The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – I Am Still With You: A Reckoning with Silence, Inheritance, and History by Emmanuel Iduma

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

I Am Still With You: A Reckoning with Silence, Inheritance, and History by Emmanuel Iduma A deeply moving, lyrical journey through the author’s homeland of Nigeria, in search of the truth about his disappeared uncle and the history of a war that shaped him, his family, and a nation In inimitable, rhythmic prose, the author and winner of the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize Emmanuel Iduma tells the story of his return to Nigeria, where he grew up, after years of living in New York. He traveled home with an elusive mission: to learn the fate of his uncle Emmanuel, his namesake, who disappeared in the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s. A conflict that left so many families broken, the war remains at the margins of the history books, almost taboo to discuss. To find answers, Iduma stopped in city after city throughout the former Biafra region, reconnecting with relatives dear and distant to probe their memories, prowling university libraries to furtively photocopy illicit books, and visiting half-abandoned monuments along the highway. Perhaps, he realized, if he could understand how his father grieved the loss of a brother in the war, he might learn how to grieve his late father in turn. His is also the story of countless families across the country and across the world who will never have answers or proper funerals for their loved ones. It’s a story about the birth of an artist, about writing itself as an act both healing and political, even dangerous. And it’s a story about family history and legacy, and all the questions the dead leave unanswered. How much of the author’s identity is wrapped up in this inheritance? And what does it mean to return home, when the people who define it are gone? Equal parts memoir, national history, and political reckoning, I Am Still With You is a profoundly personal story of collective loss and making peace with the unknowable.

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There's the plugs. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author on the show. I'm excited to talk to you about his book because his book is a journey that I think a lot of us go on in our lives where we kind of reach a point, uh, and I think it comes from in maturity too, um, where we start to, uh, reckon,

you know, who we are, where have we been, where do we come from, who are the people in our lives and what are the indelible imprints that they've left on our souls, on our making, our creation,

you know, we start to really kind of ponder that. Why are we here? And who the hell were those people that got us here and so uh i think uh this will be a great discussion um he is the author of the newest book that came out february 21st 2023 emmanuel aduma is on the show with us today his book is called i am still with you a reck Reckoning With Silence, Inheritance, and History. And he talks about his journey of going back

and trying to find his past and what went into his past and how he got there. He was born in Nigeria in 1989, a Duma studied law at OAU in Nigeria. And he received his MFA in art criticism and writing from the School of Visual Arts, New York, USA. He's the author of The Travelogue, Strangers Pose, 2018, which was long listed for the 2019 prize. prize his non-fiction and criticism have appeared in aperture art in america art forum granta n plus one the new york review of books the overview and other publications welcome the show how are you i'm doing very well it's nice to be here chris thank you thank you for coming to the

show we really appreciate emmanuel uh give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. My website is emmanueliduma.com, and you can go there and have access to a lot of the work that I've done. There you go. And how many books have you written so far? So this is the third book that I've written. The first was a novel that was published many years ago in Nigeria. And then the second is A Stranger's Pose.

And this is the third book that I've written. There you go. So what motivated you on to write this book? Many things and on many levels. The first level was that I've always been, you know, of course, fascinated by the Nigerian history, partly because, you know,

growing up, it wasn't very available in a sense in my curriculum. And so once I became conscious that I wanted to be a writer, I also became equally conscious that I needed to think through, you know, the histories that had shaped me in some way. And the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War, is certainly perhaps the biggest event in Nigeria's post-colonial history. And that was always

fascinating to me for many reasons, but I think more consequentially was the fact that my uncle or one of my uncles who I was named after went to fight in the war on the Biafran side and did not come back. And no one sort of knew what happened to him after the war ended and people began to return home. And so I knew that in some way I wanted to write about who he was. I mean, I didn't know how to do that until, you know, my father passed and I felt, oh, you know, this is the perfect moment. Well, an imperfect moment, so to speak, to begin that journey, because I also wanted to deal with um my father's life but to sort of deal with it through um my uncle's life so to speak yeah there you go and and i think this

is a moment i assume it's a moment of many people go through in their lives it happened to me and happened to you and and other things where, we kind of start to reflect on things and we kind of wonder like, you know, there's a time where I think we take maybe our parents for granted and the relatives in our lives. And then there's a time where they start to disappear or they start disappearing and we start to going, you know, who formed me? Why did they form me? Why were they motivated by what they did?

