Most challenges that surface in our lives actually have the power to bring us to our knees, when we give in to the fear that we cannot withstand it!
We tend to panic when we experience unanticipated turbulence in our lives, forgetting all the tenets that we know and we allow fear to throw us off balance!
It is always a battle field of the mind!
What I have learnt and know for sure, is that tremors will always come; that is a fact of life!
HOWEVER, you must ALWAYS adjust your stance and find a new center of gravity!
These could mean new attitude, new friends, new job, new home, new relationship, new everything!
CONCENTRATE on staying in the present and living through the turbulence, moment by moment!
It is the attempt to lump it all together that makes it more overwhelming!
Make diligent attempts to step up to higher grounds in the moment and REMEMBER to breathe easy as you forge on to the next moment.
Ego Ọne? Ikem asks. Picking up and dropping several T shirts from the pile of bend-down select clothes heaped on a tarpaulin on the market floor.
Hah! I don tell you say na N200 only! Replied the man with the bell.
Second-hand aka bend-down-select cloth sales
Bros, abeg!I wan buy 2 or even 3 sef, if you fit commot something. Ikem haggles and they eventually settle for N120 each and he happily pays for the three that he chose, clutching his black nylon of new apparels with a bounce in his steps, he leaves for Mama Nwamaka’s canteen.
A plate ofhot ‘Garri and Onugbu soup’ with some ‘Show Boy’ and a bottle of ‘small stout’ is just the thing to set his World right today; he has more jingle in his pockets from a few days of work than all the previous weeks put together.
Preceding market days have been grueling but more rewarding. It seems the approach of Christmas has triggered off a flurry of more business and lots of off-loading of bags of garri and gallons of palm-oil has enriched him more than carrying baskets for housewives and their wares.
Some of these women came for their weekly shopping armed with scorpion stingers on their lips and taking out the grouch from their homes on unsuspecting recipients.
The last one had nagged and haggled that he was charging too much, that he was almost tempted to ask her to carry the things herself.
“Is it not just from here to the bus-stop, or are we going to ‘Ibagwa’?” She harassed.
Bitter leaf soup and garri
”Carry that thing well o.” ”Hah all this shaking, my oil will pour o!” She went on and on.
”You are going too fast!” “I cannot keep up with you, she argued!” Whilst stopping to greet every single market woman that crossed her path and Ikem stood with her weighted load on his head.
Such women were very trying, but he needed all the money he could make.
He wants to buy several new items and to replace his worn out rubber slippers. Occupying his mind with happier thoughts of the jeans and canvas that he will purchase soon, he tunes out the shrewish woman’s voice.
A belly full of good food and a glass of palmy later- Mama Amaka had fresh supply and he couldn’t resist the intoxicating aroma of fresh palm-wine. It is not every day that you could get an authentic bottle that is not watered down. He hurries back to hustle for more customers.
Show boy aka Kpomo/Kanda
A few more bags of rice and basket carrying for market late-comers, it is time to go home.
It appears like a throng or water-fall of humans. Everyone rushing to get done and go home.
Ikem is happy with the days events and as he jostles along with the crowd, an unexpected shove from the back has him turning around to lambaste the pusher, only for the ensuing shouting chant of ‘Ole! Thief o!Onye Oshi!’ rings out in the crowd.
The pusher happens to be a wily young pick-pocket who was trying to make away with a woman’s purse. Out of reflex Ikem hot-foots after the escaping thief along with a several young men.
The crowd impedes the pick-pockets movements and he is nabbed a few yards away and beaten to an inch of his life.
It takes the pleading voices of some concerned women to save him from being pulped to death.
Jungle Justice! Quick to be meted out when the culprit is caught; especially among the poor culprits.
Ikem ponders on this issue as he makes his way home. Wondering why a young man would choose to bargain with his life over a paltry sum of Naira. The culprits face is one of those idling chaps that he sees around the market.
To be continued.. You can read the first part by clicking the link in red ink above!
