Words stuck in my throat when I was guided into the room where my father was lying in state. I was thirteen years old and was guided in everything I did then. Inside that room, my mother, who hadn’t eaten for days, was in a corner and her face had already collapsed into tears. Her crying was so fierce it filled the air. Her friends were with her, each one with their own size of lament. My mother’s white gown was unrecognizable – she had been throwing herself on the ground and rolling over, right from the moment my father’s body was cleared at the mortuary.
My father had come down with sickness in 2004 after he returned from work. He sat in his red Mercedes-Benz. It was customary for me and my siblings to go welcome him. He handed over his bags and some documents to take inside the house. When I came back down, I met him still sitting in his car, now in pain. His hand was clasped tight to his side. When I got closer to him, trying to make sense of his situation, he said to me, “Get your mother for me, please.” I ran as fast as my twelve-year-old legs could allow me. I found my mother in the kitchen preparing dinner, with my younger sister, Nnedimma, assisting her. She left the yams she was peeling, while my sister stood shocked by my announcement, followed me downstairs. We helped my father out of the car.
That evening, our dinner tasted like sand. The days that followed came with chaos; our apartment became empty of jokes, laughter, and the running around and screaming that once filled it. The visitors who flooded it, needing my father’s assistance, ceased. My father’s sickness created a hollow in our hearts. My mother had to stop teaching at Federal Government College, Nise. She had just taken some students to Abuja for the finals of a national debate competition, which they eventually won. It was a win that should have opened new doors for her career, and sure did in the later years. My father eventually died in 2005 in England at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. His death was devastating to us, but for my mother, it was an earthquake. The shock consumed her. I remember her body shrinking in grief; her eyes sank deep into her face as though they wanted to retreat from the world.
Many years have gone by since then, and my mother, Ngozi Ezenwa-Ohaeto, whose courage began long before I was old enough to understand it, has been a windmill in a whirlwind for herself and for my siblings and me. The most striking evidence of it was in her words one evening when food items in the kitchen were almost finished, and there was no money: “I will do my best to see you, Nua and your siblings, don’t feel your father’s death. I want this family as if he has always been here.” My mother’s love for us pushed her through the unbearable. Even though her name was sufficient for us, she reminded me that she would always be a blessing to us. My mother’s first name is Ngozika, and among the Igbo, this name translates to “a blessing is greater,” or “blessing in abundance,” and it captures the sense of a gift that cannot be measured, and surpasses what is expected. Her father, my maternal grandfather, Iduu Ambrose Ngejeme, blessings upon his name, was a wealthy businessman and had fondly called her Akumjieri. It is a name that, in its layered Igbo resonance, can be taken to mean “my wealth is in abundance,” or “my wealth is borne with grace.” That name, I now imagine spoken by my grandfather with tenderness and even pride, reveals how much he cherished her.
My mother fondly calls me Nua, from Chinualumogu. In Igbo, Nua means “fight.” Truly, I think I have been fighting all my life to find meaning, fighting through certain cruelties that come with this life. Through all these struggles and circumstances, there has always been my mother to bring in the sunshine or even to rebuke me towards the right. When I was eight or nine years old, whenever she returned from the market with food items like carrots and small luxuries for the house, my hunger, or something beyond it, would urge me to consume more than I should, to gorge until my stomach ached. But she would always stop me:“Nua, remember, you will eat tomorrow, Isiokpukpu.” Isiokpukpu—a head full of bones—was reserved only for moments when she had to steady me against my own impulses.
One afternoon when I was seven years old, I had just finished watching a Jackie Chan movie, Mr. Nice Guy, and my body was buzzing with the reckless confidence that only a child freshly baptized in cinematic magic could possess. I felt invincible. And so, I slipped out of the apartment quietly with my toy car. There was only one thing on my mind, which was to practice the dive and roll I had memorized from the movie. I walked straight to our neighbor’s compound and to the dog that everyone in the neighborhood feared. Its name was Tiger. A massive, snarling dog, quick to bare his teeth, quicker to anger. But I didn’t care. Clutching my toy car, I stepped close to the corner where Tiger was chained. I wanted to provoke a scene dramatic enough to justify the stunt I had prepared. Then, I tossed the toy toward it. It clattered near his paws. The reaction was immediate. Tiger lunged. His growl rumbled, vibrating and primal. Thick ropes of saliva dripped from his jaws as he bared all his teeth. I stood my ground. I made my pose, the way Jackie would. All I wanted was to retrieve my toy. And when the moment felt right, the movie soundtrack playing in my head, I darted forward. I performed the dive exactly as I had imagined it. I grabbed my toy and rolled out triumphant.
Then I felt it. A sharp, tearing pain along my back. That was when a neighbor, Dubem, who stepped out at that very moment, screamed. My mother heard it, then my name, and then “Mama Chinua, come oooo!” She came running. Scooped me up, pressing me to her back. And then ran all the way to Sefton hospital.