What was their journeys? And that's the beauty of what i love about the show is we get to talk about other people's journeys because mine's boring as hell um i'm sick of it so um i imagine you you kind of went through the same sort of cathartic moment uh especially at the loss of your father of wondering who am i and what got me here and who are these other people? Yeah, I completely agree with that assessment. I think, as someone said, I can't remember who exactly, that we lose our childhoods twice.

The first time when we grow up and become adults and the second time when our parents die. Wow. And it's such a powerful concept um because you know for people whose parents live until you know say they are 90 you could say oh they had a very long childhood um or um but for me you know both my parents passed by the time i was 30 you you know, it's a relatively short quote unquote childhood, but that's besides the point or that's in addition to the fact that for

me, um, thinking about, as I said, my father's life, um, or trying to make sense of it really, um, really was what drove me to reflect in on other lives in my family, such as my uncle. And I feel like this is an important place to make the point that for me, as I imagine for many people, you know, you don't really get a lot, right? You don't get a resolution, even if you had reams of documents that even if your parents say wrote a memoir, right? You don't get a resolution, even if you had reams of documents that even if your parents wrote a memoir. Right. You you don't necessarily have access to every single thing that might be noteworthy to you, so to speak. And so the question then becomes, what do you deal with? How do you deal with the limits of what you know?

Yeah. And that's what the book became. Or what you don't know, exactly. And that's what the book, I feel like, ultimately becomes in my own thinking right now. And so how would you describe your book? Would you describe it as a memoir, as a journey, a story? How do you describe it?

Well, just to say as a caveat that every time I, or at least after my last book, I set out to write a more, a book that could be easily categorized. And in the initial conception of this book, it was supposed to unfold simply as a journey. I move from place to place and discovered things and narrated upon discovery. But when I really went on the journey that informed the book, you know, I felt that that initial journey didn't really, you know, help me discover a lot of things or, you know, there wasn't any big revelation at the end of the journey. So the question then became, how do I structure the book in such a way that the reader doesn't get frustrated by the dead ends and, you know, the incompleteness of the

journey or of the story? And so the book, I think, in a very broad sense is a memoir because I'm writing about my life. I'm writing about my past, but it's also, as the subtitle says, a reckoning with history. So there's a lot of historical information that is included that doesn't necessarily have to do with my life personally. There's also, you know, really some commentary on Nigerian politics and really was an attempt for me to make sense of what I had discovered both in my journey and also in the sense of what the history of the war was. And I think that when you combine memoir and reportage and, you know, some kind of commentary, you get a sense of what the book is.

Yeah. And to me, this is a cathartic human experience. You know, I remember when I lost my father and the time was coming. He was winding down. He was constantly in the hospital. It became apparent that it was just a matter of time. And so I started sitting down with him and doing what I call the house cleaning, making sure there was no bad blood between us,

making sure that any things that we needed to resolve were cleared out of the table. And I tried to collect from him as many ideas as he could, but he was starting to go into dementia. Um, but this is, you know, as a man, and I don't know what it's like to be a woman, so I'm not going to pretend to somebody can fill that in the blank and the audience is woman. But I think of him, woman loses their mother. It's a very impactful experience um but for as a man when you lose your father you're you or both your parents you become alone in the world it becomes you and until then you're kind of i don't know if coasting is the right word but i i kind of always felt like i was like well you know what he's still here so i'm gonna still be here and yeah i'll deal with some things when uh you know maybe it's just me and then suddenly you find yourself alone in the world