Quick Glossary for words that you may not know:
Ego Ọne – How much is this?
Hah! I don tell you say na N200 only! – Ah! but I told you it is only 200 Naira (note that it is expected to haggle over price in the market)
Bros, abeg!I wan buy 2 or even 3 sef, if you fit commot something – My brother please! I want to buy 2 or even 3, only if you can reduce the price.
Bend-down-select: A heap of mixed used clothing where customers literally bend down to scrounge through the pile and select an item they want to buy.
Mama Nwamaka – Nwamaka’s mother. Nwamaka is a native Igbo name that means, ”the child is beautiful, the child is good” There are derivatives such as Amaka.
Garri- A popular West African meal made from Cassava tubers.
Onugbu soup – A type of soup which is peculiar to the Ibo’s. It is made from bitter-leaf vegetable and a thickener of coco-yams.
Show Boy also known as Kpomo or Kanda – These are processed cow hide eaten as meat. It is regarded as a delicacy.
Small stout also known as Odeku – This is a dark beer made from roasted malt or roasted barley, hops, water and yeast.
Ibagwa – Ibagwa is a community located North of the great University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
‘Ole! Thief o!Onye Oshi!’ – The three words mean the same thing: Ole is Yoruba for thief, and Onye Oshi is Igbo for thief. It is not uncommon to mix English with broken/pidgin language and another tribes language.
Palm-Oil – a reddish – yellow butter-like oil which is derived from the fruit of the oil palm. It is used as edible cooking fat and also for making soaps, candles and cream.
Palmy – a shortened name for Palm-Wine, which is an alcoholic drink made from fermented palm sap. It is used in major traditional occasions in Igbo land such as Traditional titling occasions, Traditional weddings, burials, child naming ceremony and general entertainment.
A palm wine tapper and a palm tree
Fresh bottles of Palm wine
The posts that I would like to share because they spoke to me:
When great trees fall: This poem from Maya Angelou featured by JoHanna Massey’s blog spoke loudly to me. Almost felt as is Maya was talking about her demise ”in my mind” because she is indeed a great tree. This is my first time of reading it.
Evening Chuckle: Nutsrok does know how to bring the mirth out of me. She offers rib-cracking laughter each time 🙂
Wordless – Wednesday: I love food. Lucid Gypsy’s picture was pure temptation for me 😉
Oh! There was an old map that the lady loved;
We used to be together, You and I;
Clutched every step of the way;
From East to West
From North to South
You and I; Map
Were inseparable!
Carefully plotted and stamped with anticipated goals;
Decorated with achievements and all the golden laurels;
At every mile and every inch of the way;
Map boasted of selfish individuality;
And screamed, Me, Me, Me!
The Map and Lady;
Grew very selfish in ambitions;
In a hasty bid to cover every milestone;
Lady forgot to tie her laces;
A trip, a fall and over the brimstone!
Scraped knees and a bleeding thumb;
Map got torn and was no longer perfect;
Lady sat in the puddle;
Wondering at the puzzle;
Then helping hand came to lift lady out of the muddle!
Bruised but not beaten;
Battered but not finished;
Lady said goodbye to old map;
Obtained a nicer map;
And sets-off on a happier journey!
Write about evil: how you understand it (or don’t), what you think it means, or a way it’s manifested, either in the world at large or in your life.
Evil lies at every door!
Sneaky and eager to slip in,
When the door is left unlocked,
Evil slips in unwatched!
In each of us exists a Jekyll and Hyde,
Always a tussle between Good and Bad,
Who wins is left for you to say,
Because, indeed, evil lies at the door!
She doesn’t look like the wicked witch from East-wick,
Neither does she resemble the witch from Far East,
But resides in all those, with malevolent eyes,
Indeed, evil lies at the door!
She needs not have a hooked, pimply nose,
Nor cast spells over,
Pots of mumbo-jumbo,
A minutes delay, the spell is done,
Indeed, evil slips in through the door!
