So, the second thing that I'm reading from,
it's a manuscript that I'm still working on.
I've been working on it now for about four years.
And it's called A Season of Light.
And so, essentially, the novel begins
with the main character, Amara, returning to her father.
So they've been estranged for many years.
And she returns to her father because she's
been sent by her mother to stop her father from essentially
a suicide mission.
So her father-- and this is sort of all
in the context of things that have
happened within the last year in Nigeria.
In 2015, Nnamdi Kanu was arrested in Nigeria.
He's a revivalist of Radio Biafra.
Radio Biafra was one of the transmitters
that was used during the Nigerian Civil
War for the Biafra nation.
So Nnamdi Kanu is a revivalist there.
And there's a lot of that that's going on right now in Nigeria.
And so, he was a Nigerian who was arrested for treason.
So the father in the book decides
to return to Nigeria in order to re-enlist.
And he's this older man.
He's in his 60s.
He was a prisoner of war.
So it really is a suicide mission.
And this is the one thing--
her mother sends her because she feels her daughter is
the only one who can stop him.
Now, the problem is that the father and daughter
have had this very strained relationship.
And something happened in the past,
so they've been separated for about 15 years.
And so, this is sort of her homecoming.
The section that I'm going to actually read from
explains a little bit to you about what happened.
So there were tragic circumstances
that led to their splitting up.
"When she was nine years old, Amara's father blinded her.
Her corneas were so thoroughly scratched it was a miracle
that, after months of darkness, she
should wake to see light again.
How could she have known that her father's sacred papers,
the documents hidden away in that old box
up on the top shelf of her parents' bedroom closet,
had been lightly doused along the creases with uda pepper?
How could she have known that the papers had
something to do with the war her parents called Biafra?
A time and place so distant that, upon their arrival
to America, they had promptly chosen to forget.
At nine, she was a troublesome girl
ruled only by her curiosity.
Her younger brother, Chidi, would have smelled the pepper
and sneezed.
But, at that age, Amara could imagine the colors of the world
with such saturation, such dazzling brilliance.
It was the scent of Nigeria that drew her in,
not the gorillas and tigers she saw in Tarzan,
but the windy rivers, lush forests, and outdoor cooking
stoves her mother remembered of her childhood
in Umuahia, before the war.
America was flat, tasteless, and sterile.
The streets were blank and cheerless,
nothing compared to her mother's memories.
This was a scent that filled the kitchen when her mother cooked
her large Sunday dinners, the dinners that Pastor John often
accompanied the family to after Bible study.
So Amara gathered the pages of the blue envelope in her hands.
She ran her fingers along, over the colorful stamps.
Had she taken a quick peek and settled the papers
in their original place, perhaps all could have been averted.
Maybe their lives would have remained steady.
Instead, she grew greedy.
When she had folded the envelope,
she saw a photograph of a girl.
It was the eyes, the deep-set eyes of the girl,
her limber frown, the flick of an eyebrow, that drew Amara in.
She examined the tight curls of the girl's low hair,
tracing her own stiff braids.
She drew the outline of the girl's features over her own,
as if sketching her into existence.
Even the photograph's matte finish couldn't disguise her
dark shiny skin, skin like Amara's.
A mole identical to her father's, perfectly small,
rested just above the girl's lip and answered
Amara's initial inquiry.
The girl was her father's sister.
Suddenly, an exhale of hot breath, a burst
of flames, Amara's face itched.
Searing tears stung her eyes.
Her tongue tasted of pepper.
It filled her nostrils and they began to overflow with mucus.
Her lungs swelled, threatening to splinter her rib cage.
Even her fingertips prickled with the heat.
It was then, her body roaring with the sensation of fire,
her eyes raw, like an open wound, that Amara remembered
her father's playful warning.
I will pepper you, he would say.
It was an empty threat she had heard more times than she could
count, a phrase so silly and foreign to her American ears
that she had learned only to punctuate it with laughter.
Long throat, her father would chastise
when she stole away the spicy suya from his plate, still hot
and stinging in her mouth, I will pepper you.
When she giggled, mocking the strange sounds,
he would playfully condemn, [NON-ENGLISH]..
She would sprawl into his lap, giddy with laughter.
How could she know that to pepper someone was literal,
and to be peppered was the worst pain imaginable?
That muggy afternoon, she brought her fingers
to her eyes, digging at them like an endless pit,
the blaze only growing as the pepper seared into them.
In the ebbs and waves of the roaring pain,
the girl in the photograph's deep-set eyes, and a voice
whispering to her, Biko, please.
[? Koshi, ?] stop.
Only later would she learn that it
was her mother begging her not to cry,
not the girl in the photograph.
Weakness, her mother had said, would only make it burn.
When she awoke, Amara couldn't open her eyes,
but she could feel the gauze.
A voice rang out, discordant, rumbling an untuned organ.
It was Pastor John.
Amara had always believed that he knew only how
to speak through song.
Lord, we are gathered here today, he sang out.
She tried to plug your ears, but her hands were tethered down.
She fought against the ties.
The straps held fast.
Lord, I am your humble servant.
