A HALF FORMED THING
/ A HALF FORMED THING 16 Afterword
emphasised, we need narratives, now more than ever before.
A poem, the droplet quivering on the tip of a leaf; a story, the lazy cloud lingering in the sky. Poems, stories, they are hardly ever fully formed. We need narratives, for moments that constrict, times that torment, for their freeing powers. To feel empowered by the hours—but narratives also entrap, not us, but those invested in regimes of surveillance and silence, basking in the futility of their might to threaten imagination; those for whom the voice of creativity will remain a haunting.
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Narratives root us. In the nodes of time and space, we make and express meaning through art. Our doubts, our fears, become less overwhelming. Not only do narratives help us better grasp reality, but mainly because they simply empower us; and so, we see more clearly, feel more intensely, know more fully. We become truly alive to our vulnerability and vitality. Unfeelingness would immiserate us but for narratives.
Narratives like A Half-formed thing by three Nigerian writers deepen our understanding of the human experience. It is a chapbook, the rst of such collaborative artistic practices at the Ebedi International Writers' Residency, in Iseyin, Oyo State. In the pages of this work, these artists illuminate our social reality.
One notices the nostalgic lyricism of Ehi'zogie Iyeomoan in "endless beginnings", "asset declaration of a dead poet", "ebedi rain", "sweet insanity", "in memory of you", and "a letter to a secret crush". It is evoked more clearly in these lines from "A Letter to a Secret Crush," you begin to crave for little yet long-lasting things like the desire to touch and be touched to sing and grow to become the song sung
to taste sweetness, sweetness tasting you.
The pensive resonance of Servio Gbadamosi echoes in "mending women", "For Mary", "Untitled", "For Ko Awoonor", "I found this poem", and "To a future killed by its past". Gbadamosi muses in
"mending women" thus,
We are too weak to trap a stful of life as it ies past us, death is the life we fear to live; life is the death that sets us free.
Ikechukwu Nwaogu creates ction, as opposed to Gbadamosi and Iyeomoan and we feel an a ecting nuance in his tales, "Last Day", and "Anna". The oxymoron of life orients both stories, as Nwaogu recounts in "Last Day,"
On the last day of his life, Chukwudi Okonkwo woke up happy. An irrepressible joy stole over him as he rose from the pile of old cartons and cases that served as his bed in the uncompleted building. He whistled a few bars of a song he could not remember where he had heard, but which he associated with good fortune. He was whistling as he got up and reached for his toothbrush, which was inside a small pouch inside a hole high in the wall.
Loss is palpable in every aspect of A Half-Formed Thing. But what is loss? Many a signi cant piece of art has been produced in moments of loss. Nevertheless, we have narratives to carry us through mangroves of loss. Read the poems, read the stories, as dialogue, not monologue. As intercourse between text and reader. Although compact as chapbooks always are, Nigerian literature is richer for it. A remarkable literary aperitif, no less.
—Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike
(Award winning writer, scholar and member of the Governing Board,
Ebedi International Writers' Residency)
Owerri, Imo State
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