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Daily Independent (Lagos)

Nigeria: Two Thousand And Eight, Anno Domini

Mcnezer Fasehun

29 December 2008

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opinion

Numbers exaggerate numerology. And numerology exaggerates numbers. But the poetics of numerology can never be lost on me in this ebbing year: The year 2008, A.D. It was a year I had to poetically figure out the import of figures. It was the year the woman who carried me in pregnancy for nine months before giving birth to me had transited to eternity. I was her only son .And one of the things she told me on her death bed was that I would miss her the most. I knew what that meant. I understood the depth of the feelings of emotion that underscored that caveat. But as Dennis Britus, the South African Poet would caption his collection of poetry, the predilection of man for 'Stubborn Hope' still made the credo of our being to think that there will always be a tomorrow. I drove her in her car from a private hospital in Ibadan to the University College Hospital, on the 9th of July not long after my Professor, Benedict Ibitokun had, at the parking lot of the Faculty of Arts, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, requested a by-passing Professor of Pharmacy, Lamikanra to listen to what I had to say about literature being the almighty formulaeic baseline of epistemology. I had sounded so curiously to the professors that Professor Ibitokun had promised to arrange a debate between the two of us seeing our penchants for cerebral gymnastics. That same Wednesday, back in Lagos, the case involving my tenancy was part heard at the rent tribunal. Two days later, having left my mother at the UCH the day before, my cell phone rang and it was the scream, the sob of my wife: Ye m'o ma ku n'owu'o i ooo!(My mother (-in-law) has died this morning ooo! She yelled in Ondo dialect.

I sat transfixed on the iron chair of the seamstress in our house just as I was preparing for the morning chore of fetching water in the house. My eyes looked straight into the sky and I felt that was the day I was born. I felt like a baby! I felt like a house whose fence had just caved in to a flood. I felt swept under my feet. Others had heard much earlier and had begun to put calls across to me. It dawned without dawning. Dateline: Eleventh day of the Seventh month of the year Two Thousand and Eight, Anno Domini.

Ruminating on the day my mother passed on as a historical, landmark of my life, I sought refuge in the intangible in order to arrive at the meaning and the understanding of the tangible. Numerals offered themselves. Her mother's house back in Oboto village was House Number 8. Her mother's house in Ondo town was House Number 28. Her father's house also in Ondo town was House Number 48.The number 8 was poignantly recurrent. What has numbers got to do with it? Members of the metaphysical school of numerology say that 8 is a number of new beginning. Probably from the biblical narration that God created the Heavens and the Earth for six days and rested on the Seventh day, the eight day must indeed herald a new beginning. My mind became the delineated board on which the Ludo game of numbers began to play itself out.2008!The year I became metaphorically severed from my mother's umbilical cord.

Titles of works that have to do with passing time began to float through my head: John Donne's To The Sun Rising; Wole Soyinka's To My First White Hair; The Credo of Being and Nothingness; Benedict Ibitokun's Sopaisan: Westing Oodua and his inaugural Being, Eternity and the Hemorrhage of Time in Literature, Agwonorobo Eruvbetine's inaugural Poetic Existence: A Social and Personal Imperative; my own title The Poet Is My Shepherd, etc.

Then came the Obama watershed. With the pendulum of the clock of history swinging a Will-he-or-Will-he-not for Barack Obama and a Will-she-or-Will-she-not-for the United States of America as the probable grabbers of the time-honoured medals of the twenty-first century race, humanity held a bated breath to see how events of history would turn out. Time was definitely up for the dogma of homo-social elitism. People had expressed different shades of opinion from the optimistic, to the pessimistic, to the bizarre! The atmosphere was charged with apprehension against the back-cloth of history that always had an anti-climax to the story of the evening of the mountain and the valley; the dashing of the hope of the dark horse coming up to demystify the status quo. Such was the apprehension that greeted Nigeria's last presidential election in 2007 when everyone, except few prayerful men of God, had thought as the incumbent said it was going to be a do-or-die affair. Thank God the cup passed over us and we were able to witness peaceful elections in Nigeria and the United States.

However, I thought my mother should have witnessed the Obama victory. For sure, she would have dreamt of producing her own Obama. How? You may ask.

My mother's two immediate younger brothers, Ladejo and Fredrick were married to African Americans- Sharon and Lena, respectively. Because her knowledge of history showed her that the original African-Americans that were taken to America were used to cultivate sugarcane plantation, she used to call them ajereke, the sugarcane eater! She always did so, however, not with the derogatory reference to the indentured labour we would read in history, but with the fondness of someone who herself was chewing the sugarcane and savouring its sweetness. The moment their children began to visit Nigeria, my mother always celebrated their visit like someone who had conquered the world. She would, as soon as setting eyes on them plunge into her wardrobe and Yorubanise (and Ondonise) them with all the different aso-oke she could lay her hand upon.

Ebullient, outspoken, optimistic, vivacious, she took pride in hearing that her husband's son, Dr Fredrick Fasehun, the President and Founder of the Oodua People's Congress (OPC) had used the Aso-Oke she had sent to him to take the photograph on the cover of his autobiography FREDERICK FASEHUN : THE SON OF OODUA! A very incurable optimist, my mother would always assure you that the way God made Barack Obama the President of United States, so her brothers' children would some day walk into the White House as American President of Ondo origin! Dare to doubt her and she would regale you with stories about her husband's son, who never wanted to go to school as a child but ended up not only with a PhD from a prestigious American university, but also becoming an ambassador and lately the Director General of World Intellectual Property (WIPO); about her uncle Festus Olawoyin Awosika, who was the first Nigerian to sign the currency notes, her younger brother who was the first professor of Extension Science and what have you. Her lawyer will miss her. She was the litigant who would hire the services of a lawyer yet would want to tutor the counsel on how to go about the case even though she was never a lawyer. As a youth, she used to represent her village in a wrestling match where, upon disguising herself as a male contestant would trounce the opponent time and again. Even at adult life, she had had a mallam beaten up in the market placing him in his wheelbarrow.

No doubt, had her dream come true in an Obama way, she would throw a party even as she marches to the US Embassy to pick a visa to go to the White House.

Two Thousand and Eight, Anno Domini, opened the gate for the exit of an Amazon, a sophisticated mind with a sophisticated ambition that could not be deterred by the scale bar of a pole vault.

What is a new beginning for the world when great minds exeunt from it? At what count is the new beginning, really?

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