yeah like who am i and where am i going and like you mentioned it's not really about the destination because the destination is the journey when you're learning. And sometimes at the end of these cathartic journeys that we go on, there is no right answer. There is no final thing where there's an epiphany moment where it's like, ta-da, here's the prize. You kind of reach a point where you have to come to some sort of cathartic reasoning or conclusion your end. Have I framed that correctly? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I think that you are very right that the nature of life or even thinking about life, whether it's ours or that of others, is not linear. I don't want to use the word messy but it's certainly um mine was messy it's certainly um you know um it you know it's it's certainly non-linear let's just use that word um and mine's still messy i'm still making a mess and and especially in relation to people who cannot speak back right this is the real thing in relation to that that um you know you know the the other thing that i've been thinking about is that the most honest form of conversation i think i saw this in a poem is with the dead is silence right um

and so what happens and this is why silence is in the subtitle of the book, what happens when the dead are keeping to themselves. And I had to be clear that what I was making, making what I was, what I was doing in my writing was sort of my own reasoning in relation to my father's life. I didn't think that I was writing, even though I was as close to him as I was, I was writing anything authoritative about his person, about his travails. Part of the most important thing to me, or the most cathartic thing, if I'll use that word, or memorable thing at the end of writing was that there was a lot that I didn't know and that was fine. You know, because I didn't want to present, and even for the reader, I hope that I've presented something

that doesn't seem like it's too obsessed with knowing as much as the kind of conversation, for instance, that we are having is the point of the book, you know, to have create this frame where conceptual concepts around knowing around inheritance and all of that can can be you know the reader and i can can have that conversation there you go and and i love that i love how you uh frame that because it's this is a journey i think most people go into when you're young and you're kind of a mortal,

you don't really care. You're living your life. You're, you're chasing around and then there's kind of a moment where you start to slow down and go, wait, who the hell am I? And you start looking in that mirror harsher. So you grow up, you're born and raised in Nigeria and then eventually you come to New York. How does that transpire? And then when do you make the decision to go back? Oh, yeah. Very good question.

I went to university in Nigeria. I trained as a lawyer and then went to law school. I mean, I went to law school in Nigeria. I mean, so right after university, which is a five-year period in Nigeria, you go for a one-year mandatory period if you want to become a lawyer. And so after that, you know, I'd sort of known almost early on in my undergraduate days

that I wasn't sure I was going to practice law. It was a clarity I had for whatever reason. I had nothing to do with whether or not I was compelled to study law or any of that. I just felt that my interest, there was a greater interest in being a writer or figuring out what it meant to be a writer than, you know, say, practicing law. So once I finished law school, I had to figure out a way to make this work, right? Career wise, you know, money wise and all that. And so I got involved with, um, an organization that would make road trips from Lagos in Nigeria to other parts of, um, the African continent, which was

the, in a sense, the basis of my previous book. Um, And after that, you know, when I was in one of those countries, I met someone who recommended that I, you know, go study in New York because he felt that what I was writing was art criticism and there was a program that could help me sharpen that. And so this was it. I applied for the program at the School of Visual Art and got in and just sort of stayed for the next seven years, you know, or, you know, two years for the master's and five years afterwards, just sort of making it just became clear to me that around that time, I had also got into a relationship that was also leading to marriage. And I just felt, you know what, you know, this is, this is not a place I want to spend the rest of my life or, you know, start a family.

