, for the victims of boko haram attacks in the Fulani North-they would have had a change of heart, ideas or direction-in the murder of Christians including his tribes men in d fulani North! Is that too much of a request to make to a liberated soul like Okey in d USA?
Deri, If You Listened To Obama Speech ...
Submitted by Uche J (not verified) on December 18, 2012 - 21:56.
Deri, if you did listen to Obama speech and delivery, even those innocent souls would be happy to rest in peace knowing that they have a God inspired gem as their President.
Compare with your brother who by the way has higher academic qualification (PhD). He would have been grinning from ear to ear and his speech would have been dumber that the tragedy in question.
Mediocre persons have always been imposed on Nigerians as leaders; that is the issue, your president does not inspire anybody except you; that is the tragedy.
Deri needs to grow up
Submitted by Moedans (not verified) on December 18, 2012 - 19:46.
Deri or whatever you call yourself, you feel everything relate to or is about politics and so you seem not to have a life for yourself but to rant and rant and rant about issues relating to your paymaster even though most of what you compose lack any coherence. Do you even spare a moment to think about the things you write or has whatever penny they pay you gotten so much into your head that you have lost perspective of what is right and wrong? Okey has written a beautiful piece that should make you think but you are either so confused or cannot understand that everything is not about politics. There is more to life than your ranting on every article/column, if you have anything that makes sense to write please request for your own column space and let people critically appraise your write up. If not get a life off the internet cos its doing you no good!
Deri - This is Dirty & Cheap- Is that who you are?
Submitted by Preco (not verified) on December 18, 2012 - 18:36.
I have come across so many asinine comments from DERI or whatever he chooses to go by in his daily "internet rat" paid job - Goodluck to you and your paymaster.
However, to comment on a subject - the baseless and unimaginable massacre of twenty kindergarten pupils and their courageous teachers- in such a disrespectful way as you always do is beyond the pale, despicable and gives a peep into your contorted and grotesque soul. God help you and your paymasters who are daily turning Nigeria into hell on earth.
My advice to you is to continue your hatchet job but stay out of heart wrenching and unfathomable painful issues such as this, okay?
Deri this is beyond you!
Submitted by Preco01 (not verified) on December 18, 2012 - 16:56.
I have come across so many asinine comments from DERI or whatever he chooses to go by in his daily "internet rat" paid job - Goodluck to you and your paymaster.
However, to comment on a subject - the baseless and unimaginable massacre of Twenty kindergarten pupils and their courageous teachers- in such a disrespectful way as you always do is beyond the pale, despicable and gives a peep into your contorted and grotesque soul. God help you and your paymasters who are daily turning Nigeria into hell on earth.
My advice to you is to continue your hatchet job but stay out of heart wrenching and unfathomable painful issues such as this, okay?
Thanks, Mr. Ndibe and now DERI get over yourself
Submitted by Imagine U (not verified) on December 18, 2012 - 13:53.
Thank you Mr. Ndibe for trying to articulate what is possibly an unarticulable circumstance.
To DERI (an individual or a composite - it is difficult to say which you are), to use a word or words to describe your attitude and response to Mr. Ndibe's heartfelt piece is to insult that word or those words. Stop being a caricature, grow up and become human.
Imagine U
things they can write about in 9ja but chose not to-
Submitted by DERI (not verified) on December 18, 2012 - 01:04.
Far away from the resource control hat of Jonah, Okey dwells on the murder of over 20 Americans killed by one of their own-Happily the Yankees unlike Okey and Sonala, are not blaming Obama for the incident-D duo would have asked for Jonah be fired, if that tragic event had taken place in 9ja. Aware they have remained quiet over the ongoing killings by BH. Again as sad as our own Rwanda via BH is, Okey is hardly ever seen to spare a thought for the victims of those the Buhari boys in BH, have been killing-some have had their throats slit for not being able to recite a few verses in the Koran-9jas in the fulani North including ibos, are still experiencing the same horrors that they witnessed as kids during the civil war-yet those who are supposed to highlight these satanic killings around d globe, have chosen to remain quiet-for fear of their extended butter and bread in d North, being taken away from them. what a shame-what a nation-what a people even in d USA
