By Nnamdi Elekwachi
Of Letter Writing
One of the things that preceded my writing of poetry, short stories, dramas, polemics and other genres and pieces, and which in no small measure helped to hone my skill (if I say so myself) is letter writing. By the early and mid ’90s, I was not privileged to seeing my dad every other day, week, month, and sometimes even year, because after his marriage with my mother collapsed, my father relocated to Lome, Togo from where he wrote me avalanche of letters through Nigerian Postal Service (NIPOST) or Togo-based traders on business trip to Aba who also helped send my reply back to Togo, in one round.
He didn’t send money often (of course he often hadn’t), but just letters. Those days, unlike nowadays, there were no computers, not that they never existed but that the few computers available then were only seen in banks, Nigerian Telecommunications Limited, NITEL offices and perhaps some other government offices too, and so internet was not yet a commonplace. Through this letter writing my father was monitoring my growth, also keeping in touch, and my grandmother had insisted we wrote back to him ourselves, unassisted – I and my sister.
That correspondence was emotional but got the best out of me still. My dad’s letters, beginning with his ‘Dear son’ salutation, often opened with his apologies for not always being there as I would he did, and then to that I should not worry about seeing him during the coming Christmas holidays, because business, he had written, was going under needing his presence.
Sometimes when he wrote, he asked why we had not replied his initial letter. Whenever he managed to visit Nigeria, say for an important event like a burial or something else, it was usually emotional with us. He would measure our heights with his eyes and touches, kiss us (he taught us that too) and ‘spoil’ us, and then say, ‘I was so happy reading you. Thank you for keeping me in your prayers and thoughts, what else do I live for?’.
My sister always wrote him telling him that she was placed first in their class at the end of school term. Meanwhile, I could, in my own letter, after greetings and prayers, tell him how sad I was after Shooting Stars of Ibadan lost to Zamalek of Egypt at the African Champions’ Club Cup (now CAF Champions League) final in 1996. From my dormitory bed, I had written a lot of letters to my grandmother about PTA meetings, levies, books and my exhausted provisions. She still has some of them today.
I have written here before about the trove of love letters we wrote as college boys where I became editor-in-chief for love correspondence. Before we sent out those love cannons, a lot of vetting, energy dissipation and looking up of words in the dictionary would go into that. We wanted to impress those girls with the most impeccable of written English. I’m sure from their end too, those girls did same before replying us.
On campus, I met and became friends with Peter (not his real name though) whose eduction an uncle, Dede Austin, was sponsoring from the US. Peter, who was in the same hostel with me, was studying English and Literature but would take me to internet cafes where I would either write for him or edit his letters when he was done writing them. This writing, unlike my dad’s which was laced with emotion, required element of persuasion and sometimes convinction, for Dede Austin always insisted that Peter write him at the beginning of each semester detailing all his needs.
Dede Austin, I am told, owned a big company in the United States and was a ‘big man.’ But schooling, especially the Nigerian type, is that battlefield into which you’re launched not knowing yourself exactly what would happen with your store and supply. So it goes that even when you have in excess of your need, you may still run out of stuff before the semester ends. This, with Peter, happened so often. Once or twice, Peter had written Dede Austin who did not send him a dime having told him that school session was still on. There was such impasse between uncle and nephew I helped break with my letter whereupon Dede Austin sent money in excess of Peter’s demand, for Peter who was studying English and Literature had ‘improved in writing’, Dede Austin had said in his reply mail. Dede Austin is well-read, writing in a soft disciplined tone and often circumspect with his replies, which were in short sentences. He did not write us often, we wrote him more; he did not write long replies to us either, we did to show gratitude instead.
What did I get from Peter for being his scribe? Drinks and meals, for the most part. Fair cut, if you ask me since I also technically got better with that very experience. Peter would later learn from me that writing letters, especially the kind he wrote to Dede Austin then, did not require him going straight to the point asking for money matter-of-factly without using words well to communicate his ideas or emotions; explaining his own helplessness, especially the rot in the system where strikes could make a semester longer than a session; the problem of power and water supply inherent in Ọkigwe and all other challenges that could drain his supply necessitating a supplementary budget.
Those days were sweet and a memorable experience as Peter has travelled to the States after studies in Nigeria, thanks to Dede Austin.
After I graduated from the university, letter writing continued, this time in a more intense form. Working with Barr. Duru and volunteering for Civil Society Coalition on Education for All, CSACEFA and as well as with Institute for Continuing Education, I wrote volumes of letters to Abuja, Lagos, Accra and beyond. It got to a point the learned man said I was his better when it comes to writing.
Working for Duru, I wrote mostly for a change in the system, like when I wrote to Abia State Library Board and then ministry of education for intervention in the works we were doing at Aba Library. These letters, like many of those I would later write as the foundational secretary of Aba Poetry Club, did not get the expected response or action from their addressees, unlike those informal letters I sent out to my father, Dede Austin and those girls we imagined loving and living with in our phantasmagoric world.
In fact, the Club had me write plethora of things from proposals to press releases in addition to many other poems. Whether I am writing in a formal sense, like letters, releases, proposals and the like or in the informal sense like literary pieces, writing for me comes with persuasion and sometimes conviction. This I’ve learned and still wonder whether it was because of those personal experiences in my formative years of letter writing or it is just the standard.
Today, I just opened a file and in it saw a letter my dad wrote me in 1997. I smiled and told myself it was going to be a family keepsake for coming generations, something I would love to see appear at the photograph appendix of my autobiography.
Yesterday, I read Treasure, a little girl of say about 12 or 13, who had written children stories and I kept wondering how she could piece words together and in most cases maintain her thoughts in long, compound and complex sentences, being able to break them well with punctuations. Like Adaugo and Victor, duo who wrote me letters and who are now university undergraduates, Treasure who has shown promise will write me letters soon. Maybe this is what is remaining. But at any rate, can the world go back to the age of letter writing?
Maybe, there is a thank-you letter I cannot write to my late father, who in a more practical sense started it all beyond classroom exercise. If he reads this, he will be smiling knowing that his son now speaks and writes like Headmaster, a friend of his whom he was eager to hear from; the one with whom he saw football games in our parlour in the late ’80s.