By
Obododimma Oha
Are you fond of shredding or tearing the letters you received, after reading them? You may be helping secrecy but this shredding is very bad! You destroy a lot by doing so! Is it the voices? Is it the issues raised? Is it even the idea of reliving the past and imagining that one is once again with people who have vanished for life? Who have been away for more than twenty years!
It is wonderful to listen to a voice of someone who died many years ago. It is true that this voice is imagined and the stimulus is a set of symbols on paper called "written language." But, once again, the writer is there talking about something. The writer comes back with language, arguing a case. That is wonderful and should not be discarded.
Why should I discard a treasured voice?
When a husband writes to his wife and she is reading the letter, she is actually reading him to get the message. If he uses a formal language in this case, distancing her, trouble, big trouble because she cannot find him in the style. He is not speaking to her and she cannot hear his peculiar voice in the language used.
In reading back in time, the challenge increases. We read to search for voice. The presence of the past?
One has been talking about "voice" in the letter. If "voice" is to be left to imagination, it is difficult to abandon physical marks on paper to imagination? Where individuals actually wrote the letters, we can view the physical marks on paper as actually representations of their presence.
There was a time, before the emergence of email and other electronic forms of message sharing, the letter was very popular. To some people, the whole essence of going to school was to learn how to write and read letters. It was regrettable to leave school without mastering the art. How could anyone leave Class Six and not know how to write letters?
Expert letter writers knew how to begin and end letters. They also knew how to couch the voices of the addressers in language.
The issues raised in those letters! That's evidence. Historical thing. The letter becomes evidence. The voice and the hand are testifying!
The voice and the hand tell a position, a stand, on these issues. The voice and the hand one in looking at the world. The voice and the hand is what is left, for the world.
They excavate the past and remind us about it, in case we have forgotten. The past speaks through those letters. Tell me why I would not be excited to see a letter written to someone by the late Sam Mbakwe or Oliver de Coque? In short, it is good to remember. In fact, I am going to read a letter written to me more than thirty years ago by a friend. I have kept it and have kept our friendship there.
There may be some good reasons to tear or shred some letters but let these reasons not come my way. The loss in a letter destroyed is immense.
And the writers who have been away for many years! In Igbo folklore, we have a song that says :
E deere ya leta
Ọ gaghị alọ ọzọ
Ọnwụ mere dike arụ...
(Even if a letter is written to him
He would not return
Death did terrible things to the stalwart)
Even if his wife likes, let her cut her tongue and enclose it. He would look for the voice of the crying widow and would not return from the grave. It is just finished. "Ọnwụ mere dike arụ."
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