The book, My Name is Okoro, comes with its own uniqueness in dissecting the facts of historical happenings that affected the nation in the turbulent years leading to the civil war. It is a story that has shifted attention away from the norm. In writing the book, Sam Omatseye was deliberate in his choice of approach, using the voice of the minorities to mirror the events as they unfolded.
What motivated me
He said, “two significant events informed my going into this book: they spurred me on. They are Half of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Tragedy of a Victory by General Alabi Isama. Both telling stories from different points of view, Alabi Isama’s is perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the events dwelling on the Nigerian side. His is not a work of literature or fiction. It is a combination of facts of history, with an autobiographical background. So I discovered that he told a lot of the minority story but he did not reflect the sensibilities of the minorities.”
Even though Isama took a deep sweep from the federal point of view, telling the harrowing story of a tragedy, Omatseye nonetheless chose to go deeper to fish out elements that situate some of the events in the hub of the Niger Delta. The theatre of war, the killings and harassment of majority of the peoples of the Niger Delta thus formed the core values of his narrative. “Isama’s was not intended to tell the minority story. It happened that his own tour of duty took place mainly in the minority areas of the country. He mentioned Sapele, some riverine areas and then Akwa Ibom and parts of the present day Cross River State and Rivers State. These were the areas he covered and for me it is just the story of the war events.”
However, the story of Hall of a Yellow Sun, in the reckoning of Omatseye seems to have given undue attention to the massacre of the Igbos. Therefore, it appears they were the only single ethnic group affected by the pogrom and by extension the vagaries of the war. He enthused, “It is an unabashedly Igbo version of the crisis to the extent that she diminished the point of view of the other point of view. It was as if the whole actions took place around the Igbos and ended up only trying to deal with the Igbos.”
The war story
In order to bring this story to its elemental value, Omatseye chose the name Okoro to create a little confusion, and a deeper suspense. Samson Okoro is an Urhobo man whose name though pronounced differently somewhat sounded Igbo. This creation forms part of the confusion that added to the dangers faced by the minorities of the South when the pogrom commenced. Before then, it was hard, if not impossible to decipher between the Igbos and most of the minorities in terms of physical build, orientation, attitude and behaviour. And mostly, the Northern urchins and miscreants perpetuating the orgies did not care to know any differences.
Samson Okoro unfortunately found himself in this trauma and fought tooth and nail to extricate himself from it all. His name was a give-away while his accent and exposure to America were his saving grace. Henceforth, a story is born and the narrative has a twist that inflicts pains, sorrows, love, hate, confusion, intrigues and outright audacity in the minds of readers. So, Okoro becomes a metaphor, a symbolism and a bridge between the Igbo, the minority and the entire nationhood where mere nomenclature and place of origin of a person often hampers rather than safeguarding his life.
So looking at both the war account, emphatically on the pogrom and other sequences of the crisis as they affected the other side, Omatseye succeeded in re-creating history with deep fictional tendencies. It is a story built around families and personal sentiments and sensibilities. It is about personal losses, regrets, high and low moments of not only the combatants, but those, who, even far away from areas of the battle fronts were made to groan, grit and grind. In this war account, the author gave a deeper spectrum of events; he delved into the inner-consciousness of the people to render accounts of strife, torture, turmoil, forbearance and colossal wastages.
Omatseye who until the idea of My Name is Okoro came to him, did not know he would write a book on the Nigerian civil war of 1967 – 1970, explained that the idea of Biafra and war had been fascinating to him. After all, up till date, the episodes of the World War II are still generating ideas for more stories. So also is the American war of independence and the exigencies of Apartheid South Africa.
Omatseye decided, “I remember when I was in secondary school and I read for the first time the speech made by General Ojukwu, declaring the war. He made a long speech saying the war has started. May God save us all. I saw a real danger in that speech even though I was not in the throes of it. I saw the real danger and I wondered how it was then in the war enclaves. I also had experiences of the war because I was in Lagos then. There was a day there was commotion and the teacher asked everybody to go home. It was a war situation quite all right”…
So, based on these childish memories of the crisis and some other fascinations imbued in the mind of a writer, Omatseye set out to give a comprehensive account of a faction. Taking the theatre of crisis from the North to the West and to the minorities of Warri and Sapele, he went deeper into the foyers of the Igbo enclave. He chose his characters carefully and meticulously not just to fit into the roles they had to play, but to also spell out the innocuous sentiments of pride and place.
As a child, what flashed through the mind of Omatseye in the streets of Lagos was like a whiplash. Even then in the early years of the crisis his own father, an Itsekiri man was mistaken for an Igbo man. Only rescued by the hand of providence, but young Omatseye grew up to often recount and remember that episode. So the name of John Fox, Samson Okoro and others have to come in to give the novel its best forte. It is a unique recourse to history, to tell the story as a way of balancing an era that seems to be dominated by one-sided stories. Here, then, is Okoro, the confluence of Nigeria.