Years later, when we recalled this memory on our porch over jokes and laughter, I asked her why she hadn’t just taken the car that day. It would have been faster, easier. She looked at me, a smile tugging at her lips. “That day,” my mother said, “All I wanted was to save you, Nua. I didn’t want to lose you. You isiokpukpu.” I understood then that fear does not always calculate, and sometimes comes with love that refuses the shortest route and chooses instead what feels certain.
When my father was away in Germany working, it was my mother who held our home together for my sister and me. I saw my mother’s struggle in the way she sighed when she thought no one was watching. Back then, my mother had no job; she would rise before dawn to make meat pies and sell them. I watched my mother make them, the kitchen filling with the choreography of her hands. She always began by rubbing flour and margarine together until the mixture looked like fine crumbs. Then water was added sparingly, and soon the dough held together, smooth and pliant under her palms. On another side of the counter, she worked on the filling—sautéing minced meat with onions, diced potatoes, and carrots, the scent rising, curling through our apartment. When the filling cooled, she rolled out the dough and cut neat circles, spooning in just enough meat so that each pie was generous but not bursting. With the back of a fork, she pressed the edges shut, sealing each one. Brushed with egg wash, the pies went into the oven, and as they baked, the golden-brown pies and the aroma were inviting. And then they were sold to keep the family afloat. In those same months, when telephones were scarce and unreliable, my father sent money folded carefully into medicine bottles to hide it from customs officers who often stole them. Sometimes the money took months to arrive, and in the waiting, my mother found another way to make do. She rented a small plot of land, planted cassava, and transformed harvests into garri—peeling, fermenting, frying, and bagging it to sell to interested friends and buyers. By this time, we were four—me, my sister, and two younger brothers. My mother slept alone in the matrimonial bed, waiting for my father’s return. Now, I think of my own life. Here I am in the United States, immigration tightening around me, while completing a PhD, and still separated from my wife because her applications to join me have been rejected many times. I am afraid. I am afraid that history is circling back, that what my mother endured, I am now reliving.
When my father’s death benefits and gratuity finally came to us after long months of my mother traveling back and forth on the weary road from the east to Abuja, after countless meetings with the office in charge, my mother built a public library in my father’s honor: the Prof. Ezenwa-Ohaeto Resource Center, a home for all his books and other books that were donated by Nigerian Book Foundation instituted by the late writer, Chukwuemeka Ike. My father’s books were signed, either with the location where the book was bought or just in his name. My mother hosted colloquiums there, and they were always filled with Nigeria’s writers and critics who gathered to honor the craft my father had lived for. What made it even more extraordinary was how she involved younger writers by organizing poetry competitions for secondary school students in the community, and this gave them the courage to speak their own words into the world. At the end of each colloquium came the literary nights of poetry, dance, drama, and song that lit up into celebration.
*
A few years after my father’s death, she was offered a lecturing position in the English Department at Nnamdi Azikiwe University where my father had taught, due to her exceptional interest in the field and for leading a group of secondary school students’ debate team to victory at a national competition in Abuja. That job and so many opportunities and businesses became the foundation upon which she built a new life for us. It was in that role that she began her larger mission – the reclamation of Igbo identity through language. She was relentless in her conviction that the Igbo language was eroding, and that names, those first gifts given to a child, were keys to belonging. She wrote Afamefuna, published in 2024, an encyclopedia of Igbo names, recording their origins and meanings stretching back more than four hundred centuries. Her advocacy led her to lecture halls and conferences where she spoke about the vitality of naming children rightly in Igbo. She often challenged the younger generation’s eagerness to embrace English names they barely understood their meaning. Even within the family, she insisted. I remember a family meeting in the middle of 2025, held over WhatsApp, when she summoned me, my siblings, and our spouses and rebuked us for raising her grandchildren in English language. Her disappointment was palpable in Igbo: “How could it be that not one of them could understand me when I speak Igbo to them?” For two long hours, she drilled us with explanations, history, and warnings, pointing fingers, calling us to account. We defended ourselves clumsily and promised to do the needful.
At one time, she owned a silver Nissan car, which was what came after an old Mitsubishi Colt my father had bought her from Germany. One day, she traveled and left the car key under my care because I had promised to give it a thorough wash. Before then, I had been learning to drive in my head for months by asking friends endless questions, watching others behind the wheel, and memorizing the way gears and pedals worked. Even playing car racing games. That evening, I started the car and eased it out of the compound, and by this time, my mother had already completed the family house, which she and my father had started. I drove down the almost lonely street, priding myself as a new driver. After the theatrics and on returning the car to its original parking spot, I attempted a reckless James Bond stunt by pressing the accelerator and brake in quick succession. The car lurched, my arm twisted off the wheel, my forehead almost hit the windshield, and before I could correct myself, it slammed into a tree in our compound. The right headlamp shattered. My stomach knotted with dread.
