Emmanuel Iduma, I AM STILL WITH YOU: A Reckoning with Silence, Inheritance, and History
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[1:03]A manual eduma is the author of I Am Still With You, a reckoning with silence, inheritance
[1:08]and history.
[1:09]A manual was born and raised in Nigeria where he trained as a lawyer.
[1:13]He is the author of a stranger's pose, a travel memoir, and the sound of things to come.
[1:18]A novel.
[1:19]He is a recipient of a Windham Campbell Prize for Literature and has contributed nonfiction
[1:23]and art criticism to grant the New York Review of Books, Aputure, and plus one art forum
[1:28]among other places.
[1:30]He lives in Lagos.
[1:31]And by the way, his hotel room was delayed.
[1:34]So we started this podcast with him in a hotel lobby, which he'll hear was quite loud.
[1:39]Actually, maybe I deleted it.
[1:41]And then we moved upstairs to his room where he finished the podcast.
[1:45]So when we joke around about that, that is what we are talking about.
[1:49]Welcome, a manual.
[1:50]Thanks so much for coming on mom's don't have time to read books to discuss.
[1:53]I am still with you, a reckoning with silence, inheritance and history.
[1:57]Thank you so much, Ziv.
[1:59]It's nice to be here.
[2:00]Nice to have you.
[2:01]Can you please tell us, and here's what your book is about.
[2:04]Thank you.
[2:04]So I am still with you, which is a reckoning with silence, inheritance and history is a book
[2:12]that is based on the Nigerian Civil War that happened between 1967 and 1970.
[2:18]After the war, my uncle, who I was named after, eventually, didn't come back.
[2:25]And so in the first stance, the book is an attempt to figure out what happened to my uncle.
[2:31]But also a book where I write about my family and my life in the way which in the sex
[2:40]with Nigerian history and Nigerian political climates.
[2:46]Yeah.
[2:47]So you've had such an interesting background.
[2:48]You lived in New York for seven years.
[2:52]Your born in Nigeria came to New York for seven years, which must have been like, what
[2:56]is that even like for you to leave where you're born?
[2:59]Like it's crazy.
[3:00]And I'm here for me to navigate.
[3:01]I've lived here my whole life.
[3:02]You came for your art criticism, degrees, that right?
[3:05]Yes.
[3:06]And then decided to pack everything up and leave right before the pandemic, basically.
[3:09]And talk about that sort of juxtaposition of the two cultures and what it was like when
[3:16]you were here.
[3:18]I think that it was only in rich respect that I began to realize how shocked I was by New
[3:25]York in the first place.
[3:27]I mean, my first, I would say two years or three years, even, where really just years in
[3:32]which I was trying to survive on all kinds of levels, because New York is not just an
[3:39]expensive city, but it's also an intense city.
[3:41]So you have to always be on top of things, really, in order to make it work.
[3:47]The first thing that really happened for me was that I realized that I was away from home.
[3:53]And all the things that are taken for granted in Nigeria, you know, access to family,
[3:58]access to a couch.
[4:00]You can sleep on that kind of thing.
[4:03]We're suddenly gone.
[4:05]But also that it was a completely different life from the one I had lived in Nigeria had
[4:09]lived.
[4:10]I mean, in Nigeria, I trained as a lawyer and so my education, obviously, when I came to
[4:14]to New York or by the time I came to New York, was very illegal in that sense.
[4:20]And coming to New York and having to do a program in which I had to see a lot of exhibitions
[4:25]right about them, think about philosophy or literature or, you know, art history, all
[4:32]of those fields in a way that I'd never done was actually quite intense in a good way,
[4:37]of course, you know, intellectually, for sure, stimulating, but also demanding.
[4:42]And the time came, you know, in my case, the time comes really when people just have
[4:49]to ask themselves, do I want to commit to New York?
[4:52]I feel like it has happened for many people, even Americans.
[4:56]Yes.
[4:57]Do I want to commit to New York for the long time or do I feel that, you know, I want to be
[5:03]elsewhere?
[5:04]And for me, that was a very easy decision to make because, you know, I wanted to be close
[5:08]to my family.
[5:10]I felt a Nigeria had more for me, but intellectually and culturally, done New York or America,
[5:16]any other part of America.