S/he comes well packaged in lovely gift wraps,
S/he comes sensuous, sleek with soft touch,
Glossy and sweet, like everything nice,
A little taste and then its doom,
Indeed, evil lies at the door!
S/he needs no crooked black hat,
Nor a black cat that spits with squinted eyes,
She needs no broom,
To get her vroom,
Yes indeed, evil lies at the door!
At the door of an unrepentant heart,
With no sense of remorse!
At the door of wicked pleasure,
From others pain and misery!
At the door of abuse, loneliness, violence and more,
Yes indeed, evil lies at the door!
Dare we take a peek? I shudder;
I shudder, should we dare seek to see;
Beneath our pantomime parades;
What turbulence lies under the facades;
Can the glare of the twisted mess found beneath;
Can the parts all broken, cracked, jumbled, mangled and messed up beyond measure;
Ever fit, not to cause so much displeasure?
Facades that shimmers and glimmers like timeless diamonds;
Yet within their confined cupboards they fight and grapple with their demons;
Painful warts underneath, score my soul like those of a soiled dove;
dirty, filthy, unbecoming, unwholesome tiny cracks everywhere;
The freckles of imperfection marks me brutally;
I am covered in sinful spots and dots;
A sore sight to the sinless eyes;
But who are these sinless eyes? Where are they be to be found? I ask;
Shall we dare to take a peek to see;
There are no sinless between you and I;
All broken bits of imperfections we are;
But yet he says;
Come! I beseech you;
Come to me with all your freckles and all your warts!
Come to me with all your spots and all your dots!
Disgraced, Broken, Discarded, Cracked, Twisted, Warped,Mangled,
Hopeless, Desperate, Ashamed, Naked;
However spotty it might be!
Come!
For my perfection makes your imperfection whole!
Come!
For I came to set the captives free!
Grandma dancing on the occasion of my traditional/customary marriage.
I held your frail wrinkled hands in mine,
They were much smaller! Now! You were old!
The skin of your hands had waxed, waned and tautened over decades;
Toughened by ages of farming and weeding, from lifting innumerable hot clay pots from the burning firewood, from bathing babies; lots and lots of babies.
I caressed them lightly; noting the veins that stood out more prominently; noting the traditionally placed tattoos and the story behind the tattoos;
Beautiful age worn hands that had nourished,
Beautiful wrinkled bejeweled fingers that lightly applied ”Ude-Aku” on my scalp whilst shaping my unruly hair into a bouffant style.
Those fingers were my preferred hair stylist because, you did not pull it tight like Mama Nkechi used to do whilst making the periwinkle hair-do for me.
Beautiful hands that left my little bum smarting from a well-deserved smack after a misbehaviour.
I beheld your face with my eyes. Your beautiful dark skinned face;
I looked! Looking and looking at every lovely lined feature of your face.
Knowing that it might probably be the last time that my eyes would behold your skin.
Your eyes had seen the Civil war, your eyes had looked life in the face, it was a map of times past, etched with love and pain, with joy and laughter, with fear and worry, with seeing things that I can barely imagine…
Your lovely wrinkled face, etched with very fine lines and tiny spots that had stolen in and taken bold space,
Your crown of whitened hair held in a little bun Everything had grown smaller! Your skin had shrunk and your capacious bosom which used to cradle my hair, had bowed to the caprices of gravity
You had aged!
I saw it coming! I knew that it would happen!
But I wasn’t prepared!
The pain still cut me deep!
I wasn’t prepared to stop looking at your age-wizened face!
And when you left, you left with the name! Grandma, nobody ever calls me Nnedim or Ngozika again!
They were your special bequests to me.
You left with your skin all shriveled by death And you took the lovely smell of Okwuma and Ude-Aku!
Our old house on Imoke street inside the University of Nigeria Nsukka campus, was a colonial British styled three-bedroom, three bath bungalow with a garage for my dad’s Renault on the left side, a huge open veranda to the right and a detached maid’s room that my brothers turned into their ”man-cave.”