Even with her eyes covered, she could see him.
Sundays, Pastor John, the tall, red-faced albino,
stood sweating on the pulpit as he
bellowed at the congregation.
She could imagine the miniature organ
in his throat vibrating as his breath passed
through its pipes.
To Amara, he was God and Satan rolled in one,
so bendy and serpent-like, so pale
and ghostly with his red-rimmed eyes.
After carefully scrutinizing the Children's Illustrated Bible
she had received in Sunday school,
Amara had once pointed out the similarity to her mother.
A resounding smack to the face was
the answer to her observation.
When Amara ran circles around the gazebo
during the church picnic, Pastor John's pincer-like claws
would latch to her ears.
He'd size her up with his bald, beady eyes.
Troublemaker, he'd howl, his voice rising to a crescendo.
Sinner, he would decrescendo.
He'd beg her to beg for God's forgiveness
because a sin shone through like a glass full of dirty water,
and it hurt.
It hurt so bad to see a sheep separate from the flock
and stumble down the wolf's perilous path.
For years, Amara would peek over her shoulder
in search of that wolf.
But one day, she stopped believing.
His favorite word, fornicator, had mystified Amara for years.
He'd said it so often and so lustily
that Amara was certain that fornicators had knives
for hands and melting faces like Freddy Krueger,
that they hid their ugly faces under a mask like Jason,
and, like Chucky, their skin was the hard, pulsing plastic
of a demonic doll.
And it could bleed.
What a disappointment to one day find
the word, sandwiched between the clinical, uncomplicated words
"formal" and "Fornax," in her father's sturdy Collins
Dictionary.
It only meant to have sexual relations with someone
you hadn't married.
Amara had already learned about good touch,
bad touch in school.
What a disappointment.
After that, her father chuckled when
she called the Easter Bunny and Santa
Claus trite and hackneyed, two other words she had discovered
in the dictionary.
He found it amusing for a gangly girl of nine
to be so thoroughly disillusioned and cynical.
But lying in the hospital, her hands
tethered to the bed, her eyes wrapped in gauze,
Amara became a believer.
Sinners earned eternal damnation, a fiery pit,
Pastor John sang, and nothing can salve the burn but God's
forgiveness.
Only hell could explain the fire,
not uda pepper, harmlessly sandwiched between the oregano
and thyme in her mother's kitchen cabinet,
pounded into a fine black dust to be sprinkled
into her mother's pepper soup and the hot, meaty, skewered
suya.
Oh, holy Lord, forgive us our trespass.
Thou who hath forsaken my Lord, shall they perish.
Amara became a believer, a believer
in demons and hellfire, a believer in a talking
serpent and God wrapped in one.
A rush of flaming waves doused her.
Lava ran from her eyes.
Her nostrils rippled with pain.
Her throat burned.
She thrashed in every effort to pry her eyeballs
free of her face.
And because her mother urged her not to cry,
the strange sound of laughter filled the room.
Sinner, Pastor John sang.
Pastor John will not come again.
Amara eased toward her mother's voice.
With darkness surrounding her, she
tried to swallow the words as her mother said them.
She tried to whisper to block out Pastor John's wavering
proclamation as it ebbed at the back of her head,
but her throat was raw and achy.
Her mother's fingers met Amara's lips, silencing her.
She told Amara that what she had experienced was a panic attack.
Anxiety, like an electric volt, had
sent a charge through her body and forced her nerves to fire.
Since her senses had last been attuned to trauma,
that was where they had picked up again.
That was why she felt fire, tasted fire,
could hear its hiss in her ears.
Her mother's words didn't calm Amara.
So instead, for the first time since an annoyed seven-year-old
Amara had declared that they were didactic,
her mother told her a tale.
In her mother's stories, Amara learned
of how the tortoise earned his shell, how Ekwensu outwitted
his captors, how Amadioha exacted fury,
and how Ala must be placated.
That day, her mother returned to the story of Mkpụrụ Obi.
When you were a baby, Chukwu planted mkpụrụ, a seed,
in your obi, she said, stabbing Amara in the chest.
I fed you my milk each time you cried.
And it fertilized that seed until it
bloomed into a marvelous flower in the shape of a heart.
She ran her fingers along the length of Amara's rib cage.
This heart of yours has a stem and roots
that are connected to all the parts of your body, she said.
And if you are still, and if you are quiet,
you can feel the flower get nicked by the breeze.
Amara played along, holding still,
careful not to twitch a single muscle.
This time, she promised herself, I will not sleep.
This time I will feel the seed in my chest
that is now a flower.
Still, day came with the warmth of the sun
and her mother was gone.
Nevertheless, Amara knew with sudden certainty
that she was not alone.
She couldn't see her father, she couldn't hear him,
but she could sense his presence.
Her body clenched.
Daddy, she called out.
Daddy?
Moments passed, moments burdened by the ache of his presence.
It's shaped like the shell of a picked-open scar pulsing
in the periphery of the darkness.
And then, suddenly, she felt surrounded by his absence.
How could Amara have known that it
would be the last time she would share the same space
with her father for 15 years?"
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]