(here’s how things are named:

a) like they are

b) like we want them to be. 

–Nwanne Agwu)

You check a dictionary and it says a name is a noun that indicates or identifies a thing or an idea. You put a name in the place of a home, a skin you don’t choose at first but can get comfortable in. A cloth you can change if you want. Your name is the home you carry around, everywhere you go. You think of home as where your parents call home. As where your siblings are. As where you belong. As a person; everyone you have loved was once your home.

Home: where you feel seen.

You do not run to the dictionary to find the meaning of home because, in this one, home is just a place. You divide it by four.

Home 1 (Mgbom, Ọkpọsị):

Here, your mother is a toddler with mucus crawling down her nose. A man asks, Who are you? You say whose child you are, thinking that he must have known your mother. That, maybe, he had also heard your mother’s first cries as a baby. This man, from whom your maternal uncles and aunts inquire the years of their unregistered births and the events your grandparents never talked about, looks at you and nods. You know your home, he says. You look like where you come from.

Where do you come from? In Ọkpọsị, a person comes from, at least, two places: the maternal side and the paternal side. The two lines are the streams that form this river that could be anybody. One is as important as the other.

Mgbom is the first stream you know out of the two most important streams of descent. Here is where you meet the cousins that you do not have on your paternal side. Here is where you call home first, even though Abakaliki has been your birthplace before anywhere else. In Mgbom, your best friend is named Ọzọemena, a plea against recurrence. Your sister says he is the reincarnation of someone who died so many times; you don’t care. He is the first boy you love, the first that makes you notice and loosen up over an erection. With skin the colour of ripe mangoes, he sits with you; your dark skin, a clear parallel to his. He is plump where you are skinny and full of laughter as against your naiveté. With him, you don’t fear other parents. And when it is time to introduce yourself to his mother, you find your place in some names.

This is how you are known here: by your mother’s name, by her father’s name. You walk into your aunt’s yard and greet the people around. She holds your hand and says: This is Uzoma’s last child. In the moment, you feel pity for yourself. Like this is it, there’s loss in a name, things evoking tears. The women look at you with a certain tenderness but curiosity arises in the words of some of them: Children! He’s already grown. Isn’t he the one she named after her brother? Ah, he’s so quick!

You think of your mother seated with all these people, making jokes. They say she danced so much, so well when she was still young, alive and strong. Your mother was the okoso of her troupe, the feet that did magic on the ground, a body that swam and flew, that broke the limits of flexibility. Some would say that she was the life of the party and others would say she was a pot of music, dancing, singing, and using the instruments like she had left the womb holding them in her hands; destiny.

You think of your mother as art. You think of her as memories: butterflies that float away, sometimes aimlessly. 

In places where you think your mother is not known, you add the name of your maternal grandfather. My mother is Uzoma, the daughter of Okorie Akpoke. Or you say, I am a grandson of Okorie Akpoke; by this, you wait for questions on whose son you are, then you break their hearts by saying you are the son of a daughter and not the son of a son as they had expected. In this way, you tell stories about two different generations, people who broke their fears with faith, people who stepped in when others walked out, people who chose tears instead of faking a smile, faking a laugh.

While alive, your grandfather would talk about choosing to walk back to Ọkpọsị from the magistrate court in Afikpo because he had refused to bear false witness against someone who didn’t know him, who would still not have much regard for him even after the event. Your grandfather would rather suffer to keep a reputable name than dine with the wealthy for the opposite.

Uzoma (your mother’s name): safe way; good road; nice path.

Okorie (your grandfather’s name): born on an Orie day, a male-given name. A name mainly originated, you think, from the Arochukwu, a migratory Igbo ethnicity that lived in Ọkpọsị and interchanged cultures for decades.

Home 2 (Mebiọwa, Ọkpọsị):

Last night, you hid one of your father’s passport photographs in a book. See, you were actually going through the photo album of your family from the twentieth century. In it, were  black and white images dating between the fifties and the nineties. In the photos, your father’s wives are belles; standing on wedged heels, legs shooting out from knee-length gowns. They scare you now with the effect of age. Contrasts: gray hair against afro wigs, wrinkled skins against perfectly smooth bodies, eyes developing bags, smiles weakened into laughter. You search for depth and think of things that do not go beyond the lips. These women should be six, you see five. Your mother is also in the picture, the sixth and last wife of your father. The first died even before the fifth was married. You think of grief and see your half-brother, a motherless toddler walking among friendly enemies called stepmothers, learning to live within boundaries, to love back when he is loved, and to loathe when loathed.

See, all these women had the names of their fathers until your father happened to them. You think of a community and remember your father’s compound. Beehive. Anthill. You are the last child, they say you never saw a thing. Child of your father’s old age.

You walk out of your father’s compound and say you are the son of Agwu Nwogo. This is the magic itself, your father’s name is a door opener here. It is respect. Man says he keeps his life holy and you see it daily when he prays before doing anything. (You are motherless so when people talk about their praying mothers, you talk about your praying father who even prays before drinking, before eating, before leaving the house, while bathing.) You see it when he would rather keep quiet or argue, scold or accuse, than lay a curse on any of his children.

