The descriptive first paragraph was what soaked me in. It had done the same some months back when I had scanned through a copy in the newsroom, which I could not take away. The paragraph had blood, dust, sweat and all the violent imageries they often conjure in the mind. And there was the promise of a saucy story, whose end could be complicated. There were also hints of pain and death.
For me, a student of the Dele Giwa school of thought which always craves a catchy introductory paragraph, it did not take time before I was lured into the world of Okoro, who is different from the Okoro many of us know.
This Okoro and that Okoro are only the same in spelling. Their pronunciations are walls apart and their origins miles away. One is Igbo—that is the one most of us know and meet almost every other day. We even use it as a generic term for all people of Igbo descent. The other, which is my concern here, is Urhobo, a proper Niger Delta ‘pikin’.
I met this Okoro in My Name is Okoro, Sam Omatseye’s second published novel. It is the story of the civil war. There are many civil war fictions, including Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, which has been made into a movie of the same title. But, there is something different about Omatseye’s civil war novel. Yes, like the others, it is violence-filled. What is different is what I see as a protest in the book. It is from a minority’s point of view. Instances abound in it of efforts to properly situate the feelings of the minorities of the South. And the clincher, for me, is the use of a name which cuts across the divides to tell this amazing story of love in a time of war.
Okoro asked: “Why do the newspapers keep writing about Igbo pogrom when they killed everyone who was southerner except the Yoruba?”
I also came across this line of thought in chapter five, where I encountered a woman from the South who had come to the North in search of her son. She gave us some lessons in sociology. The woman, who was married to an Ukwani man, narrowly escaped being wasted because she had Yoruba tribal marks
“Ukwanis are not Igbo,” she said. “The animals are killing everyone.”
She offered explanations: “Ukwanis can understand Igbo language but they can distinguish who is speaking Ukwani and who is speaking Igbo. The Igbo know who is speaking Ukwani as distinct from who is speaking Igbo.”
Then wait for this from Okoro: “But is it not worse when the language is not even close but seems to sound the same but is not Yoruba or Hausa? For instance, the Anang and Ibibio.”
Chief Subomi, who hid Okoro in his Kaduna house after he escaped Lieutenant Abdullahi’s bullets, added: “They were not spared. They were lumped together with the Igbo in the slaughter.”
Then the ironic situation of these minorities was worsened as I found out at the point where Okoro returned home and Okungbowa was briefing him about the imminence of war.
“His father, you know, lived in Aba and there is this thing going on there called ‘leave town’. It began with criminals and never-do-wells out of the city. Now, they are asking those who are not Igbo enough to leave. It included those across the Niger. So, he heard that his father and his other relations from Asaba had been forced to leave town.”
To Okungbowa’s statement, Okoro raised a poser: “What did they mean by not Igbo enough? In the north, everyone, including people like me, were haunted and killed for being Igbo.”
There is also the Barclays Bank lady who lost her Isoko uncle in the ‘Igbo pogrom’ in Kaduna who wondered why no one was talking about that.
Like Reza did for the heart of Hajiya Binta Zubairu in Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s award-winning Season of Crimson Blossoms, My Name is Okoro succeeded in scaling the fence and landed in my puddle, so much so that I did not stop reading on account of painful neck. It shocked and excited all at once. The elegance of the language added to my determination to read it to the end. I smiled at expressions such as: “The warrior about his loins would have found rest in Nneka”; “He shot when she was not looking”; “It took about seven months into their sojourn in Umunze before Okoro unlocked his dam”; “He let himself loose in the curves and dips of Clara’s body”.
Beneath the protest in the book lies the story of passion, love and lust in a time of war. This fascinated me. I was thrilled by what it means to be human in war-time Igbo land rived by man’s inhumanity to man. Okoro found Clara and with time, the warriors in his loins exhibited his prowess. Again and again, even when they tried to stop, failure starred them in the face. The brute called Lieutenant Abdullahi also fell in love with Nneka and for love, he surrendered almost all.
I love movies and books that allow me use my head. Don’t resolve everything for me. Leave me with things to ponder after returning the book to the shelf. Omatseye leaves room for this. As I write this, I still wonder how Clara, Okoro’s war-time lover, handled the truth of how her sister’s potential of leading the Nigerian soldiers to their hideout. Did she tell the truth that she watched while one of the men with whom she was hiding from the Nigerian troops strangled life out of the poor girl? Or, did she just lie about it and they all live happily ever after? What did she tell them about Victory, the boy she adopted during the war and saw as consolation for the girl killed for her and others to live?
There is also the question of why Clara was vomiting and feeling nausea after leaving the war zone and returning to her hometown. Did the pregnancy she was afraid of getting for Okoro find her? After all, they did it without guarantees!
Another question still looking for an answer in my mind is what happened to Lieutenant Abdullahi. Did he kill himself after Nkechi, the girl who made him experience circumcision, committed suicide because she did not want to lose her chastity to a brute?
I also love how a reader is allowed to figure out who Captain was despite that the question was not answered when Udeze, the Biafran spy, asked his sister Nneka, who was pregnant when the war started and was separated from her husband all through but returned with two biological children who are not twins. Captain must have been the strong man’s shield Nneka hid under. Who is Okoro not to understand? Not with his experience with Clara whose letter he said he would be awaiting. I wonder about the content.
My final take will be borrowed from Okoro’s wife. It is about the futility of war. Here it is: “That (time wasting) is the meaning of this war. People died, families destroyed and cities on their knees. We have returned to where we started without all the things we started with.”
If you are thinking of going into a war, if you are encouraging hostilities, if you are an apostle of strife, if you are violence promoter, the time to stop is now because at the end of the day, chances are that because of your insensitivity people will die, families will be destroyed and cities will be on their knees. And sadly, it will only dawn on you that all has been nothing but time wasting when you find yourself returning to where you were, if you are lucky to be alive.