And so Nigeria appealed to me for the fact that I was returning home. I was returning to my family. I was returning to start a family returning to my family, I was returning to start a family. But also because, you know, and secondarily, it was also the place where I felt I could tease out this interest, such as the history of Nigeria, the history of the Biafran war. And I didn't think that I could write a book like this if i wasn't if i hadn't recommitted to to living in nigeria full time and this is an interesting journey going you know i i should jumping back a little bit i i still often think about my father i think about his motivations i

think about what he was trying to do what he's trying to think um i certainly i wrote the other day on facebook that i did i i probably owe my father a few apologies and a little bit more respect when he went through as i as i've as gone through my journey i'm going through his old age right now that he was in when I had my largest interactions with him post-childhood. And so you go back to Nigeria and how do you go on this journey? Why do you choose your uncle? I think it's kind of obvious, but I'd love to hear it from you. And what does this journey entail? I mean, certainly there's some complexity to it.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, i choose my uncle um i should just reiterate if that wasn't clear like my uncle is the person i was named after you know one of his names is my name emmanuel his name was emmanuel i mean this was you know i write it in more detail in the book it was one of the names that he was known by, but became my first name. And so, you know, for me, because I had for many years been collecting, you know, books, buying books about a war, trying to research it just for, you know, intellectual curiosity. And I sort of knew I would write a book or I wanted to write something about it. I wasn't sure what.

And it just occurred to me one day that, you know, the story that I'm trying to tell in relation to the war is in relation to my uncle. And so the journey is, you know, I didn't have any, you know, there's no place, there's no archive where I could find his name or whatever. You know, it was really structured around talking to relatives, going to my hometown, but also traveling to parts of Nigeria where the war had been fought. year was you know very of course very um conceptual very um uh what's the word very indirect was you know if i if i could visit some of the places where the last battles of the war had been fought since i had heard from my father that he was last seen in the last year of the war he was seen in the last year of the war so i was seen in the last year of the war. So I thought, okay, I'm going to look, think around or travel to places where

the, the, the last battles of the war was fought and just be there, right? It doesn't, I, there were, there was nobody that I was going to meet there that would immediately know my uncle, this is like a 50, 50 plus year. But I also, um, wanted to, to wanted to understand how the war was being remembered or talked about in those places. So on one hand, I'm traveling to talk to my relatives or my father's friends who had been friends with him from childhood. But also, in addition to that, I'm traveling to places that meant something in relation to the war and bringing those two kinds of journeys together. So I travel to one place to meet a relative.

I travel to another place to just sort of talk to people or try to visit places that were important for the war effort. Let me ask you this. Did you hope to find, maybe he might be alive? Maybe, might he give you some insight? Or did you, were more you were interested in what you mentioned before, walking through his shoes and experience and just kind of trying to feel maybe what he felt or experience or or think maybe some of the things he thought um well i mean i i sort

of was i sort of knew that it would be almost impossible that he would still be alive right so the fact and which would have been a more dramatic story of course you know if i had sort of met him somewhere um and and that's because you know for two reasons one is that my father had always been you know made the statement over the years when he was alive that oh you know what if one day he just returned, right. You know, which was of course a, um, I mean, that's the, that's, that's what happens when people disappear really, you know, because their bodies are not present. You just sort of keep imagining. Um, but on the other hand, you know, it was clear to me from my interaction with people who were old enough to have been, you know, alive during the war that people who went, regardless of how far people went back, part of what happened in the first year or within the first year, sometimes weeks, months, even a year or two, was that people find their way back to their hometowns, regardless of how long it had taken.

So for someone who spent all that time, I mean, if he was alive and within his right mind, right, he would have certainly come back. Also, because, you know, part of what usually happened was that when the person didn't return after a bit of time you know a symbolic burial will be held for the person you know in this you know because there were all these beliefs about the person's spirits that needed to be sent out properly and all that and so i don't think i i think that by the middle of the journey or by actually pretty much early into the journey it's it was clear to me that what i was doing was trying to understand what had happened to him you know really that was the big question what's what could have happened to this person and how could i find that out there you go and the journey of going through it all and and trying to walk in their footsteps you know it's interesting

