By
Obododimma
Oha
The Nigerian poet, J.P. Clark Bekeederemo, wrote
an interesting poem called “The Cry of Birth.” I studied that poem and it challenged my thinking in a
poetry classroom many years ago. That poem has an intersection with this essay
in some ways. First, they are both about childbirth, about coming into this
world, about being born. I know that when puppies are born, their eyes are
shut. They remain blind and do not see where they have arrived until after some
days. Goats are different: minutes after they are born, they are standing up,
on their own, and can look around and see things, see where they have arrived.
Humans are too far from standing on their legs (on their own), but they also
can see at birth. I mean, their eyes are “open.” I do not really know professionally
whether human babies at birth “see” when they “look” or whether they look on
blankly! Seeth thou what thou looketh at, you would add.
But, let us assume that creatures with open eyes
at birth are supposed to see. So, in that case, the human young has no excuse
and is brought into this world to look and see! Connected to looking and seeing
is the sign that the new comer has been expelled from the zone of comfort and
is in an uncomfortable context.The cry of birth naturally is a sign of discomfort,
to which the birth attendant responds by putting the new arrival in a crib that
dramatizes comfort or near comfort. The baby has stopped crying, may start
sleeping, but would return to the harsh reality that one has arrived in an
uncomfortable place, a world where that comfort is merely dramatized, the aim
being to deceive the new arrival.
Well, this arrival has been mythologized in many cultures. In Igbo culture, for instance,
there is the folklore of iyi ụwa (roughly translated as covenant stone of birth). This folklore
assumes that humans know where they are going to be born: country, town, and village. The intending traveler makes a vow, a choice, of the
destination, sealing the vow with the stone (iyi
ụwa) and then buries it somewhere for remembrance. The
discovery of where this iyi ụwa is buried is a spiritual task that the dibịa afa (the diviner) carries out, destroying the stone
of covenant, bribing some
spirits, and which would terminate the coming and going of an ọgbanje (a child that is born and
later dies when it most painful, according to the iyi ụwa). Isn’t that an interesting explanation? Now
that many Igbo people have become Christians and have replaced one myth with
another, locating and destroying iyi ụwa may appear fictional. Well, this is just
to show that there are cultural explanations of the metaphorization of life as a
journey (to somewhere) and birth as a significant point.
What bothers me is that, if one is coming to this
life and would seal it with this iyi ụwa , one does not know a thing! One is
just catapulted to this life. Whether the dibia tells a lie as a spiritual
merchant or not, one would not know. The community and the family are his or
her mercy as subscribers to the myth. As one would see it from the province of
computer studies, it is as if one’s memory of these things, of previous life,
is erased, cleaned out for him or her to commence a new experience somewhere
else, or a software is reformatted! In that case, we must accept that we are the Maker’s materials in
artificial intelligence experimentation; in fact, resources. But, honestly, I
am not aware of a former life, or that I signed any agreement to be born on any
galaxy, what more in a country where some beings do swim in dirty gutter water
or drink it because the person they are supporting have won in a tremendously
rigged “election;” or a society where Government Class Four holders climb the ladder using the visibility
created by coup d’etat participation and become presidents, with highly
educated people (professors) becoming his subordinate and executing his
terribly backward decisions!
This is where one must return to J.P.
Clark-Bekeederemo’s poem and reinvent it as “The Lament at
Birth.” Was I stupid, very
stupid, to agree to be born in a country
where some people celebrate questionable victory with a death wish of swimming and
drinking dirty gutter water? Was it a love for an “adventure’” perhaps a more
eventful adventure where the abnormal is considered normal? Some wise travelers
chose places like Switzerland, Austria, USA, Germany, etc, but I foolishly
chose to be born close to the dirty
gutter and its smelly water! What kind of choice is this, where chance has
thrown you? I hereby declare that no iyi uwa that is buried close to the gutter! I declare
that I did not make any covenant with anyone, at least, not to my knowledge!
Yes; there is no documentation, no evidence to support a contrary claim that I
did!
J.P. Clark-Bekeederemo must have seriously considered these options in
framing the title of the poem: “lament,” “cry,” “moan,” “weep,” etc. Each says
something about shedding of tears in a different way. The choice, “cry” appears
moderate about shedding of tears. It pretends to be rhetorically neutral, to
let another set of words betray the emotion of the entity involved. But “lament”
spills the emotion, spreads it; makes it infectious for the audience. One may
even characterise it as dysphemistic: intended to shock us with emotion. I like
it because it reveals something about the degree of the shedding of tears. It
is immense! The word “moan” suggests pain that may be on the mind or the body.
But we know that pain is behind the shedding of tears and so is a given. What of “weep”? The word is already wet. We
can feel the wetness in the shedding of tears. But that speaks also about
despair, about being overpowered. The entity is not helpless or in despair in
shedding tears. You see! One is right in
wanting to show the high degree of the shedding of tears shown in “lament.” And
so, I have called it “The Lament at birth.” One had to lament at birth on
opening one’s eyes to know that one has been ejected from the comfort of the
womb near the gutter of dirty water. Imagine! Other travelers were luckier.
Their posting was to places far from the gutter!
I now know that some children cry exceedingly on discovering
that their posting is a miserable one!
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