Conversations with my Father
My father finally asked me about this device I kept carrying everywhere.
“What’s this thing you’re holding?” he asked, seated in his favourite chair, the one everyone steered clear of whenever he was home.
“Oh, it’s a Kindle” I offered enthusiastically.
Papayo was actually showing interest in my Kindle, and I was more than willing to tell him all about it.
“Nni?”* He asked in Igbo.
“It’s an Amazon Kindle.” It was only after I’d answered that I realised my response hadn’t been particularly helpful. My father belongs to the Baby Boomer generation; talk of e-readers and their specifications doesn’t mean much to him.
Get Uchechukwu’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
However, he stretched his hand as a gesture that he wanted to further inspect the device and I gladly handed it over. With a little direction here and there, I was soon showing him the books I had in my library.
When we got to Akachi Adimora Ezeigbo’s Roses and Bullets, I explained that, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, it was a book set against the backdrop of the Biafran War. I also took the opportunity to gush about how much more I’d enjoyed the latter.
On my Kindle, it felt like a casual scroll across book titles until his eyes landed on Chinua Achebe’s There was a Country. Neither of us had read the book, but I had heard enough about it to recognise what it represented: Achebe’s personal account of Biafra.
The tagline on the cover, “A Personal History of Biafra,” only affirmed my thoughts on how befitting the title was.
Well, the book did pique my father’s interest, and I instructed him to keep swiping to turn the pages. We came across the map of Biafra within the Nigerian map, and he stopped scrolling when we got to the introduction.
You see, no matter how intriguing the tales of Biafra might have been, I have never been able to get a story about the war from him. According to him, he was a child during the war and has no memories of it.
I know my father has a long memory, the memory of an elephant, which I believe was passed on to me, a trait my mother endlessly teases us about, insisting that we never seem to forget anything. In the days following my conversation with him, I have found myself calculating and recalculating his age during the war. I have memories from my own pre-teen years, and I am left wondering if his claim to have no memories of the war is related to trauma or if indeed, he had a sheltered childhood, one that wasn’t marred by the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War.
That moment has since sent me down a rabbit hole of conversations with friends who come from the same riverine area as I do, relying on what memory serves them from oral tradition.
*Nni: An Igbo expression meaning “What?” in this context.