how we go through times in our life and and i think this is what your book illustrates where we we try and go home and i've learned the hard way you can never really go home yeah it's different and yeah but you you go like what i i went back several times to my neighborhood as a child and i walked the streets as i did as a child and i tried to get a feel of of what that was and tried to relive the experience a little bit or come to some sort of cathartic moment or see if there was something there it was the journey of the experience and there was a lot of similarities but yet there is things a lot of different and uh but but still it's interesting because you're going on an emotional or intellectual i think it's both

a journey within your own mind you're trying to walk through people's experiences and why did my parents choose what they did why did they what shaped them and in thereby what shaped them also shaped me absolutely no so very young yeah yeah I think that you know the idea that we could recover a sense of the past it's always fascinating to us for many reasons I mean the present is usually has a degree of complexity, right? You know, dealing with everyday life. The future is sometimes, you know, aspirational and also

in some cases hard to imagine, but the past is always settled in that sense. So if it's settled, it's therefore in our minds recoverable or we can recover part of it. And so I think that there is always a fascination for many writers I know you know to return into their childhood or the places that inform their

childhood but the question is with what eyes are you returning um you know um as someone said, the past must only be entered into illegally. You know, it doesn't issue visas. So the question is, you know, what angle or with what forged papers do we enter the past? And when you, for instance, go to the places or the streets where you grew up, what you are seeing is, what you're certainly seeing is through an adult's eye. How do you imagine yourself as a child with the language of an adult, right? That's the issue, right? That we can't, you know, we can't quite return to the language we had as children. We are always sort of thinking about our childhood because we are now adults

and using the language of adulthood to frame what our childhood was. And so the only people that really know us as children are our parents. That's who, in the sense of even just the daily lives that we lived, you know, for us, it's something to recover. For them, it's something they lived through with some degree of certainty. Yeah. And correct me if I'm wrong here, but, and I love what you're saying. Um,

you know, this is also a journey of a war of a nation that's, uh, given freedom from the oppression of the United Kingdoms, uh, colonization, uh, of Nigeria in 1960, uh,

where it gets, it, it turns over, uh, there's a coup. It's a, it's a bloody horrific Ethnic civil war That has all the horrors

Of war And in a way Your uncle was taken from you And stolen from you by the events of this war And it's almost kind of like The journey that we go on You know there's the famous movie Citizen Kane

Where at the end his final words are rosebud. And everyone's like, what is rosebud? And it was something that he lost or something that was taken from him as a child. You, of course, learn in the movie. And that's kind of, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's kind of the journey of you're trying to find something that was taken from you and the history behind that why it was taken from you and what happened with it and the journey of the history of a country and a people which is also your identity as well yeah absolutely because history i mean for me the the history had to become invariably personal in the sense that i was i was not looking at this history so i wasn't writing about this history to simply just recount what happened but as you say what happened to me

in relation to this history i i felt that this was the only way it mattered really um otherwise i wasn't alive then um one can only imagine what what it meant for people who were alive then and you know in fact most people who are alive then have difficulties talking about it you know just because of how difficult it was right and how traumatic it is and i think the idea that they need to say everything or deal i don't necessarily agree i mean i feel like people can also deal with things by being quiet about it you know um but that's a different conversation but i mean that uh for me in writing this book i i it was clear that the history had to become personal. I had to engage with it in a way that felt meaningful to me.

And I think this is a great example in why stories and authors and books like you that you've written, you know, they're lifeless. We don't get a life manual in this world. And so stories are the ways that we learn, whether it's through film books tv whatever it is the stories that's that's kind of our life lessons and manuals and we learn from each other you know oh you you went through this maybe i need to go on that journey or or maybe this is similar to something i experienced and it's it's the human experience when it really

comes down to it you know you you're trying to find your way and you're you're it's a family experience it's a it's a personal experience it's a it's a father mother paternal uh maternal experience it's a it's a nation experience of it's a human experience that we we're going through and we're trying to find ourselves why are we here what does this mean what happens after what got me here what was the motivations and so i think that's the beauty of stories like this and and why it's important that we you know try and find what this all means and it adds to the beauty of the the breadth and tapestry of life um and uh there's no really destination it just, it's all about the journey. And maybe someday, I don't know, maybe someday before you die, you come to some sort of conclusion to it all. I don't know that anyone does, maybe.