It stood on what was quite a substantial portion of grounds (maybe a plot or more), on which we grew so much crop. There was a big mango tree that had the penchant to hang heavy with fruit right at the back, an avocado and grapefruit tree to the side of the veranda.
We tilled the ground ourselves with a hoe and grew crops ranging from cassava, yam tubers, yellow pepper, bitter leaf, curry leaf, potatoes, amaranthus, okra, corn, melon, lettuce, plantain and more. We grew a lot of the crops that we ate.
Sometimes, when the work was a lot, my dad would engage some labour hands to do the tilling whilst we did the sowing. You had to grow a combination of crops that performed well together, that way they would both do very well and the manure from our chicken coop helped in nourishing those plants. I learnt crop rotation through this process.
The house had a sprawling nature (they built them big back then), with big louvered windows that swung open outwards and mosquito nets installed to keep the pesky things away. Instead of a picket fence running round the house, it had a trimmed hedge of purple hibiscus running around it.
It was painted creamy oil paint colour but time and the elements matured its painted exterior to butter-yellow. Its corrugated zinc roof was reddish in colour. The rooms were coated in dusky blue and the hallway, living and dining room with the kitchen were cream in colour. The flooring was terrazzo and we scrubbed its floors with hard brush and foamy detergent every Saturday mornings.
I recollect my mum or dad apportioning spaces each Saturday morning and you had to scrub, mop and shine these floors to my dad’s satisfaction. Of course, there was no luxury of gadgets to carry out these chores. We performed these tasks manually with our bare hands, including washing our clothes.
Our house was quite a beehive. It was a middle class Nigerian home. My parents had six of us along with several young cousins who spent some part of their lives under our roof. It was in our culture to assist in raising less fortunate relatives and back then, when academicians were still valued, my parents were viewed as comfortable, so I grew up seeing them extend charity to other relatives who grew up and went to school under our roof.
The weekday mornings were filled with noisy and hurried preparation for school after a family devotion in the parlour, usually led by my mom and the evenings with noise of different things. Chattering voices, pounding mortar, squabbling siblings, music from my dad’s Grundig, loud singing from one person or the other.
Our weekends were equally filled with house chores, catechisms and block rosaries, play, social events and all manners of things we got up to.
It was always lively and during harvest season, we would all gather at the veranda to either peel cassava for processing, melon seeds for soup or corn for drying. These chores were performed with my mom or sometimes my grandma keeping our minds entertained with old folktales and songs.
The aromas/fragrance that floated through the butter-yellow house were of different blends. On Saturday mornings, the whiff of Omo Blue detergent and drops of dettol disinfectant which was used in scrubbing the floors dominated the air until the evening hours when it gets replaced by aromas emanating from one native pot or the other. This could be yam pottage, vegetable soup, goat-meat and bitter-leaf soup (which is one of my favorite native soups 🙂 etc. but there was an aroma that came to stay for a very long time.
Two particular aromas that linger most in my mind, maybe because they persisted for quite a long while, is the yeasty aroma of home made bread that my mom baked weekly. Slices of her bread slathered with Planta margarine, jam, marmite or peanut butter and a cup of Horlicks would fill and sit in your tummy for a better part of the day. The bread smell was soon joined with that of cake.
She ventured into baking cakes every other day and supplying shops in the neighbourhood as well as students hostels on campus, when the Federal Government started their incessant delays in paying staff salary which led to a lot of financial hardship in some homes.
My mom became quite resourceful with baking and crafting to augment their insufficient and epileptic salary payments.
We would cream the cake batter in a huge local mortar that she bought for that purpose, until she was able to save up to buy a Kenwood mixer.
I remember the flavour of vanilla essence and nutmeg added to the cake batter, the Topper butter that she used for so many years and the licking of the sugary creamy cake batter.
What are the earliest memories of the place you lived in as a child? Describe your house. What did it look like? How did it smell? What did it sound like? Was it quiet like a library, or full of the noise of life? Tell us all about it, in as much detail as you can recall.
