A tribute to my father

(read by Yewande Omotoso at the Memorial on 8th August 2023)

I was thinking of a part of my new work where I was writing about my father. I wanted to read some of that:

I visit Daddy and although he’s still very alive I can’t help but look at his life as something that opened and closed. In an expansive sense. I can’t help but take him in, all of him. I sit

across and look straight into his face as he tries to talk. I nod along when this might be helpful and offer a single word to help contextualise what he is trying to tell me.

‘Kids?’ I say. ‘They’re fine, Ananse has a slight cough.’

Or

‘Change position?’

Then I go behind, hook my arms under his armpits and hoist him further back into the chair.

It’s hard to be with him only in that moment. He is 80 but in between our drawn-out conversation he is also in his forties – my age – driving the family to Ibadan, liberal with the horn, in disdain of the crumbling Ife-Ibadan road. He is delivering a lecture. I remember him in pictures. There is one where he must be in his early thirties. A black and white portrait, his head full of hair, the beard I knew as a girl, medium and not yet a fashion trend. There is something particular about the light in this photograph, it is almost celestial, he is looking straight at the camera – beautiful and potent.

Another photograph that sits, like an existential slideshow just behind his 80-year-old shoulder, is the one with him holding the manuscript of "Just Before Dawn". The pages are stacked and impressive, collected in a yellow and black A4 box, here he is triumphant, his publisher Bankole Olayebi in the background, proud, hopeful.

My father’s sentences are slow and broken, that is the purpose of a stroke, to

cut one off from source. Stroke is not evil. It’s not that I hate it. Only my heart squeezes to see my father fight for his words so. Words he commanded as a young man, a professor, a

playwright; words that lined up along his tongue, gathered, waiting, along the ridges between his teeth. Precise words. Even now he reaches for “exhausted” when “tired” would do. I see

him grimace.

‘Are you in pain?’

‘Huh?’

‘You’re wincing.’

He says something I can’t make out. But he’s definitely winced and the look of pain on his face has scared me. He repeats the word.

‘Sewing together?’ I ask doubtful.

He nods. We laugh.

‘The pain is from sewing the body back together?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘You’re falling apart? You need some stitching.’

We laugh some more.

‘You remind me of Ananse and his bunny. That thing is being loved till its seams burst. That’s something that needs sewing together. Or maybe it’s too late.’

At this my father laughs really hard. I neither get the joke nor had I intended it as one.

‘Anyway,’ I say once he’s stopped laughing and yawns.

‘You’re still a poet. You’re still finding…the right words in the right order.’

When I was 16 or so and living with my brothers and parents in Kenwyn, Cape Town, and when I was starting to think that I could be bold enough to try and write I submitted my short

stories to my father. He was too kind to lie to me and took his red pen to the papers. He wasn’t nice, he was expert and demanding and I eventually turned in the stories with a bit of

anger to go with it, but I still turned them in. I worked. If he wrote “predictable” at the end of one, I let the feedback bite me and made sure the sting taught me something. Later when I

published novels I wondered if my father read them with his red pen in hand. I don’t think so though. My father was my hero and, in those early days especially, my first and sometimes

only reader. As time passed, he continued quietly and skilfully, using a light-touch, to support my budding ambitions. Never telling me what I should or shouldn’t write but always

interested that whatever I did I exercised craft and had fun too. I remember my father asking me to attend the Time of The Poet Festival in Durban to which he’d been invited. I tagged

along with him and Odia Ofeimun – an old friend and also a guest at the festival – and I marvelled at how they moved through life, giving and enjoying, bursting with energy and

healthy mischief. I was in my mid-twenties. I remember thinking – when I’m in my 60s and 70s this is how I want to be.

My parents were dedicated to my brothers and I – without somehow sacrificing too much of their dedication to themselves and their journeys – whatever we have accomplished takes root from that dedication.

I want to wish my father happy passage as he continues his already and forever wonder-filled journey. And I want to say: Thank you.

Your daughter, Yewande.