Dad, after you left: memoirs of a fatherless child (2024)

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Told from the heart: A review of O'Star Eze's Dad... After You Left By Henry Chigozie Duru, PhDWriters are creators; they mould tales using words as the material. However, different writers mould their tales differently depending on one's gift, inspiration and idiosyncrasies. Enter O'Star Eze's work, Dad... After You Left: Memoirs of a Fatherless Child, a piece that embodies the impressive literary gift of its creator as well as a view into the depth of his inner self locked in battle with misery, bewilderment, despair, and of course, hope following one fateful twist that has rendered him fatherless even with no death recorded in the family.The man, Bertrand Okechukwu Eze, a once successful businessman based in Katsina, had left his home and a young family of wife and four children (with the author as the first) for a business trip up north and never to return unto this day, and with no one yet able to say his whereabouts. This very incident has left a fraternal gap - nay an existential lacuna - in the life of his family with the author, in this 84paged book, narrating to us how that incident has shaped his world in a most profound way thenceforth. It is a tale of the survival struggle of a young widow alongside her four vulnerable children in a remorselessly hostile environment infested with jealous and aggressive relatives. There is to be no respite for the fatherless family as they battle with poverty, deprivations, hostilities and harassment of the 27-year-old widowed mother by some sex-gluttonous men around.It was in the midst of (and of course for the reason of) all these that the metamorphosis of the author's personality assumed the trajectory told in the book. First, he became a bookworm, not in the mundane sense, but in a profoundly contemplative fashion. Hear the author's account in the foreword to the book: " Amidst the web of distraught I fell into as I became conscious of myself as a result of the gaping hole, questions, lack, sadness, left behind by my one in a millennium father, I found solace in books. Books became my father, my instructor, my guide. I knew that one day I would make an attempt to write about how it felt to live without a father who is neither dead nor alive. That feeling that I would wake up one day and hear the door open and he would step in and I would run into his arms have not left me yet even though I was made to perform his burial ceremony after 27 years of his disappearance and I am also a father too" (pp.3 - 4).The above summarises the author's mindset that drove him to reading (and of course writing the work under review). Going further, these adventures of his on the pages of books in time veered into the world of mystical and occult literature where he found himself so much engrossed, reading and searching for that spiritual leeway out of the existential entanglement created by his father's disappearance. Ultimately, he made a leap from theory to practice, embracing mysticism with its paraphernalia of initiations, studies and exercises - this was after his earlier romance with Pentecostalism and Jehovah's Witness. (His family is Catholic). Still the road remained dark seemingly with no sign of any light ahead. The author's mother was no less adventurous in her search for solution, though she did not cross the boundaries of her Christian faith in this process. Hers, however, is itself another story of intrigues and lessons of life.And so the author's tale continues, taking the reader through the chequered terrain of his domestic, educational, and social life experiences. As one reads through the last pages, one would have expected the tale to end, just like seen with all books, but this tale remains uncompleted simply because the incident upon which it is built is yet unresolved. The fate of Mr. Bertrand Okechukwu Eze, the author's living but dead father, is yet to be known, so the end of the story is yet to be known...