Maybe that's the point of it all. That's the point of the afterlife. That's the point of it all. You just, you experience it. It was really hard for me when I was young to, when people would say, it's about the journey, Chris, not the destination. I want to punch him in the face all the time. It used to make me visceral. But then I got enough kicks in the ass from life.

What more do you want to tease out of the book? Because we definitely want them to pick it up and read on it and go on the journey with you. I mean, what more do I want to tease out? That's a good point. Or anything we haven't touched on. Yeah. I think that part of what is important for me

or what was important for me writing the book was also to underscore how the historical is not far from the present moment. And so for instance, there were, the war was fought between a country that, or the region that declared itself independence called and called itself Biafra with the Nigerian federal government. And now, at least since 99, in a more, in a concerted way, there's been, at least there's been groups that are advocating

for, you know, for Biafra again. And in the last, I would say, in the last um i would say in the last seven years it has gotten a little bit more um intense with um which which um you know a more militant group called the the indigenous people of piafra and in my writing this book i i knew that I wasn't writing a book about that movement for sure you know it would take more time and you know certainly more access that I didn't have but I wanted to make the connection between how the war is talked about or not talked about with you know the fact that people feel emboldened to clamor for a return to or their reinstatement or a fresh move into Biafra. But the larger point was how do you ensure that you don't think in pockets of events, right? Or just think that something that happens in the country is isolated. How do you think, how do you ensure that you don't think in pockets of events, right?

So just think that something that happens in the country is isolated. How do you make connections across the history of a country? And for me, that was very important to do, you know. Yeah. And, you know, you've given me epiphany A lot of Not only from what we've talked about From a personal journey A personal identity A lot of people are on this journey with their nations

Or their politics or whatever Nigeria as you mentioned is on this Some people have a romanticism To the past of certain things That maybe something was better back then I've often found that Like I said you can't go home uh it's never it's never wasn't as romantic as you thought it was but there's sometimes that

idealism you know um your country uh nigeria has been through civil wars uh and battles and fought over identity and and maybe possibly return it to the past, as you mentioned, uh, Africa as a continent, uh, has, you know, from colonialization and the removal of colonialization has been fighting for their identity and what they feel might be prevalent, uh, our, my country, America and your, your country too. Um, I, you know, we, we fought a civil war over our identity. We're still kind of fighting a civil war that in January 6th, you know, we, we fought a civil war over our identity. We're still kind of fighting a civil war that in January six, you know, there was the, there was the, uh, Confederate flag of losers in our Capitol. Once again, in a fight for, you know, a clawback to what some people feel was a better time, which it wasn't. I lived there.

Um, I lived through some of that some of that and we should go back to the old days and they weren't that great um and and they weren't great for everybody and that's what we should have is a world that's great for everybody but it's interesting to me you give me epiphany that not only are people searching for that identity and and reconciliation of who they are through the past is also a journey of nations. Yeah, I mean, you put it so brilliantly. You know, I feel like, I mean, of course, historians, and this is the task of historians to sort of articulate a story that is not just the story of an individual, right?

Think about it from a more collective perspective. But if we think about our lives, as I often do, as, you know, as tributaries in a sea of stories, right? The question is that the fact is that we are, it's almost like a network of stories, right? So the story of the individual within a family, within a country, or in my case, within an ethnic group, within a country, and then gets bigger and bigger like that. Stories can be told on all those levels.

And that is equally what I feel like, of course, each country has to keep negotiating. That how do we tell a story? I mean, of course, for instance, in America, where some stories are not being told, or some people feel that some stories are not being told or some people feel that some stories are not being told. Others feel like, you know, you should include the story, right?