They say your father is a personality. His name is his personality, his reputation. They talk about his wealth and how he was a Messiah, about how he walked into places and had them changed forever. You look around for the wealth, you don’t see it, you go back to the pictures and are reminded that he once had servants, that parents celebrated and called themselves lucky if they noticed his interest in their daughters.

This is not the real home of your father as regards the patrilocal residential system practiced in Ọkpọsị. It is the maiden home of his maternal grandmother and also the maiden home of your maternal grandmother (the mother of your mother had been married from here into Mgbom and people always said that your mother went back to replace her mother).

This place that your father calls home accepted him through his mother’s uncle who had prayed for a boy from his niece. And because he was born here, this, too, became his home as his father had died before his birth.

Home 3 (Amaechi, Ọkpọsị):

This is the real home of your father, the root of his name. His father died during his expectancy and he was thought to be his father’s quick reincarnation. He was named after his father.

Your father’s father was born here by a very popular and wealthy mother. He was given his mother’s name as his last name.

Agwu: the name of a god who is also a spirit. Spirit of art and divination. Agwu means prophecy. Agwu becomes destiny. Agwu possesses a man and makes him a spirit in flesh.

Nwogo (nwa+ogo): the child of Ogo. Your father’s father’s last name comes from his mother’s name. Your father bears the name of his father and that of his grandmother as his surname.

You think of feminism and compare it to privilege, to power. The difference wherever we are is power. Your father says that every child his paternal grandmother had taken kept her name as their last name. Even when she remarried. Even after her death. He says power means everything, and in the hands of a woman, it is the same as in the hands of a man. You smile at his name, Nwogo. A reclamation, a belonging. Was this what she wanted of her children or what they already were even before she had tried?

In a dream, your great-grandmother is a curvy woman. Though silenced by age, her beauty still smiles at you. You ask if she is the source of your father’s daughters’ curviness and she starts laughing, her cheeks breaking into dimples and her face lighting up, the colour of ripe plantain. She says no, then says maybe, then smiles. And you stop dreaming. Now age makes you ask if that dream was in black and white like old photos. Craze! You forgot to ask her about investment, about power, about names. You dream again but you don’t see her.

Home 4 (Abakaliki):

Here, your father is a figure and a personality. Since 1959, he has lived and traded from here. He talks about Cameroon and other West African countries. He talks about hospitality in Obudu, Ikom, and Ogoja. Those are places he had gone to buy achi, ogbono, ekpiri, and their likes which he brought back to Abakaliki to sell. You see Gabonese notes in his pockets and wish they are recent. There are coins, too, in a bag, from various places: Nigerian pennies, Francs from different Francophone countries all looking alike. Useless. You once thought of using the ones with holes as keyholders. Your father has been to places and has retired. You ask him if Abakaliki is home to him and he says no. But you don’t believe him.

Your father is a nonagenarian, has outlived most of his peers, and is possibly the oldest Ọkpọsị man living in Abakaliki.

People say he doesn’t age and you laugh. In the photos from many decades ago, he looks young and possesses the swagger of youth. Now it’s just a gait and a cup of happiness daily. In his bedroom, your father exercises all the time and talks about his frailty. They won’t know that. At night, your father complains of things crawling on his skin. In the morning, he exercises like a slightly older childhood friend, who is still alive but lives in Ọkpọsị, had taught him.

You write your name beside his everywhere you can think of: Nwanneka Christopher Agwu. This too is reclamation, a name given to you after the death of the original bearer, your late brother, without whose death you would never have been born.

This name you have twisted and mangled and tried stretching and straightening is also your passcode. You say it at doors and watch them open or close. You smile when you hear it and you are not sure if this is who you are or who you want to be. If your name already has enough reputation on its shoulders. If people see you when they hear your name or if they think, instead, of your name when they see you?

A boy once joked that your name sounds funny; Nwanne Agwu, Agwu’s sibling. Am I speaking with Nwanne Agwu himself or Nwanne, the brother of Agwu? your mentor’s daughter had asked the day you spoke with her on the phone. In your legal documents, it is Christopher Agwu. But you have learned to choose and to never stop choosing.

In the end, you want to be seen because that is love. Where you come from, to be loved is to be seen, even when you are not there, even when you are just another fragment of memory, a rainbow: faint lines drawn in a curvature across the sky, begging to take the place of stars.

Seen. Completely. Loved.

About the Author:

Nwanne Agwu is from Ọkpọsị, Nigeria. He aims to write with the texture of flux and the tempo of music. Nwanne was longlisted for the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. His work has been or will be published in Bending Genres, The Revolution, Rigorous, Southword Magazine, The Mukana Anthology of African Writing and elsewhere. Nwanne recently completed a full-length novel manuscript and is currently querying agents. On X (Twitter), he is @NwanneAgwu

*feature image by Marcel Fremar from Pixabay