[5:18]This was what prompted my living and it was quite fortuitous because this was just, you
[5:24]know, three months before the lockdown.
[5:27]Oh my gosh.
[5:28]Yeah.
[5:29]I studied a lot of art history in college, I have to say, and spent many, many hours.
[5:34]They had this whole gallery of, like, hundreds of images of different pieces of art.
[5:40]And we had to memorize, like, the name, the artist, the date, and where it was from.
[5:45]And then we were like, had to regurgitate all that.
[5:48]And I just spent hours before they're all night, just like, and I would like cover it
[5:52]up.
[5:53]Anyway, this is my art history.
[5:55]I didn't have that experience.
[5:57]No.
[5:58]Oh my gosh.
[5:59]That was tough.
[6:00]That was like in my intro class.
[6:02]They got better after that, but still, what type of art are you most interested in?
[6:07]Or what, what even prompted, I know we're going to talk about the book, but I'm just
[6:10]happened to be very curious about this.
[6:11]Yeah.
[6:12]What type of art brought you here and like, what are you most interested in on that
[6:16]friend?
[6:17]I had the four coming to New York had an experience, I mean, for a few years of traveling
[6:21]with photographers who would travel from one part of the African continent to the other
[6:26]by road.
[6:27]And that was really how I got into all of this really into a visual art, because I would
[6:32]have to write about being on the road.
[6:35]And I just became quite interested in the idea of taking photographs or writing about
[6:40]photographs as they were being taken.
[6:42]And so photography is the is the language that I feel like I have most spoken or written
[6:48]about in a sense.
[6:50]I mean, of course, I've also written about other forms of art, but I feel like if I would
[6:55]look at the writing that I've done in the past 10 years, most of it would really be
[6:59]around photography, really.
[7:01]Yeah.
[7:02]I love photography.
[7:03]I used to do photography, I used to study photography, I love going to photography exhibits.
[7:08]And speaking of photography, you have these amazing photos in here.
[7:12]Wait, hold on.
[7:13]Let me find one.
[7:14]Hello.
[7:15]I don't know why I'm going to hold it up when we're on a podcast, but why I need to show
[7:20]you when you're the one who put it in here, but anyway, I mean, what did I make?
[7:25]So for people listening, I won't even describe it.
[7:27]It's just a really beautiful picture.
[7:29]And in the military facility, it's your training for the army, right?
[7:33]And in Nigeria, back in the day.
[7:34]It was part of the story of your family's history and how you were uncovering everything
[7:38]and wondering what it was like for people in your family, uncovering all the things you
[7:45]were curious about.
[7:46]And as you write about it, as you mentioned earlier, you talk about these personal things
[7:50]about your own childhood.
[7:52]And one thing I particularly responded to is your home sickness at boarding school.
[7:56]I have a son of boarding school who's been there for a long time, and he was quite sad
[8:02]at the beginning.
[8:03]He's gotten older now, obviously, as we all do, but that home sickness, it just broke
[8:08]my heart.
[8:09]I was like, I'm home, I can't believe it, but you lost your mom at such a young age.
[8:16]And I'm so sorry about that.
[8:17]And you write about that beautifully when you were four years old and what it was like
[8:21]to sort of carry that loss around with you.
[8:24]Can you talk about your most painful memories here and now that we've known each other
[8:27]for 10 minutes?
[8:28]I mean, I think the writing about boarding school was such a clarifying thing for me because
[8:38]I was writing about that in the context of faking this illness while I was in boarding
[8:43]school, right?
[8:44]Nice job.
[8:45]And this is quite, yeah, it's quite vivid for me even now when I just sort of had this
[8:50]strong sense that I wanted to be anywhere else, especially I wanted to be home, but for
[8:55]boarding school, right?
[8:57]And would start eating my head on this like quite intense actually eating my head against
[9:03]like the co-post that I would develop a headache and then go to the sick as the court
[9:08]either sick bay and then get like a permission.
[9:11]And for some reason, the knots and dutesy believe to me and roads like a prescription for
[9:18]me and I took it to the administrative building and got an exit to go home.
[9:24]And when I go home, of course, my parents immediately said, you just just say, you all
[9:28]that's a compound because plenty of you, right?