At some point, especially when our dancing swag steps are beginning to sway and jive with the beats of the music; especially when our shoes feel more comfortable that we are ready to start kicking and bumping like Soul Train dancers, dawn filters through and the DJ tells you that the party is over; you wonder how time flew so fast and how much fun you had whilst the beat was going on.
At some point, the party does come to a close even if you don’t feel like leaving the club 😉
This is how Writing 101 makes me feel. Like hanging back in the warmth of these lovely beats. I am glad that I took the class!
If you are still considering whether you should participate in any forthcoming class, cease the overthinking and dawdling.
Put on your dancing shoes and just hop into the fray. I tell you, it’s one experience that you won’t regret.
Writing 101 drew me out! It drew out thoughts that were under boulders begging to be let out. It set my heart free in so many ways.
I have written far more on this blog in the past few weeks than when I started in May. This is a good thing!
I met so many wonderful people/bloggers that made me happy, thoughtful, inspired, motivated and impressed.
I read posts that made me howl in laughter (and I had to share with my hubby so that he doesn’t feel left out of my merriment), posts that made my eyes well up in tears, posts that made me hunger for certain experiences….so many posts that left something behind.
I connected with so many of you and if the truth be told, the list would get too long if I should commence enlisting all the bloggers that made Writing 101 worth my while.
You all brought something to the table and my sincere thanks to every single one of you.
You are definitely Marvelous!
Please, let us stay connected beyond this class. We have a lot to learn from each other.
Wading forward:
I shall spend the next few days catching up with my mails and clicking furiously in The Commons on blogs that might have escaped my views before the DJ shuts the door in my face.
There are several awards to catch up with and I do appreciate them. They decorate my blogging house 🙂
A bit of tweaking with some little widgets are long overdue.
Within the month, I want to inculcate a project ”POsitive TRain CHallenge” which would be thrown open for all who choose to get on board. A post with regards to this will follow suit in due course and I will definitely crave your indulgence.
Even though, I know that I am young at these blogging things and may not know so much about what it takes to be a successful blogger, I would like to throw my blogging doors open as a Hostess for a monthly blog hopping experience. Remember that ”we only get better from doing.”
A new feature for Short Stories Series (SSS) will be inculcated on my blog by next week as well.
I will be dabbling into the poetry class from next week to see what poetic lyrics I can wax – sometimes I wonder why I get myself into these things 😉
Nanowrimo is also on my radar to give my novel writing a nudge. I will give it more thought.
On a Personal Note:
I plan to laugh and laugh some more!
To devise more ways of spending quality time with my family.
To continue on my quest to loose some useless pounds that don’t aid my body in any way.
A deep contemplation of going back again through the doors of a college/university is in the offing. I am considering a Youth Leadership program or Communication Arts. I honestly don’t have it all worked it in my head, but we will see how it goes.
That’s it my good folks! Thank you for staying with me and I shall leave you with these last words:
“As we journey through diversity and different plains, may our ink-pots never run dry – Keep writing..”
Over and OUt..Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha ……Till next time 🙂
In fulfillment of Writing 101 – Day 20 Assignment: The Future
The moments spent with my family are priceless to me, especially as I watch my children gallop in growth and at the rate that they are growing, before I can say Hey Presto! they will fly my coop.
If I could compress all these precious moments, dotted with times spent with good friends, then have them encapsulated in a frozen kaleidoscopic capsule, so that even when I am old and my memory is no longer as sharp as brass tacks, I may revisit and relive them as often as I choose.
Are there any words or acts of mine that would add value and minister wisdom to others even when I am long gone? If I should peradventure find such words; those are the words that I will have immortalized in stone. Those words that will nurture, strengthen, encourage, motivate and teach are keepers.
What adjectives can I use to describe the probability of such occurrence? Fabulous, Fantastic, Wonderful and every hyperbole that you can think of.
Alas! The transient state of life makes such dreams impossible Since at some point, everything that has been created by man shall become detritus. Back to planet Earth oh my wishful, illusive mind.
a cooking pot and twisted tales 