By
Obododimma Oha
What do we expect to see on a battlefield? Obviously, many depressing sights! Terrible injuries, horrible wounds, rare heroism, shameful cowardice, etc. But above all, capital price: death. Especially horrible death. So, no one goes to battle and expects to watch a football match. Kill or be killed is the rule. And when we attach battlefield as a metaphor to earthly existence, are we not inviting others to view that existence analogously as a context of tragedy? Are we also not asking them to consider the strategies and tactics that can bring them home alive? Generally, are we not drawing their attention to the risky nature of life itself and the fact that they have to have the heart to live it?
The big issue, then, is survival. This survival is a personal responsibility. There are promises that some others would help, but promises are promises. The law, for instance, with all its systems and fanciful structures it can boast of, cannot give it, even though it promises it. The government cannot provide it, even though it has with seeming confidence promised it. One has to seek it, asking one's Maker to step in. Maybe this supernatural intervention would help.
The Maker has clothed humans with perishable flesh that would vanish one day, which even makes them very vulnerable on the battlefield. But one interesting thing is that it is this flesh that is afraid of the aftermath of the battle. The flesh is also a weak form of clothing: it possible that it is only a stage to a higher transformation. The human flesh suffers and dies to remain on earth, but the spirit marches on. So,the battle is not the end, luckily. What a consolation!
The settings of this great existential battle include: child bearing, child rearing, property acquisition and maintenance, health, and relationship. More can be added, depending on the context. We have to display skills in these settings and sometimes make our styles unpredictable, so that we do not expose and endanger our plans, our victory.
If life is such a battle, it means that it requires courage and is not a place for the gullible or the one that takes whatever he or she sees. It is a place of cleverness, though requiring honesty. We can no longer retreat into our mothers' wombs, neither should we sit and lament over disadvantage. The hunter of a tiger must dress up in a garment of steel. We need to rise and fight that battle in our time, in our own way. Imagine me expecting Chinua Achebe or Oliver de Coque and Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu and Nnamdi Azikiwe to rise from their graves and fight my battle. Nonsense. It is now my battle!
Chinua Achebe should be resting, having fought his own battle. If things fall apart now, it is for us the living to struggle make them hang together again and not even dwell on borrowed warfare, borrowed victory, and past glory. If I expect Achebe and Odumegwu-Ojukwu to come back and continue breaking the coconut with their heads, I must be joking.
That this is now my battle does not mean that I cannot learn anything, or have not learnt anything, from the ways that Chinua Achebe and Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu waged the battle and withdrew. There is always one or two lessons waiting to be learnt from the past. Does the person who has not witnessed a burial not start anywhere to exhume the body, sometimes from the legside? The past remains an important witness, to be examined and cross-examined.
That life is a battle means that we are all fighters that look forward to a victory. There are no spectators who only stand and watch things happening. We are all fighters in the war, with our little shocks that require personal attention. Fighters in the battle of life. That is what we are and may get home traumatised.
The battlefield of life says clearly that a fighter may not win a bout all the time. So the fighter has to be prepared. Even prepared for what one is not prepared for! One must be prepared to lose, with the hope of winning some time later.
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