[9:31]But the sense, I mean, I think like I don't know how to talk about the most painful memory
[9:35]of how I do think that home sickness or the feeling of being away.
[9:41]I feel like it's a very big thing or has been a big thing for my writing.
[9:47]How do I write about that acute sense of being elsewhere, being in a place other than
[9:55]where you feel like you belong?
[9:57]And it's of course, you know, for...
[10:00]Someone like me who migrated voluntarily.
[10:03]It's not as argued or as painful as someone
[10:07]who is looking for papers or, you know,
[10:09]cuts between, you know, say two countries
[10:11]because they don't have the right papers to move.
[10:14]You know, recently I've been speaking to friends.
[10:16]People who I've known for years
[10:17]were just didn't know that for many years.
[10:19]Some of them 15 years lived, you know,
[10:22]without the right papers in America.
[10:24]And I just found it so fascinating.
[10:27]But my experience isn't as acute as that.
[10:30]Yet there was always a sense.
[10:32]Or there has always been a sense when I'm away,
[10:35]especially when I was in New York
[10:36]and, you know, when I was growing up
[10:38]and being in boarding school that I'm longing for home.
[10:40]And of course, as we know home,
[10:42]it's not just a fiscal location.
[10:44]It's a series of experiences, including, you know,
[10:47]having parents and, you know,
[10:50]where you keep things, how your day starts,
[10:53]all of those things is what forms home.
[10:55]And being away from that always felt quite acute for me.
[11:01]Yeah. Yeah.
[11:02]And how did you process the loss of your mom back
[11:06]at that time?
[11:06]Do you remember all of that?
[11:08]I know you wrote about it a little, but.
[11:10]No, I mean, there was no, I mean, it's,
[11:13]well, the festival that the processing of it's really,
[11:16]I think, in my adults who has come with rice in this book.
[11:20]You know, for anyone who has lost a parent
[11:22]at such an early age, it's a very confusing thing, right?
[11:25]Because you don't even recognize that
[11:28]there is a part of you that is lost, so to speak,
[11:31]until you're old enough to have the language for that loss, right?
[11:35]And so I don't think that I growing up,
[11:39]it was immediately apparent to me in the way it is now, you know,
[11:43]now that I'm, you know, parents myself, right,
[11:46]that my own childhood was,
[11:51]a ruptured in that way, so to speak.
[11:53]But one of the incredible things that helped me
[11:56]and sending out my siblings was that, you know,
[11:58]my step model is just, you know, an incredible person.
[12:02]So we grew up without in their immediate sense
[12:06]of having a maternal presence without feeling that loss.
[12:09]And yet, of course, as one has gotten older, you know,
[12:12]you begins to think about what even,
[12:14]what could have been and all of that.
[12:16]And so that process and it's still happening.
[12:19]In fact, right in the book,
[12:20]I didn't think that I would even address it had long, right?
[12:23]Until it became clever,
[12:25]I was going to write about my father's passing.
[12:27]I had to also deal with what's the kind of grief
[12:30]that my father would have carried, you know,
[12:33]within himself, including the loss of his brothers.
[12:36]And then, of course, you know, like his wife, my mother.
[12:40]Yeah, so I still, you know,
[12:44]I don't necessarily think of it as something
[12:46]that hasn't processed as much as something
[12:48]that, you know, it's the fact of my life.
[12:51]And I'm understanding it better as, of course, you know,
[12:54]the interesting.
[12:55]Yeah. Well, you weave in your story
[12:58]with all of this Nigerian history, of course.
[13:01]I feel like, have you read Zane Asher's book,
[13:04]where the children take us?
[13:05]Do you know her?
[13:06]I know of that book.
[13:07]And I know her, you know, yeah, but I haven't read it.
[13:11]Yeah, but I know that book and I know her, yes.
[13:14]Okay. Well, I feel like I learned a lot about Nigerian
[13:17]history first from her.
[13:19]Okay. And so it was very fresh in my mind,
[13:20]because I probably read that with them last year.
[13:22]And this, of course, is a different lens through which
[13:25]to view some of the same conflicts that she wrote about
[13:29]with her family and how they had experienced.
[13:31]So when you've done all your digging on the war
[13:34]and everything that's happened and your family's involvement
[13:37]in it, like, what are some of the things you take away
[13:40]or when you think about writing it?
