It was in New Maroko, where I finally got a job in a decrepit high school, that Biafra caught up with me. I had been born after the Nigeria-Biafra civil war and had a poor knowledge of the horrors of the fighting. My one-armed father, too bruised by the war, hardly ever spoke of it. In my village, Sa’ra, where the imprints of the war were very visible, the villagers talked about it – when they did at all – as something in the past to which they would rather not return. They always made me feel that there was something about the war that was being left unsaid. I was therefore stunned the day Opio, a short man whose bulging muscles made him look as awesome, nevertheless, as a mortar, arrived in New Maroko, selling the memory of the war like painted candles.

            He came marching in like a parade, with slithering snakes entwined around his body, singing in a booming voice a song I would never forget:

            Agabanam ikwa mgbo n’Uzuakoli

            Agabanam ikwa mgbo

Nwa ada m n’ebe

Si mgbo atukwala m n’obi-o…

I had instant goose pimples. There was an arching power in this snake charmer’s voice that exhumed a bloody story of defiance and death. I could hear in its timber the cries from the trenches, the charges through the grasslands, the thunder of mass-killers, the scampering for cover, the paling frenzy of mothers and orphans haunted by hunger and disease, the misery of teary sweethearts.

But Opio was not particularly interested in evoking the sorrows of the war in the manner I had supposed. He was a traveling spectacle, and he soon became known as Opio the Dance because he went about retelling and dancing stories of the war for coins and applause. He told about the stand in Uzuakoli and Uli, sang about the gore in Opi and Nsukka, danced the dare in Onitsha and Abagana, mimed the massacre in Sa’ra.

            Sara?! 

I sought him out. “What happened in Sa’ra?” I asked him, with bated breath.

            “O, Sara!” he said in that booming voice that he had, this time like a lament, as he toweled sweat off his face with his fingers. “Death was in its big harvest season in Sa’ra.”

            “What exactly happened there?”

            “Where did you say you’re from?”

            “Sa’ra.”

            “Ask the graveyard then.”

            “What graveyard?”

            “The graveyard.”

            “I don’t understand. Besides, graves don’t speak, you and I know that.”

            “Didn’t you say you’re from Sa’ra? It will speak to you.”

            I went home and told my father about Opio. “What does he mean? What really happened in Sa’ra? What is it that everyone would rather not talk about?”

            “I thought you would never ask.”

            “But you could have told me what happened, even without my asking,” I gently protested. I knew he never talked about the war, but I was impatient then.

            “Sit down then,” he said, motioning me to a chair in the living room, his voice growing heavy, as if imminent with the fulfillment of a tortuous trust. “You have to understand that the war isn’t just a story to some of us. It is deeper inside. You have to be ready to appreciate what happened. Now, I’m going to tell you about the dogs of Sa’ra – and not for telling sake.”

            I waited while he cleared his throat again and again.

            “The war seized us by the balls. We had to fight or keep on running. Or rather we had to fight to keep from forever running. My parents were living in the North in those days, the main theater of the massacres. I lost my entire family there, in Sabon Gari. Everyone. Mother. Father. Brother. Two sisters. Aunt. Neighbors. A mob surrounded our compound one night, chanting ‘Ba mu so nyamiri’: ‘We don’t want nyamiri.’ The pogrom against Easterners, against us, had transformed from a hazy rumor to a sweeping arc of annihilation. That organized mob neither wanted us in the North nor on the face of the earth. They set the house ablaze; whoever escaped the arson was set upon with crude weapons and pounded like yam or impaled like fish.

“I only survived because I was not there. I was a church worker at the time, and it was Saturday night. I had gone for rehearsals in view of a special Sunday mass. Somehow, the news found its way through the doors of St Savior’s Church. When we learnt that Sabon Gari was up in flames, with several mobs making the rounds and stoking the embers, not even Father Adam Nwankwo’s counsel that we should remain in the church until the danger was over could calm our panic. It was just as well because one of the mobs eventually burnt down the church and first shaved the father’s carefully cultivated beard, as if they did not want him to be mistakenly received in the heaven of mullahs and sheiks, before they set on him with sticks and daggers. He fell reciting the Litany of the Faithful. Was that still religion or belief? I often wonder.

“Well, we lit out for our various homes. I never arrived because there was no home for me to come back to. What was left were charred corpses and smoking debris, emitting the acrid smell of roasted flesh. I had left that same house only a few hours ago, still standing and pulsing with life. In those few hours, my life changed terribly. Tragedy is swift in its time management.

            “The only other person that survived that raid was Azuka, a cobbler who was a kind of half-breed in that his mother was from the North. Although he had been discarded at birth, he had the right features under the circumstances. When he looked death in the face, Azuka decided he would rather live a Northerner than die an Easterner. He forgot all his resentment about his maternity and convinced the invaders that he was one of them who had only come to our compound to levy a debt. It was not an easy thing for him to do, I understand. But Azuka could speak both languages flawlessly, and he was a man who could tell a lie better than the truth.

“Seeing that the invaders were still skeptical and that his fate hung in the balance, he actually partook in mobbing his next-door neighbor. It was a terrible story for me to hear, about the man who had always announced loudly to us: ‘We are one.’ But in a war there are always two or more sides, never one. He instantly became Dan Azumi that night, and part of a world that he had always denounced.