By Ms Omoh Giwa
Dear Vatsa,
How now? I would have sent you felicitations but I’m still uncertain of your permanent celestial coordinates. Do you oscillate between the clearer skies of Mount Olympus, plucking juicy grapes from the palms of fair maidens or do you find yourself in warmer latitudes, something close to Lagos humidity in March and April, where sweat clings to you like an overzealous campaign poster?
I ask not just for curiosity’s sake (though I admit I’m nosy) but because if the Nigerian Postal Service is to deliver this letter, we must write a precise address.
Besides, you are an enigma, bearing the image of the murdered poet but with a sprinkle of Caesar’s blood on your battle-weary boots. I hope you won’t find me forward if I pry into your final thoughts that day they tied you to the stake. Did you look at the horizon and see the clouds part for you or was it the same grim dusk that swallowed Major Fajuyi as he stared into the dark circle of the barrel? (And yes, I recall you were under Murtala during the counter-coup of ’66. Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten that chapter.)
My people say whoever goes to bed with an itchy buttock wakes up with smelly fingers. Now, don’t misinterpret me. I’m not accusing you of walking around with odorous hands. But history, my dear general, has a way of leaving certain stains.
Now, I did not resurrect you to antagonise you, at least not entirely. I’m genuinely curious if you’ve taken time, in your current eternal posting, to read your war comrade’s autobiography. You know the one I mean. If you haven’t, you should. It’s the sort of book that deserves to be read aloud, preferably with a glass of bourbon to soften the edges of disbelief.
Tell me honestly: do you consider that tell-all a slap across your ghostly face or will you be requesting a signed copy for your shelves? I find it fascinating how your comrades so often paste memoir or autobiography across what are essentially fictionalised sagas of their gallantry. Like that certain octagenarian who still parades himself as a hero of the Civil War. (No be my mouth you go hear say Pope wear white.)
But I digress, again. Let me come to the reason I’ve pulled you, dusty boots and all, from your eternal rest. A certain naval chief recently suggested that Nigeria’s insecurity woes may require a “spiritual solution”. Don’t frown; I didn’t say it. And don’t ask why a Naval Chief is moonlighting as a prophet during the 69th anniversary of the Nigerian Navy, dedicating places of worship instead of ships. If you could wind back the clock, would you have summoned clerics to intercede on your behalf, instead of that motley crew of dramatists and novelists who wrote petitions in your defence?
I can’t entirely blame them for trying. You were a soldier of the arts. Your role in establishing the Writers’ Village for the Association of Nigerian Authors and your poetry collections still speak for you, louder than the rifles did.
Now, before you suspect me of mockery, let me confess: I actually agree with the naval chief. Yes, I, an unrepentant sceptic in matters of faith. (These days my crisis of belief is so severe that optimism feels like a badly fitted second-hand suit.) But look around. Nigeria’s troubles have long outgrown the realm of the physical. How else do you explain a country where “unknown gunmen” descend on a church in Ondo, raining bullets like it’s holy benediction? Where a young woman boards a BRT bus in Lagos and ends up as another name in our endless obituary list? Or the massacres in Edo, Benue, Plateau, each one a fresh wound on a body already riddled with scars?
Tell me, in what sane reality can a nation maintain so many interlinked security agencies and yet remain this unsafe? Apart from checking fire extinguishers and tyre expiry dates, can you explain the difference between the FRSC and VIO?
That’s why I have a modest proposal. One I think even you might admire for its military-style precision. Forget your usual Joint Task Force with their AK-47s and patrol trucks. Let’s assemble a JTF for Heavenly and Spiritual Matters. Operation Holy Water. Imagine it: a coalition of clerics, bishops, imams, traditional priests, and, very importantly, earthly mothers whose bosoms hold the foundations of the earth. I insist on the women. What self-respecting spiritual battalion excludes women and their battalions of invisible minions? We’ve tried tanks, rifles, drones; why not try rosaries, prayer beads and cowrie shells?
Do not mistake my humour for lightness of heart. Beneath the jest is a deep weariness. You, of all people, should know what it’s like to live in a country where the line between the living and the dead is as thin as the smoke from a rifle’s mouth. We keep saying we’re “holding the line” but it feels like this line is drawn in chalk and the rain clouds are already gathering.
Before I end, do send my greetings to Christopher Okigbo. Let him know I’ll be sending him a missive soon. We have much to discuss: art, death and the cruel ways they sometimes intersect.
As for you, sleep easy, if such a thing is possible where you are. And if you do still pray, remember us, citizens who keep waiting for peace as if it were an overdue train that may never arrive.
Yours in uneasy peace,
Giwa of the Department of English, University of Lagos.