[13:43]Like, what are the pieces of it that you're like?
[13:45]This, it's really important that everybody knows this.
[13:50]That it takes, it takes many decades for people
[13:56]to understand what happened, right, in the past,
[13:59]especially with something as traumatic,
[14:02]as different pieces of Nigerian history
[14:06]as the Nigerian civil war.
[14:08]I feel that sometimes we have the orange,
[14:13]which has been the case for Nigeria to move on
[14:16]and to find ways to keep going that in such a hurry
[14:20]to move on people, you know,
[14:23]all the nation in the collective sense,
[14:25]move past very quickly, what should be dealt with.
[14:29]And for me, in the research and in the thinking around the war,
[14:33]I just realized that there were so many things
[14:35]that were obviously a hunger, boy,
[14:37]hunger from the war that had not been addressed
[14:40]in a direct sense.
[14:42]Such as, for instance, you know, what happened,
[14:45]what were the records of people who fought during the war,
[14:49]especially on the side that lost,
[14:51]which is the side that my family was part of, right?
[14:55]So if there were records that had been kept of men
[14:58]who fought during the war,
[14:59]perhaps it would have been easier to figure out,
[15:01]you know, what happens with my uncle.
[15:03]And just that very basic, even bureaucratic fan of,
[15:09]this is the list of people who fought at this front
[15:12]or at this particular location is absent.
[15:15]As far as I know, you know,
[15:17]as far as I could discover in my writing.
[15:20]And so that's one sentence.
[15:22]So the past is never really finished in any sense,
[15:27]especially for the generation of people were born after.
[15:31]For me, because my name is,
[15:33]so it's part of that history, right?
[15:36]It's not even a very, it's not a traumatic name, right?
[15:39]It's just a simple name in manual,
[15:41]but this is the name or one of the names of my uncle.
[15:44]I feel I felt in writing the book
[15:46]that there was some kind of personal uncovering
[15:49]that had to be done.
[15:50]Why do I have this name?
[15:52]Or especially what does this name now mean to me
[15:54]in light of the fact of the previous bearer of the name?
[15:59]You know, I don't know if that answers your question,
[16:01]but I think that's that.
[16:03]It doesn't matter.
[16:03]It was interesting to hear.
[16:05]Yeah, well, I do like how at the end of the book,
[16:08]you explain it to us and, you know,
[16:11]what you uncover then, you know,
[16:12]maybe things you have affected.
[16:15]So that was great.
[16:16]I feel like dreams play a big part in this book.
[16:18]You reference many dreams throughout.
[16:20]Tell me about the importance of dreams in your culture,
[16:24]your life, yourself, any good dreams lately.
[16:29]No, this is great because I think you're the first person
[16:32]that's actually pointing that out.
[16:33]Nobody had asked me questions about it.
[16:35]I mean, I've always been fascinated by dreams.
[16:39]You know, in the previous book I did,
[16:41]that was even more of a motif.
[16:44]But for me, dreams are quite just as what they are,
[16:48]they are quite fascinating to me on a conceptual level, right?
[16:52]So dreams are this interesting experiences
[16:56]where you are neither in the past or in the present, right?
[16:59]Or even in the future, you're in this state of consciousness
[17:03]or semi-consciousness, however you want to define.
[17:06]Where things, where chronology is not even a question, right?
[17:09]So you can be in China in one scene of a dream
[17:13]and you can be in Lagos in another scene of the dream
[17:16]and you can cross, you know,
[17:18]and you can know what people are thinking
[17:20]even without them speaking.
[17:22]So it's this, it's always been this place of,
[17:25]or for me, it's always been this place really of great narrative,
[17:31]so to speak, when I think of dreams.
[17:34]For this book, I was not as, I hope that I wasn't too obvious
[17:39]with my interest in dreams,
[17:42]but one of the first things that was said to me in relation
[17:45]to my uncle was that, you know, he had been, you know,
[17:50]the oldest member of the family who would automatically
[17:53]in our culture be the head of the family
[17:55]of the extended large family kept having this recording dreams
[18:00]where my uncle would appear to him.
[18:01]And for them, that immediately signaled that his spirit
[18:05]was not, you know, at rest.
