Under The Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Chinelo Okparanta
- Language: English
- Genre: Coming of Age Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
MIDWAY BETWEEN Old Oba-Nnewi Road and New Oba-Nnewi Road, in that
general area bound by the village church and the primary school, and where
Mmiri John Road drops off only to begin again, stood our house in Ojoto. It
was a yellow-painted two-story cement construction built along the dusty
brown trails just south of River John, where Papa’s mother almost drowned
when she was a girl, back when people still washed their clothes on the rocky
edges of the river.
Ours was a gated compound, guarded at the front by thickets of rose and
hibiscus bushes. Leading up to the bushes, a pair of parallel green hedges
grew, dotted heavily in pink by tiny, star-like ixora flowers. Vendors lined
the road adjacent to the hedges, as did trees thick with fruit: orange, guava,
cashew, and mango trees. In the recesses of the roadsides, where the bushes
rose high like a forest, even more trees stood: tall irokos, whistling pines, and
a scattering of oil and coconut palms. We had to turn our eyes up toward the
sky to see the tops of these trees. So high were the bushes and so tall were the
trees.
In the harmattan, the Sahara winds arrived and stirred up the dust, and
clouded the air, and rendered the trees and bushes wobbly like a mirage, and
made the sun a blurry ball in the sky.
In the rainy season, the rains wheedled the wildness out of the dust, and
everything took back its clarity and its shape.
This was the normal cycle of things: the rainy season followed by the dry
season, and the harmattan folding itself within the dry. All the while, goats
bleated. Dogs barked. Hens and roosters scuttled up and down the roads,
staying close to the compounds to which they belonged. Striped swordtails
and monarchs, grass yellows and redtops—all the butterflies—flitted
leisurely from one flower to the next.
As for us, we moved about in that unhurried way of the butterflies, as if the
breeze was sweet, as if the sun on our skin was a caress. As if slow paces
allowed for the savoring of both. This was the way things were before the
war: our lives, tamely moving forward.
It was 1967 when the war barged in and installed itself all over the place.
By 1968, the whole of Ojoto had begun pulsing with the ruckus of armored
cars and shelling machines, bomber planes and their loud engines sending
shock waves through our ears.
By 1968, our men had begun slinging guns across their shoulders and
carrying axes and machetes, blades glistening in the sun; and out on the
streets, every hour or two in the afternoons and evenings, their chanting could
be heard, loud voices pouring out like libations from their mouths: “Biafra,
win the war!”
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