Or stop telling the story. And it goes on and on with this negotiation of what should be told. What is collective enough as a story? What is national enough as a story? what is national enough as a story. And I feel, you know, that as long as we keep looking for those big universal stories that can represent every single person, we'll keep having the same kind of issues that we have in, say, you know, in, you know, in most countries really, um, you know, because the, the story,

and this is the final, the main point that the story is inherently individual. Um, you know, we, we, of course, we latch onto collective stories to make sense of our individual stories, but we really always come down to it, know from an individual point so which is why most people who participate in big political movements sort of you can you can tell a story of how their lives led to that moment or that participation um and it didn't just it's not just this big story that you know the news would like to make it like oh this person did this there is always the individual story in which um the bigger story plays all that is part of the bigger story so to speak yeah there you go you know it reminds me of something that william

barr said uh attorney william barr said that history is written by the winners and he may be quoting someone else but but but that's not the true history that's the that's the winner's version of the history and they get to dictate it which was kind of his point in a very negative sense but it gives me thought that there's a there's a downside to that there's a negative side there's other stories there's other people's um experiences that that can be highlighted that can be talked about. I just had the author of the book, The Case for Cancel Culture, on the show. We're talking about our culture that we have nowadays of victimhood and everything.

And I had an epiphany after the show that sometimes it's not so much that, uh, we need to be calling out or claiming that we're the victim of something more. So what it needs to be is that we're trying to tell our story that we're trying to tell, uh, our experiences to each other so that we understand each other better so that we empathize with each other better. You know, you're, you're educating me and i've learned a lot actually about the civil war i've learned that doctors without borders came out of this a lot of ngos came out of this that uh uh i believe you know that tv guy you see it late at night it goes one dollar will save children in

africa a lot of these organizations came out of this this whole area yeah um it's a it's a it's a it's a lesson of when uh colonization or powers removed and a nation falls into civil war we did that in iraq with the american government we took it over we had no idea that that uh you know technically the thing that was keeping everybody in line was saddam hussein and we removed him the two the different ethnic groups went at each other and so it's a lesson of history and life and stuff but really you know we're we're all trying to tell our story and make sure that people understand us and the reason we're doing that isn't so much narcissism as it is to where you know it's important that we learn from these stories and the experiences of others and that we understand each other

and that we empathize with each other and we understand each other's journeys. Does that sound crazy or am I wrong? No, no, that's very apt. That's well put, actually. I'm on a journey today of something I'm going to learn. You know, I mean, the first point you made about history being written by the Winas, which is, I mean, it might sound cliched now, but it's so true.

I mean, every cliche has a gem of truth, right? One of the ways in which that was sort of, you know, made um apparent in in nigeria's in the aftermath of the war was that you know there was this statement that was bandied around by the government and i think it could be well-meaning you know it's it was no victor no vanquished right this idea that everyone um sort of in the spirit of reconciliation, no one should be considered a victor, no one should be considered vanquished, right? But when I'm thinking about it in retrospect now, I'm saying, oh yeah, that's of course what the winner

would say. The winner says, oh, no one was vanquished, right? You know, the winner would say, I won, therefore I make the rules on how the war is talked about. Yeah. You know, in your country, in Nigeria, when it gained freedom from the United Kingdom, this is October 1st, 1960, it had a population of 45.2 million. And there were 300 different ethnic groups and cultural groups, which is a lot to try and get everybody to all get along. Yeah. Yeah. And so three of the largest ethnic groups, you know, start, you know, warring battles with each other. You know, we, we had the same problem with, we're, we're going through the same problem now with the birth of America, where the winners of