[18:08]And so they had to perform a ritual that would appease him,
[18:14]so to speak.
[18:16]And this is not something that people who believe in it,
[18:20]take for granted.
[18:21]It's not, it's not, you know, it's not a joke, right?
[18:25]You, once that kind of thing happens,
[18:28]you go to the ritual, and so that's even for them,
[18:32]how they knew or felt that he had actually died.
[18:38]Because if a person is not there,
[18:40]they wouldn't appear in that kind of,
[18:41]we're not recording way.
[18:43]But also I began to have dreams about my father
[18:47]once he passed, you know, not so much lately,
[18:50]but in the first year I would have all this.
[18:53]I think it was more of a nightmare, really.
[18:55]It was just the, the strange feeling of loss, right?
[18:59]Where you want to claim someone or have them return to life.
[19:06]And the only way you can access that is, you know,
[19:10]is by dreaming about them or wheeling yourself.
[19:14]So imagine them in a dream state.
[19:17]But all in all, I think that what dreams,
[19:21]how I think about dreams in relation to the book now
[19:24]is just how they allow us to access parts of ourself
[19:28]that are not visible to us.
[19:30]I mean, of course there are people who believe
[19:32]that dreams for shadowing of what is the calm
[19:35]or, you know, if you have a terrible dream,
[19:37]then something bad is about to happen.
[19:39]But I don't think about it that way.
[19:41]Mostly I think of my dream in as a way to access
[19:44]what is otherwise unavailable to me.
[19:48]And this is not even a, I hope it's not a cycle
[19:51]on how it's cool in a cycle and it's the same.
[19:54]I think it's just the fact of dreaming
[19:56]that for me when, when now I have a dream about it.
[20:00]My father, you know, sometimes, and especially now after five years, it's quite benign.
[20:04]It's just something that we maybe were somewhere together and all that, you know,
[20:09]and it's actually at this point something nice, you know,
[20:14]because you can see that person again.
[20:16]You can have some kind of experience with them that, and many times,
[20:22]when I'm having the dream, I know this person is actually not alive.
[20:25]And so, it's this, you know, fascinating thing to me that I never quite...
[20:32]Yeah, it's difficult to talk about because dreams are just always fascinating.
[20:36]You never know what state you are in when you're dreaming, yeah.
[20:40]It's true. I mean, you think we would all talk about it all the time.
[20:45]Like, oh my gosh, can you believe what just happened last night?
[20:49]Like, I have a crazy dream last night where, like, Tom Cruise went crazy,
[20:53]and we all had, like, wrangle, like, he was...
[20:56]And I was like, when's the last time I even thought about Tom Cruise?
[20:58]What Earth was he in my dream?
[20:59]Daring, like, whatever. It's just crazy.
[21:02]But I believe, too, I mean, sometimes, you know, my grandmother will come say hi,
[21:07]and I wake up and I feel like I've just been given, like, a warm hug, you know?
[21:11]Like, such a nice, it's such a nice visit,
[21:15]where it is if it's my imagination or a spirit or whatever it is.
[21:19]It's a nice feeling.
[21:20]Yeah, I believe it's mostly our imagination memories, yeah.
[21:24]Who knows? You never know.
[21:25]Yeah.
[21:26]Like, it's crazy. Humans are weird.
[21:28]Oh, who knows what happened?
[21:30]All right. Well, I mean, you'll thank you.
[21:32]Thank you for the time.
[21:33]Thanks for the support.
[21:34]Thank you.
[21:35]I'll tell the hotel visit we had here, and
[21:37]you have a nice trip wherever you are.
[21:39]And...
[21:39]Thank you.
[21:40]Thank you.
[21:41]And thanks for your time.
[21:42]Congratulations.
[21:43]Thank you so much, David.
[21:44]Thank you very much.
[21:44]Yeah.
[21:45]Okay.
[21:45]Thank you.
[21:46]Thank you, bye.
[21:47]Bye-bye.
[21:47]Thanks for listening to this episode of
[21:50]Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[21:52]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram,
[21:54]at Zebi Owens, and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
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[22:00]and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[22:04]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan in fact,
[22:06]Texture Sound for the Sound Editing.
[22:08]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and out trim music.