On (Not) Reclaiming My Father's Head

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “On (Not) Reclaiming My Father’s Head” by Innocent Ilo. Innocent Chizaram Ilo is Igbo. They live in Lagos and write to make sense of the world around them.

---

I

In the many times I killed my father, the one I love the most is where he is a seer who paints through time and space to help people find lost things:

In the evenings, when air collects at people’s feet in chilly, invisible spools, he gathers his painting things to the balcony and sits in front of a rotting canvas.

Papa, the seer, embodied my father in the way none of my characters has before. They always put the needs of others first, sometimes to their own detriment, are both repositories of stories that bleed fiction into reality, vice versa, and they were fully aware of the power stories wielded. Papa's swansong before I killed him was Mmili Mountain. A painting so realistic you could feel the water strumming beneath your finger. Mmili Mountain will go on to guide his son to a mystical water fortress and, in turn, save their town from extinction.

But my father's death five years ago was too ordinary and did not share a shred of semblance with the many scenarios where I killed him. He died quietly in a derelict ward of one of those specialist clinics as his body succumbed to sepsis after decades of slugging it out with a faulty kidney and heart. I was not at his bedside listening to him assure me that he left a map behind for me to find something. To find myself.

II

In the last two years, 32 months to be exact, I have stared at the white expanse of an open Docs app, hoping that something, anything at all, will make me write again. I have experimented with writing in crowded buses, at restaurants during rush hours and the late morning trickle, at my sister's house while drowned in the background noise of my nibling singing along to Cocomelon, walking around art galleries, while waiting for my stop in the elevator at work, at bookshops, in the mall. Nothing. Just endless days of trying to find the right answers to: Has my imagination been scrubbed clean? Then why do I have the stories in my head? And if I have these stories in my head, WHY CAN'T I WRITE THEM? There have been intermittent blooms of false hope. Maybe the dry spell is over. Only to be greeted, again, by the lonely pointer of my Docs app. The blooms of false hope waned and were replaced with a painful dreading which lingered for a long time before the relief of finally coming to terms with the realization that this is the end.

The day I called my friend to tell him of this relief, he did not say anything at first. He had just gotten back from his NHS job and was waiting for the stew in his freezer to thaw so he could make dinner. I cried and talked about how It's never been this hard. Even when I was fighting for my life in Uni, studying economics, even when I lost my dad, I've always been able to write. You know what? Fuck this! I'm not doing again. If writing does not want to be kind to me, so be it. He let me vent to my fill,before replying, Innocent, forget all these things you're saying. You will always be a writer.

But the truth is that I have not always been a writer. I have always loved stories whether it came from reading novels, English comprehension texts, minutes from my mother's prayer meeting group, listening to folktales at my father's feet, eavesdropping on Aunty Salome and Aunty Grace's conversation with my mother, or the ones my mother reserves exclusively for my father when she returns from August Meeting.

I never cared about writing stories. The mystery of not knowing how stories come to be made them even more intriguing. Then the mid 2000s came, and mobile phones flourished in Nigeria homes, ushering in a new tradition of sending family Christmas text messages instead of greeting cards. For years, my father handpicked my sister to write our family Christmas text message. It was not just about being the designated scribe of the house. I envied this magic my sister possessed that made her write about visiting magical places like an orchard fenced with a rose hedge. It would take another seven years for me to write a Christmas text message that rivaled my sister's and be selected by my father. After this triumph, I realized that I am now stuck with this gift that will bring me so much pain and joy in years to come.

Craving for my father's validation started this journey, so it makes perfect sense that it may end now that he is no longer here to tell me how he felt so much pride as he signed off for the package containing my first ever short story in print.

“Nnam,” he would say, “you will be like Achebe.”

III

I will tell you this: you never know the last time you will write a story. If you did, you would take your time to savor every moment of it so that you could replay it in an endless loop. That way, even when the word no longer comes to you, you can always remember when it did. It is the same way with losing people.

The most crushing thing about my father's death was that I arrived late to his mourning. Almost a month after his demise. On the night I returned home from national service. He was not seated at the balcony, waiting for me, like he always did anytime I came back home. I waved it off because my family had told me that my father's last transient ischemic attack required him to take a lot of bedrest and adopt a strict no phone calls policy. I tossed my traveling bag aside and rushed to the emptiness of his bedroom. This was when everyone called off the charade, gathered around me, and told me that my father had passed on.