My balancing act
“The mission is not basically to tell the minority story, it is to tell the story”. Omatseye informed, “It is the story of the war. You can see the story from the Igbo points of view. It is a comprehensive story of an era; an era of crisis and trouble in the history of a nation. You see the story of Igbo lady called Nkechi with the spirit not to yield. You also see the story of Udeze one of the lead characters who wanted to impress his mother. He went to war to impress his mother. He ended up not even fighting, but going everywhere in battle. He didn’t have the mother to show his valour when the war ended. His mother did not survive the war. He felt a sense of loss because in the end he lost everything”.
Like most people in the heart of Igboland when the war ended, Udeze was in a dilemma, asking himself why the need for the war. This was why he had to go look for his mother’s grave or whatever symbol it was, to lay his Biafran uniform with a smart military salute. It was basically to give that honour he had nursed while the war lasted. As an author, Omatseye spiced the story with romance, love affairs and scenes that depicted the inner-minds of those who could not control their libidos even when death lurked nearby. These scenes were purposely invented to show the other side of the human person that crisis does not necessarily stifle emotions or keep in abeyance the urge to procreate.
In other words, the story of Udeze and the story of Okoro are the two knots that tie all the characters together. Okoro was married to Udeze’s sister Nneka and together the two occupied the centre-piece of the narrative. There is now a link between the Igbo majority and South-South minorities. It was intended to show the link between these two areas before time and even till date. With all the characters connected to Samson Okoro, it became easier to connect with the sequences of the narrative and their believability. It is an approach that is not only unique but model and inspirational. It tells of an author very vast, versatile and immersed in the act of story-telling. A vivid narrator, Omatseye is also a poet, dramatist, essayist and public commentator. He is given to his own peculiar way of presentation and analysis very profound and deeply routed in articulation and dissemination.
Flourishing style
Writing for him is a natural way of life, an innate urge he cannot ignore or suppress. “Yes, the book is imaginary faction. That’s what I’ll call it. It is, however, basically fiction. There were lots of marriages between the Edos and Igbos before time. Therefore the reflection of this in the book shows a lot of socio-cultural link among these people. And so when the Hausa-Fulani began the pogrom in the North, a lot of people from across were taken to be Igbos. The story is the story of Nigeria. It is also the story of all the non-Igbos married to Igbos, who by the time they came back from the war had begun to speak Igbo. It was the language they needed to survive the war.
“Yes, there was also the story of an Itsekiri man who was running away from the scene of the pogrom, who kept saying, I am not Igbo, I am not Igbo. I am from Mid-west. But they used a stick to stop him. The man fell down. There were many scenes like that. And the book is now to open up those scenes where the minorities were dealt with. I don’t think I was carried away the way I told the story. All the ideas were portrayed deliberately. Where it seemed so, it was to tell that the anger of the Hausa was still carried into Biafra. The way the Igbos pronounced toro also gave them away. This was one of the ways the Hausas identified the Igbos, that’s if they ever had the time to ask you to identify yourself before hacking you down.
“Of course, I usually arrive at my titles before I begin to write. However, this one was particularly difficult to get, I mean My Name is Okoro. I had to go into a collaboration with a friend to get it. Initially, I gave a title that did not show the minority perspective. The guy said, don’t use that title; it doesn’t fit the book. This book is tied around this man, this Okoro. Then I said I would title it Okoro but he said no, that is not yet appropriate. He then suggested I am Okoro, but in the end, we arrived at this title, My Name is Okoro which best describes the intentions of the novel. It took me a while to begin to write because I was doing many things then. I have written a play, and two volumes of poems. I have done two books on politics and then I was distracted by the 2015 elections. All these delayed the coming of My Name is Okoro. It is a book I wrote in bits and starts. I’d write today, then in two months I won’t write. Then a friend of mine would say oh, won’t you go back to that book again? Then I would go back. But when the elections were over last year, then I said it was time to concentrate.
“When I wrote, I wrote with speed and then here we are. I’d say it took me a period of two years to accomplish it. At times too it is good to give space because it gives you time to reflect. It did for me. I did a lot of research; I spent money to get materials. I also listened to people’s stories; their war experiences. Not all of them were contained in the book, but they helped. The greater part of the stories came from the Igbos. Yes I moved to prose because it gives me time to be more expressive. You know poetry has a lot of discipline and you constrict words in a few lines. It makes you flourish. In drama, you have a sense of action, you create the scenes in the minds of people. In it, you start to create things. This is my second novel; the first is The Crocodile Girl which I am reworking at the moment.
