My
dad would often spend the night with me at the hospital while my mother
tended to my siblings at home. Although angry that I had gone to play
where mosquitoes could bite me, my father would not reprimand a sick
child. Instead, I’d be treated with the utmost care, garlanded with
endearments and brought an assortment of tasty treats I’d say I was
hungry for. Then, once I’d eaten and he’d changed from his suit and tie
into a shirt and pants, I would seize the moment I’d been waiting for
all day.
“Daddy?”
“Eh, Uko,” he’d say.
“Please tell me a story.”
It
was during one such hospital stay that I unearthed the greatest
treasure of my life. I’ve come to understand that we stumble on the best
things by serendipity. There are no preparations, no choreographed
rehearsals. A man decides to plant a tree in his compound, on a piece of
land that his parents have owned for decades. One day he digs up crude
oil. In a year, his life is transformed! What he’d been just moments
before his hoe dug into the earth becomes history.
My
father was a gifted storyteller. At the hospital, he would tell me a
story or two, or, sometimes, if he was not too tired, many in response
to my request. I would try to imagine the worlds that opened up through
his carefully chosen words. When, for instance, he told the story of the
first white man who arrived in Igboland riding a bicycle, he made
bicycle sounds, tapped his feet and gasped. He would imbue these noises
with so much dread, so much significance, that vivid pictures would
remain in my mind for days afterward. So riveting were these moments
that I sometimes wished to prolong my hospital stay.
Between
the ages of 5 and 7, I must have been admitted to the hospital at least
four times, during which my father told me stories. I returned home
after each stay to tightened surveillance, and it became increasingly
difficult to steal out of the compound in the evenings. No longer sick,
and with my father returning late from work, I was not able to get him
to tell me stories. So I turned to my mother.
But
my mother’s stories did not please me. They often seemed childish
because they were peopled with animals, usually tortoises or hares. Only
a few times did she tell stories of people; once, even of herself,
ambushed on her father’s farm deep in the forest by what must have been
two dozen chimpanzees. Moreover, my father told stories in English; my
mother in Igbo. In a way that I could not understand at the time, the
stories sounded better in English.
I
discovered the reason for all this in my eighth year. My father had not
told me a story in a long time. Frustrated, I barged into his room one
evening just after he returned from work, and demanded he tell me a
story. I had half hidden myself behind the curtain at the threshold of
his door, afraid he would be angry at my intrusion.
“Oh,” he said. “Come in, Chigozie.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“I si gini?” he said to me in Igbo, even though I had spoken in English.
“You tell me a story only when I am sick. Please tell me a story now that I am not sick.”
My father laughed. He rocked back and forth and shook his head.
“Eight,” I mumbled.
“You
can read now. Why don’t you read these stories yourself?” With that, he
reached down to a small shelf filled with Central Bank bulletins and
handed me a book whose cover had fallen off. He straightened a wrinkled
page, tucked in a thread hanging loose from the spine and gave it to me.
“Go and read that, and it will tell you a story.”
I
remember that night clearly. I took the book to the front porch and sat
down on the floor, a foot from a trail of white ants. I opened the book
to what I judged was the first page and read what turned out to be the
most fascinating of the stories my father had told me.
The
story was about a man who lived in a village long ago and who had
magical powers. For years, the other residents fail to consult him, and,
despite having performed wonders in the past, he is almost forgotten.
Then, one day, the king of the village knocks on his door. His daughter,
an only child, had followed an “unknown man” of extraordinary beauty to
a secret location. Distraught, the king asks the shaman to find his
daughter and return her to the village in exchange for half his lands.
The shaman sets out only to discover that the princess had followed a
skull — a member of a race of creatures who lived as skulls — that had
borrowed body parts to become “a complete gentleman.”
I
lay awake in bed all that night, mesmerized, even shocked, by the
discovery. My father had told me this story as if it were his own
creation. I had been in awe, believing him possessed of the most
spectacular of gifts: that of storytelling. I had no idea that he was
reading these stories and then recounting them to me.
While
my mother, who had less education than my father, relied on tales told
to her as a child, my father had gathered his stories from books. This
was also why he told the stories in English. It struck me that if I
could read well, I could be like my father. I, too, could become a
repository of stories and live in their beautiful worlds, away from the
dust and ululations of Akure.
What I
discovered that night transformed my life. I devoured that book, “The
Palm-Wine Drinkard,” by Amos Tutuola, and became a voracious reader. I
read in the mornings, at nights, and, when that seemed insufficient, I
read at school, in between classes. Sometimes I read during classes,
placing books under the desk while the teacher taught. I was unmoved by
punishments, by failing grades from not paying attention. When I had
read all the books on my father’s shelf, he unearthed more from a box on
top of his wardrobe. I read those, too. My head swirled, my mind
brimmed. I felt as though I were walking on a metaphysical plane where
no one else but me could walk, and whose pathways were known only to me.
I
read while eating. I did errands hastily. I dressed hastily. My
existence became mere machinery engineered to give me time to read. My
mother complained, and my father began to panic. They put out strict
orders that I not read anything while at school. I complied, but took to
making up the lost time at odd hours, waking up in the dead of the
night, when everyone was asleep, to read.
By the fifth month, I had read every book my father owned. One Saturday, he returned home and asked me to get in the car.
“I have a surprise for you.”
We
drove through streets clotted with people until we got to a newly
painted building with an arch over the gate that read, Ondo State
Library. We walked through the arch into the building, the likes of
which I had never seen. There were books everywhere, on shelves, on
tables, on the floor.
“I want to register you here and bring you every Saturday here to read,” my father said.
I
waited breathlessly as he completed the registration at the counter
with an elderly, bespectacled woman who seemed in awe of the idea of a
child coming in alone to read. My father, proud, agreed and said that it
was all I wanted to do.
“That is
good,” I heard the woman say. “Very, very good. Reading is like finding
light, you know. Jesus said a light cannot be hidden under a bushel.”
“That is true,” my father said, nodding as the woman wrote my name on a small, square yellow card.
“Your son has found the light under the bushel.”
She
handed me the card, and my father said he would pick me up at noon. I
waved him goodbye and disappeared among the crowded shelves.
Chigozie Obioma is a Nigerian writer. His new novel, “An Orchestra of Minorities,” will come out in January.