The consequence of arriving late to my father's mourning, albeit no fault of mine, was that I felt alone and left behind. Everyone has laid claim to the choicest portions of the grief and left only crumbs for me. Even when my mother and my siblings cried with me that night, their crying felt like a rehearsal. Something they have dusted off a shelf, only they had access to, and splayed in front of me.

It became even more infuriating when everyone around me kept talking about how they saw in my father's eyes or gleaned it from his voice that he was nearing his end and how their last moment with him was so profound, how they knew he knew he was going to die, and how he laughed off their convincing that he wouldn't.

The last time we spoke, my father casually brought up that he was going for his routine medical checkup. Unlike everyone else, my father did not give me the faintest clue that he was dying. I felt betrayed because my childhood was filled with stories about how I was the child who brought his father home. Each storyteller, whether it was my mother, an uncle or an aunt, added personal inflections and theatrics to prove the intensity of this point.

Before I was born, my father worked as a marketing manager for a firm. He traveled around the country, inspecting depots, prospecting for new customers, and soliciting feedback from existing ones. During one of his sparse visits home, my elder brother had rushed into the bedroom to tell my mother that “the uncle who comes here with sweet-sweet bread” was at the door. Few days after my birth, my father was involved in a ghastly car accident. He was reassigned to a new role.

After my father's funeral, the stories morphed into apparitions and dreams. Everyone talked about how they saw him wearing white, half-shrouded in light, how he told them to stop crying because he is in a better place, how they felt a kind of presence while ruffling through his belongings or sitting on his favorite sofa in the parlor. I wanted to feel among, to share my own stories about the dreams and apparitions of my father. Thankfully, there were more than enough stories from my family, my father's friends and even neighbors, to go round so nobody bothered me with sharing mine.

For weeks, I sniffed his old books, slept in his shirts, attended job interviews wearing his multicolored neckties just to see him one last time. Then I turned to writing; the surest way to permanently etch him into my memory. But this did not work either. Story after story, nothing I wrote felt enough, worthy of capturing him. I distracted myself with writing other things, but that feeling that I have not written some kind of edifice in the memory of my father never left me. The feeling grew new teeth with every yearly memorial, gnawing and gnawing until there is nothing left behind but the lonely pointer of my open Docs app.

IV

Anytime I talk about my involuntary hiatus from writing, I am met with pity from friends and fellow writers. As if the most sinister of all tragedies has befallen me. They are so quick to offer words of encouragement or share stories about how these things happen to everyone and you just read so-so-so-and-so and you will get over it. I think every writer should experience this to question what we are without our ability to create stories with words, to explore parts of ourselves we never even realized existed.

For me, I have rediscovered the beauty of reading. Not that I ever stopped, but it has been years since I felt the ethereality of reading for the sake of reading, without the burden of having to write. I have also learnt how to reread my past works with kinder, less critical eyes. Rereading myself confronted me with something a friend told me some years back; how most of the father figures in my stories are dying or dead and when they are alive, they were either downright terrible or just there, that someone who does not know would think I have an abusive relationship with my father.

In the luxurious space of not writing, I began to interrogate why I wrote different versions of my father's death in fiction. My father has been ill all my life. As a child, I watched my father go in and out of hospitals. Every now and then, a family friend or neighbor or work colleague will introduce us to yet another Bible-believing church and my mother will pester my unwilling father to attend and claim his miracle. Growing up in the shadow of my father's death inspired these characters. Each story was a way of me borrowing grief from the future. Maybe, I had thought, it would make it easier when the imminent happens.

V

Okwiri Oduor's My Father's Head follows Simbi as she navigates her father's loss. After a series of headless drawings of her father, Simbi with the help of Bwibo, a colleague, will summon her father's ghost just so she could see his face and, in turn, reclaim his head in her drawings.

Simbi's father and mine are very much alike. They were both diligent workers who were paid dust by their exploitative employers and were fond of the radio, news broadcast, and listening to the news over the road. Just like Simbi, I too had a larger-than-life script of how my father would die. A script that would become dampened by the reality of the occurrence. And we both wanted to reclaim our fathers, wholly. Not in bits and pieces. Hers, through drawing, and mine, through writing.

However, what Simbi and I failed to understand is that a drawing or a piece of writing is too infinitesimal to capture what we shared with our fathers. So I am going to stop taunting myself of how I have yet to write something that feels like when Simbi lets her father's ghost in, offers him tea, bonds over a conversation about the loss of her father's old friend, and finally asks him to stay for a couple more days, because even that will not be enough.