In Afikpo Igbo, the morning greeting, nnaa, elicits the response, nahicha. As in many West African languages, words are often elisions of longer phrases or sentences. The morning greeting, nnaa, is an elision of the question, Inahiri onwu? Did you escape death? The idea is that sleep is akin to death and that to wake up is to escape death. Anahichara’m, I escaped well, the response to this question is shortened to nahicha, escaped well.
The orientation of Afikpo-Igbo is towards the philosophical and existential over direct communication. Languages like this are deeply embedded in myth and account for multiple positions of experience and existence. A linguistic form that embeds existential ideas within the quotidian, and ensures that every interaction is a chance for a quantum exchange to occur. Worldviews that allow for us to think in simultaneity are perhaps a better way to cope with the increasing crises of our lives. To have a conversation in Afikpo-Igbo is to “weave a conversation” (kpa nkata) and is one tonal mark away from “weaving a basket” (kpa nkata). The concept is that things exist in common and for common use.
As we emerge out of the isolation of the last two years, we find we are altered. While we managed to escape death, literal and metaphorical, I for one have not done it as well as I thought, and maybe that is a good thing. Before COVID, everyone, it seemed, was clear about their positions, their individuality, and even exclusivity. This may have been a result of taking community for granted, and imagining we were less interdependent than we were.
As COVID raged, we all clung to the chant and hope, “when we return to normal.” But as we emerge back into the world, we realize that not only are things not going back to “normal” but that normal was shorthand for all manner of things. As we move forward with plans, we realize that what interested us two years ago no longer holds a shine, what we thought was important no longer gives us any urgency. We are struggling to calibrate to the world as we return. The world is asking us for a simultaneity in language and thought that we never had to calibrate for prior to COVID.
What is humbling and encouraging to me, as someone whose role is largely that of facilitating conversations and research amongst and between very intelligent and focused people around the subject of Africa, is that there seems to be a new generosity among this constituency. The willingness to work alongside each other, to listen deeply to each other, to talk, to argue, has always marked this community. But it seems there is a deeper empathy at play now, a willingness to find ourselves within each other’s intellectual orbit – we are seeing harmonic resonances within our work and are gravitating towards working more deeply and collaboratively. Perhaps not surviving well has made us more intellectually curious and open and generous. Perhaps we are witnessing the beginnings of a new kind of community, one not bound by limited lines of research. Instead, we are beginning to see connections across disciplines, ideas and ideologies and other interdisciplinary crossovers in a new way. Perhaps not surviving death well has given us new hopes for how to weave new conversations and the requisite baskets to hold them.
Welcome back to the world, not as it was, not normal, but with a new post-COVID reality.