I Am Still With You by Emmanuel Iduma

Author:Emmanuel Iduma [Iduma, Emmanuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2023-01-05T12:00:00+00:00

THE NEXT MORNING, Emeka and I went on a brisk walk. His daily goal was ten thousand steps. He’d achieve that, he said, if we were to walk to the hotel where Obinna and Adaora were lodged, on the road to the beach, no less than ninety minutes away. Every ten minutes or so, I stopped to deal with my unlaced shoes, and he would mention how many steps we’d gained, how much farther we needed to go. I began to feel the throb of my effort. But I’d known, in the time he invited me to walk with him, that this might be our only time alone.

Afikpo’s busiest market lay at the end of the road we’d turned in from, which also doubled as a bus station. A small mosque was built on the road to the beach, and it was the area in which one was sure to see men in long kaftans or women in veils. This was a new quarter in our town. I tried to imagine it during the war, when it was an expanse likely reserved as a gateway to the Cross River. From that river, the war-thirsty federal soldiers had made their way to the hilly town, no doubt shelling in advance and making little of the defense put up by terrified locals, including by Uncle Edwin, as I had been told in Enugu.

I summed up to Emeka what I had discovered about our uncle Emmanuel, the potpourri of details passed to me by Okparacha, Daddy Onitsha, and our father’s cousin Otu. I told him I hoped we could speak to Raymond, my father’s maternal cousin, and Agha, Otu’s older brother, since both men were in town.

He nodded, but wondered if we had time for anything besides the wedding.

My shoelaces were untied again, and after stopping and bending to tighten them, I rose with a sour feeling. It was stupefying to realize how hard it was to trace my uncle’s story, and I wasn’t sure if it was due to a failure in my methods or the impenetrability of his life.

Our conversation turned to names in our family. “Yesterday,” I said to Emeka, “I overheard Inya say he named his child Oko after our missing uncle. He seems to have made an appearance in every succeeding generation of the family.”

“Given the way people are named in Afikpo,” Emeka said in response, “it would be difficult to trace our lineage.”

I made an inquiring sound.

Our people took the first names of their fathers as surnames, he explained. Inya was our grandfather’s name. Our father was Agbi Inya, before he adopted Iduma as a surname. Ordinarily, in Afikpo tradition, our surname would be Agbi. And yet we had always gone by Iduma.

I’d always found the tracing of lineages a confounding task, worried that the further I went into the past, the more likely the names would cancel out the identities. I was more curious about the exact circumstances with which my father took on the name Iduma, or when, in fact, his records began to reflect that name.

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