Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

Mother woke me the following morning, tapping me and saying, “Ben, wake, wake; your father wants you, Ben.”

Every node in my body seemed afire with pain. It seemed my buttocks had acquired surplus flesh. I was, however, relieved that our hunger strike, which I’d feared might extend into the next day, would not linger after all. For we always nursed grudges against our parents in the aftermath of such severe punishment and avoided them and food for a period of time to get back at them and to — at best — have them apologize and pacify us. But we could not do that this time, as Father himself had summoned us.

To leave the bed, I first crawled to its end, and then stepped down slowly, my buttocks filled with tacks of pain. When I entered the sitting room, it was still dim. Electricity had been cut since the previous night and the sitting room was lit by a kerosene lantern placed on the centre table. Boja, the last person to sit, came with a slight limp in his gait, cringing with every move. After we all settled into our seats, Father stared at us for a long time, his hands on his chin. Mother, seated facing us just a stretch away from me, untied the side of the swaddling wrappa fastened into a knot under her armpit, and lifted her brassiere. Her rounded, milk-filled breast disappeared at once into Nkem’s tiny grip. The infant greedily covered the round, dark, and stiff nipple with her mouth like an animal taking in its prey. Father seemed to have watched the nipple with interest, and when it had gone from sight, he removed his eyeglasses and placed them on the table. Whenever he removed his eyeglasses, the great resemblance Boja and I bore to him — dark skin and a bean-shaped head — often became clearer. Ikenna and Obembe were cloaked in Mother’s anthill-coloured skin.

“Now, listen, all of you,” Father said in English. “I was hurt by what you did for many reasons. First, I told you before I left here not to give your mother any troubles. But what did you do? You gave her — and me — the mother of all troubles.” He glanced from face to face.

“Listen, what you did was truly bad. Bad. Just how could kids receiving Western education engage in such a barbaric endeavour?” I did not know what the word “endeavour” was at the time, but because Father had shouted it, I knew it was a grim word. “And secondly, your mother and I are appalled by the dangerous risks you took. This was not the school I sent you to. Nowhere around that deadly river will you find books to read. Despite the fact that I have always told you to read your books, you no longer have eyes for your books.” Then, with a dead-serious frown on his face and his hand raised in an awe-inspiring gesture, he said, “Let me warn you my friends , I will send anyone who comes to this house with a bad school grade to the village to farm or tap palm wine— Ogbu-akwu .”

“God forbid!” Mother retorted, snapping her fingers over her head to swat away Father’s spiritually toxic words. “None of my kids will be this.”

Father glanced angrily at her. “Yes, God forbid ,” he said, imitating Mother’s tender tone of voice. “How will God forbid when under your nose, Adaku, they went to that river for six weeks; Six. Good. Weeks.” He shook his head as he counted six weeks with his fingers. “Now listen, my friend , from now on, you must make sure they read their books. Do you hear me? And your closing time for work from now on is five, no longer seven; and no work on Saturdays. I can’t have these kids sliding into the pits under your nose.”

“I have heard,” Mother replied in Igbo, tsking.

“In all,” Father continued, gazing round at us in a broken semi-circle, “cut your fads from now. Try to be good children. No one enjoys whipping his kids — no one.”

Fads, we’d come to understand from Father’s frequent usage of the word, meant useless indulgences. He was about to speak on, but was interrupted by the sudden swirl of the ceiling fan, signalling the abrupt restoration of erratic power. Mother switched on the bulb and wound down the wick of the kerosene lantern. In the lull that the occasion gave and because the bulb’s glow rested on it, my eyes fell on the year’s calendar: although it was now March, the calendar was still turned to the page of February, which had the painting of the eagle captured in flight, wings spread, legs stretched, claws curved, and the bird’s prominent sapphire eyes staring into the camera. His grandeur spread over the vista in the background as though the world were his and he was the creator of all — a god with wings and feathers. I thought then, with a certain crippling fear that something would change in a fleeting moment and disrupt that interminable stillness. I feared that the bird’s frozen wings would be suddenly thawed and begin to flutter. I feared that its bulging eyes would blink, its legs would move. I feared that when that happened — when the eagle left that space, that portion of the sky in which it’d been caught since February 2nd, when Ikenna flipped the pages of the calendar to this one — this world and everything in it would change beyond reckoning.

“On the other hand, I want you all to know that even though what you did was wrong, it reflected once again that you have the courage to indulge in something adventurous. Such adventurous spirit is the spirit of men. So, from now onwards, I want you all to channel that spirit into something more fruitful. I want you to be a different kind of fishermen.”

We glanced at each other with surprise, except Ikenna, who kept his eyes on the floor. He’d been hurt most of all by the whipping, especially because Father had put much of the blame on him and had whipped him the hardest without knowing that Ikenna had tried to make us stop. “What I want you to be is a group of fishermen who will be fishers of good dreams, who will not relent until they have caught the biggest catch. I want you to be juggernauts, menacing and unstoppable fishermen.”

This surprised me deeply. I’d thought that he disdained that word. Grasping for meaning, I looked at Obembe. He was nodding his head at everything Father said, his brow tinged with the hint of a smile.

“Good boys,” Father muttered, a wide smile smoothening the rough creases that anger and fury had strewn over the yarn of his face. “Listen, in keeping with what I have always taught you, that in every bad thing, you can always dig up some good things, I will tell you that you could be a different kind of fishermen. Not the kind that fish at a filthy swamp like the Omi-Ala, but fishermen of the mind. Go-getters. Children who will dip their hands into rivers, seas, oceans of this life and become successful: doctors, pilots, professors, lawyers. Eh?”

He gazed round again. “Those are the kinds of fishermen I want to have as children. Now, would you be willing to recite an anthem?”

Obembe and I nodded immediately. He glanced at the pair whose eyes were focused on the floor.

“Boja, you?”

“Yes,” Boja mumbled reluctantly.

“Ike?”

“Yes,” Ikenna said after a prolonged pause.

“Very good, now all of you say ‘ju-gger-nauts.’ ”

“Ju-gger-nauts,” we all repeated.

“Me- na -cing. M-e-n-a-c-i-n-g. Me-nacing.”

“Unstopp-able.”

“Fishermen of good things.”

Father laughed a deep, throaty laugh, adjusted his tie, and gazed closely at us. With his voice ascending a new crescendo and thrusting his fist aloft so that his tie flung upward, he yelled: “We are fishermen.”

“We are fishermen!” we chorused at the top of our lungs, each one of us surprised at how suddenly — and nearly effortlessly — we’d broken into this excitement.