Image Credit: Dove Med
Once upon a time, as many stories begin, humans and spirits co-existed. Hold on, this feels incomplete, we need more context. Consider this revised version: Once upon a time in Igbo cosmology, humans, and spirits are believed to have co-existed. Much better? Maybe even more intriguing. Still, I’ll try again: Once upon a time in Igbo cosmology, the revered Kola nut was considered as the first tree to be planted on earth, during a time when humans and spirits co-existed. Is this it? Can we tell if it’s true? In any case, let us continue. Once upon a time, humans, and spirits co-existed. This co-existence was not merely the temperate relations of polite neighborliness - think of it more like the buoyant friendship of equals; flesh, and non-flesh participating in a dance of life and living. However, this is about Kola nut, not friendship. So, a rewind then? Once upon a time, Kola nut was traced to a love affair (it involved an elopement!) between a human woman and a revered spirit warrior. (Reasonable enough if you ask me, considering that in the manner of many friendships, everything is good until you try to take what is mine.) And so, the stories go, the human relatives of the woman insisted on the return of their sister and sought her out at the bottom of the Cross River. The spirit being (read, eloped husband) excited to receive his guests, (did not know they would insist on taking back their sister) brought out the Kola nut among other items, as a gesture of hospitality. However, like happy stories with sad endings, his offerings were not quite enthusiastically received. If we had the power to canonize this narrative, maybe it’d read something like: Once upon a time, a great spirit warrior offered the pods of a strange plant as a peace offering to relatives of his love interest. Or, Once upon a time, an embittered spirit warrior, enraged that his human love interest was taken from him, would strike her on a lonesome bridge so that she bleeds out the child she was carrying. Or, once upon a time in Igbo cosmology, as reported by Ikenna Ukpabi Unya, who reported his findings from other researchers. Or, once upon a time, there was an Igbo cosmology, but we know nothing of it, nor of its Kola nuts. Or, once upon a time, ellipsis, ellipsis.
I’ve been thinking about the Kola nut for a few weeks now, after I had to translate the prayers of a Dibia into a lyric prose-poem in a graduate translation workshop. I’ll be honest, my fascination is recent: I never cared much for the presence of Kola nut in my father’s living room in the village; when suitor after suitor lined up for the aunties who raised me. I knew that Kola nut was awfully bitter, that it kept one awake, that my father carried it around in the pocket of his French suits—sometimes for days, and would still insist that it not be thrown away. Sadly, what I know now of the Kola nut has not changed much. I know that most things, like Kola, are never only what they are, they are also what they have come from, the places they have been before we know them in the spaces they occupy now. What we know of anything is what has survived of its past, so that our stories arrive buoyant or emaciated, depending on who decides that they are worth telling.
My friend, R, is a disavowed Christian. After years of teenage indoctrination, she awoke to the idea that she would rather pay homage to her ancestors than some Western idealization of faith. She insists that by doing so, she gives to her ancestors and to their stories, a kind of agency that was denied them. Plus, acknowledging a self defining authority passed down through biological lines. I cannot argue with the logic. Not just because she is my friend, but because I admire it. I have, however, asked myself what I consider to be my ancestry, the past from which I have how emerged. Unlike R, My forefathers, feel somewhat nameless to me. Yet, I know that in this loss, I have compromised not just a sense of their heroism but the sense of defeat, therefore neither resonating uniquely with their accomplished past or the traumas of their lives. Now, here is this addendum: Given that my relationship to my immediate lineage has borne the embittered markings of violence and abuse, I am slow (read extremely hesitant) to return to my bloodline as a base for self-imagination. Here is another jarring addendum. When I think of ancestry, I imagine the Abraham of my Bible study. And, I imagine the lived Christ to be closer and inextricably connected to the stories I tell about myself, and my place in this world. But this is not about Abraham, or Jesus Christ, or the legacies of troubled pasts. Wait, maybe it’s not even about Kola nut. It is about story telling, narrative power, and living in the questions of our own contradictions. Okay, I admit, it’s a little bit about kola nut too.
Here’s the thing: My Christian faith is a life I have chosen, and it is not without frequent wrestles and internal conversations. It bears its mark on the ways I have come to imagine the world, and it is still the context in which I language my hopes and dreams. Yet, it bears the weight of blood. This blood is not just the voluntary sacrifice of the life of Christ, as the ancient story goes; it is also the involuntary slaughter of peoples in Africa and their histories and the stories of their human-spirit interactions, and of course! their Kola nut. This parallel is concrete and instructive but not necessarily oppositional. See, I like to think that a haunted history can keep us solemn, maybe even push us to imagine new ways of escaping the past, but a haunted history does not invalidate the present moment. There, too, can be a third place. Hyphenated. Liminal. Problematic and Honest. Our best stories, if we look closely, have the trappings of horror. Don’t get defensive now, maybe it is true that the whole lot of us are sacrilegious.
What does it look like; this work of looking closely? of vulnerable questioning? of teeth-grinding honest investigation? of straddling existential angst and socio-historical nightmares, of loving our “enemies,” when enemies are people who don’t look or think or believe like us? Of loving ourselves, too, because sometimes the greatest resistance to our faith emerge from our own wanderings. What does it look like to hold a story accountable to its past and not feel like your structures of stability are falling away. To say that maybe there is something very colonial about dominating the earth, and yet to groan in prayer as I ask for my own portion of this world. It looks like contradictions, but it also looks like negotiation. A world where we learn to reconcile our questions, yet continue in the hope of what can make our time better. Is this not the inevitable thrust of stories? To find us and help us be better?
We are not only in conversation with our histories, we are transitional, too. We are moving from spirit to human to spirit. Also true: We don’t know what will be said of us after we have left this plane, any more than we know what was said of those who were here before us. What we can know is that our lives, with its stark contradictions and ghostlike hauntings, is also a story. We are here and now writing it. So let us try again: Once upon a time, as many stories go, humans and spirits co-existed, because antithetical realities can be reconciled, because it is possible to confront our contradictions: life & death, day & night; now & then. One more time then, if you may: Once upon a time, humans and spirts co-existed, even though we know nothing about once upon a time, except that today will one day be once, and will one day be time. You know, we are the future past. Sigh. If you are reading up till now and still wonder what any of this means, let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time, ellipsis, ellipsis.
Sources:
Unya, Ikenna Ukpabi. "The Historical Significance and Role of the Kola Nut Among the Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria." Journal of Religion and Human Relations , vol. 13.1, 2021, pp. 289-312.
I loved reading this so much. Less about the subject matter, more about how you've written it.
I read this and thought, "what a (wonderful) teacher" I enjoyed the story and I enjoyed the way you wrote it. Master at this language thing.