the, you know, of, of white settlers who came here and enslaved and, uh, attacked and destroyed many of the, um, uh, Native Americans that were here and African-Americans. Um, you know, we we've we've been told kind of a whitewashed story for 200 almost 50 years and you know the winner's rule and it wasn't always true and we're finding out now that we're having these discussions and we're exposing stories and and i've learned a lot from great. We've had on the show that have talked about other people's experiences that,

uh, weren't the winners in that thing. But in, in truth, it's not really about winners and losers. It's about hearing each other, understanding each other and getting along as a community of, of human beings and making sure that everyone,

uh, at least as recognized as stories heard or is at least dealt with in a manner of empathy. Yeah. And we care. And so it's the constant battle for those stories and finding out who we are, whether it's a person or a nation or a being or a group or whatever it is. Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. Anything more you want to tease out of the book before we go? No. yeah definitely absolutely anything more you want to tease out on the book before we go um no i mean it's it's uh i guess finally it's also you know i i do i do want to point out that for me also in this finally actually that writing this book was not just um dealing with a tragedy it was also to to find meaning for myself in a hopeful manner in relation to those tragedies. I hope that I have not written a book that is suffused with self-pity, you know, because the stories don't matter for the other story that I write doesn't matter for its its scandalousness or its sentimentality as much as for what it communicates about I think you know the human condition and and and attempt to an attempt to make

meaning of the past which the um and you know through the past as well yeah there you go and an example to all of us you know i learned a long time ago i i didn't share stuff sometimes like when my dogs died and other things that were um you know i i had a lot of feeling or emotion in life and i found that by sometimes sharing that stuff, I helped other people. I remember when I shared the death of my dog with people that it was cathartic for other people. They were like, wow, I didn't realize you didn't have closure until you talked about the loss of your father, the loss of your dogs, and the experience that you went through.

To me, I didn't ever want to share because I felt like, oh, I'm just doing a pity party. Poor as me, wah, wah, wah. And it was amazing to me how much talking about the experience of the human experience was cathartic to other people and helped other people sometimes with closure and reconciling what they went through and stuff like that. And that whole journey of where we start to realize that we feel that we're alone in some things and we learn that we're alone in some things and we

learn that we're not, we're not, we're part of it kind of, it takes us on a journey where we feel like we're kind of wandering alone in the wilderness. And then we come back and, and arrive at a point where we find that we're part of the human race and this is the human experience.

And it's that coming back and forth. Absolutely. Way of doing it well this has been really insightful i've learned a lot emmanuel i'm in fact i'm going to go spend some more time watching some videos on this war i'm always interested in these these wars that shaped us in the history of it and you know the the one thing i always say on the show the one thing man can learn from his history is man never learns from his history. That's why he's doomed to repeat it. So we should always learn.

Give us your.com so people can find you on the internet. My website is emmanuelduma.com, and you can find the book really anywhere that books are sold, I think. There you go. Thank you very much for coming on the show and enlightening us today. Thank you very much, Chris. Hopefully my audience, and if they're not lighting well then that's their problem but i i learned so

much today i hope they're enlightened yeah i don't know what i'm gonna do i'm just gonna i don't know go bask in my sexiness because my brain is so much bigger today i've learned so much this is a journey we all go on you know i still think about my father to this day um and it was important that i i did what you did i went to find other people This is a journey we all go on. You know, I still think about my father to this day. And it was important that I did what you did. I went to find other people who could give me history. Because sometimes my father would give me a little bit of PR history.

You know what I mean? Sometimes he, and I think sometimes it wasn't an evil intent. So I think sometimes he was maybe trying to protect himself, but also maybe protect me from the truth a little bit. And so it's important to go learn about your history you know some people do this through genealogy etc etc anyway uh order up the book folks wherever fine books are sold i am still with you a reckoning with silence inheritance and history wherever fine books are sold thanks everyone for tuning in refer to show your family or friends goodreadreads.com, Fortress Crispus,

YouTube.com, Fortress Crispus, and LinkedIn, Fortress Crispus. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you next time.