When my mother returned from her trip, and before she could discover the mess the following day, I went to her and confessed, trembling. After a long silence, she told me to follow her outside. My legs shook as she asked me into the car and we drove out. The drive was silent, and hell, and my armpit was soaked. She pulled us over at Zik’s Avenue, Awka, then entered a shop and bought a replacement headlamp. She turned to me and with calmness, said, “This is your school fees.” I stood there, stunned, as something gave way inside me. I was an undergraduate in my first year. And when school resumed for the next semester after two or three months of break, my mother called me into her bedroom and handed me the receipt for my school fees.
*
Football was a chapter of my teenage and post-teenage years that both thrilled and worried her. I played for local clubs in Awka. People and teammates nicknamed me Ronaldo because of my skill, and again, they didn’t know my actual name. A few years later when I changed clubs, I was nicknamed Carrick, just for my long-range passes. I hated the name Carrick because he was not as popular and revered as Cristiano Ronaldo. One evening, shortly after I turned twenty-two, my mother ushered me into our living room. She told me frankly that she knew no one in football or in any club, that we did not have the resources for trials and registrations, and that perhaps I should consider focusing on writing, as poetry and reading had always been my quiet refuge. I was disappointed. For days, I was angry at myself and at life. After four months, I saw reasons in her words because there was no money to take me to trials, as my siblings were also in the university. University fees were expensive. Football trials were also expensive. Acknowledging and accepting the situation felt like letting go of a piece of myself. Today, I understand that she was right. She saved me from chasing a dream we could not afford at that time, and having a frail body, I didn’t think I would last for five years as a professional football player. So I turned to books.
I loved books and still do. At fourteen, when I started reading too many foreign books I found in our bookshelves, entranced by the strange worlds they opened for me, again my mother recognized what was missing. She looked at me one morning and told me that if I truly wanted to grow as a writer, I needed balance. It was not enough to live in borrowed imaginations. She placed a copy of The Old Man and the Medal in my hands. That single gesture was my total initiation into African literature. From that day forward, my appetite shifted. I began to read with a different hunger, finding myself and my history and those of Africa between pages.
People often say I inherited my love for reading and writing from my parents. But, honestly, that is not true. My parents never forced books into my hands, never lectured me into literature. What they gave me instead were the tools of curiosity, which were poster colors, markers, and endless paper for my drawings when I had an interest in them.
When I began writing, my mother supported me; she took me to Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) conventions, including the one in Ondo State, in 2010, where I stood awestruck before Nigerian writers whose names I had only seen on the spines of books. It was my mother who opened those doors of possibility, who made me believe that I could stand in the company of giants of letters. The year before, she had gathered my poems, edited them, and sent them off. Months later, these poems won the Mazariyya Teen Author Prize for Poetry, issued by the Association of Nigerian Authors in 2009. My mother also told me to be honest in my writings, to share what I feel, just like my father told me.
Yes, I tried being honest in my writings but did not always live up to it in real life. In my teenage years and because of my edginess, I once took her gold necklace from her keep and gifted a girlfriend. When she discovered it missing, I lied, telling her it must have fallen off at work. She worried then when I began going out in the evenings, her mind restless with suspicion that I was wasting my youth in secret trysts. Sometimes, when she asked where I was going, I could hear the ache in her voice. During one of our evening discussions, she finally confronted me. I could have lied, but something in me refused. I told her the truth, which was that I went out for dance practices as I secured gigs to dance as an entertainer at gatherings and parties. And then, with the bluntness only a young boy can muster, I added that whatever boys and girls might do in the darkness of night, they could just as easily do in broad daylight. For a long moment, she looked at me, perhaps startled by my candor, perhaps even wounded by my boldness. But then I saw the softening in her eyes, the way she received my honesty, even if it unsettled her. I think that was the day her trust in me was solidified.
The last time I saw my mother was on August 22, 2025, when I traveled back to Nigeria to see my family. She was sixty on November thirteenth of that year. I remember readying to being driven to Chinua Achebe Airport, Umeri, by my younger brother, the car revving softly and the compound gate wide ajar to let us out. This time, there were no silent, trembling tears like in 2024 when I was back home, no choking back of tears into ourselves. I let myself dissolve into my mother’s embrace, her warmth wrapping me like the ever-familiar blanket. All smiles, all comfort, her presence steadying the flutter in my chest. I remained there, breathing in the reassurance, because this time, I knew I would see her again soon.
About the Author:
Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. He won the 2018 Castello di Duino Poesia Prize, Italy, and the 2022 Special ANMIG poetry prize, organized by the Centro Giovanni e Poesia di Truiggio, Italy. In 2023, he was a runner-up in the Sparks Poetry Competition, Memorial University, Canada and in the African and African-American Studies Program Contest hosted by UNL’s Institute for Ethnic Studies. He is the author of The Naming (Nebraska Press, 2025). His works have appeared in Joyland, Poetry Ireland Review, Oxford Poetry, Massachusetts Review, and World Literature Today.