There Was A Father

How can a family be shaped by a man who wasn't there?

A photo of my mom and dad in a carnival ride in the late ‘70’s, when they were still dating.

I think I have one memory of my father. I was two, crawling under the airport chairs, laughing and giggling under the legs of the adults. Two of those legs belonged to my father, I remember knowing that. The skinny ankles and calves - ankles and calves my brother Aham and I both have today - wore socks pulled up underneath the cuffed pants. I remember my mom telling me to stop playing around. That's it. That's the only memory of the man responsible for my name and for half of my genetics that I have. And I'm not even sure if I dreamed it up.

But my mother, having spent seven years with my father, had more than just ankles to carry with her in the years after he left her with two young children to care for. Mom mixed those memories with the unfulfilled promises her husband had made before he left, and used it to concoct a reality for us that made it all make sense. Something that reconciled the great man she knew - the man who had swept her off her feet and promised her the world - with the everyday harshness of a broken heart, poverty, and single motherhood.

Our father had bigger responsibilities back home, she explained. He was a brilliant mind and an esteemed politician. Nigeria needed men like him. He would be here if not for that, or we would be there. It was different in Nigeria, she would say. Fathers weren’t expected to be as involved in their children's upbringing. He had done his part by making sure that we were in America, that we had family here to care for us. So many people there would give anything to be in America, she would tell us.

Sometimes the facade would crack. At night, I would see her out on our balcony crying. For all of the joy and possibility my mom tried to provide for my brother and I during the day, in the evening, when she was alone with our thoughts, it was clear that she was heartbroken by the possibilities of her own life that were slipping away.

One day when I was around ten years old, a letter from my father came. It was the first one I remember coming to the house. Mom gathered my brother and I excitedly to read it together. As she read past the warm, if perfunctory greetings, the elation left her voice. The letter was informing us that our father's mother had died.

"I never got to meet her," mom said as she choked back tears. "He promised me I would meet her," she said, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

I didn't care about the death of the mother of someone I didn't know. I cared about my mother's tears.

As I grew older, my father became less of a person in my life and more of the annoying ghost of a person. His memory existed only to make things more difficult. His whole being in our lives revolved around what wasn't. He wasn't there to help our mom with bills. He wasn't there to cheer on our sports games. He wasn't there to help mom when my brother reached his combative teenage years, no matter how many times she would say, “If your father was here….”

When we were young teens my mom and my brother argued about everything. One of the regular arguments was my brother's refusal to wear a bicycle helmet when riding around the neighborhood. Helmets were uncool, he'd insist. Brain damage was less cool than that, our mom would counter. Nothing could possibly make you cool, I'd add.

One day, less than a half hour after my brother had rushed out on his bike, sans helmet, we got a call from someone in the neighborhood. We rushed out in search of Aham and found him sitting dazed on the sidewalk, his bike a dented mess behind him. He had hit a rock or some other obstruction while going down a steep hill, and had taken a nasty tumble, hitting his head. He was conscious, but disoriented, one side of his face was red and raw from scraping against the pavement. A knot was already blooming on his head.

We took him to the emergency room. While the ER nurse examined him and cleaned his face, Aham talked nonstop in his concussed state.

"Why am I here? What happened to my face? My beautiful face!" He wailed. We laughed quietly at his disoriented vanity.

"Where is my father? Why isn't he here?" He added, his eyes filling up with tears. "Figures, he'd miss this too. My face is ruined and he's not even here. He's never here." We stopped laughing.

I was 19 when my father wrote again, for the first time in over a decade. He had missed us so much, he longed to hear from us, he said. He closed the letter with a telephone number.

I was living on my own at that time. A tiny, messy one bedroom apartment in Everett. Aham came by my apartment  the evening before so we could call him together in the very early hours of the morning. We sat around waiting until the right time, nervously drinking some Dos Equis my friend had stolen from her mom's restaurant. We went over what we would say. What he might say back.

I won't go into detail about how the conversation went. My brother has written about it and talked about it. We even made a film about it. It didn't go well, especially for my brother. Apparently the great Sam Oluo expected his son to choose a field more fitting of his legacy than "musician."

I remember sitting in my apartment at four in the morning, watching my 6'6” brother shrink smaller and smaller as the words of our father's disapproval traveled from the phone to his 17-year-old heart. I remember thinking, "this is not how great men behave."

I refused to entertain my mother's fantasies about our father after that. I remember looking at her in wonder, trying and failing to understand what could sustain such delusion for so many years. To my young eyes and surface-level analysis, it seemed like a sign of weakness in her, and I was angry. I was angry that our little family had spent so many years grieving a man who was never there, who never gave a shit about us. A man who had abandoned his wife and kids.

About five years later I received a call from an unknown number in New Jersey. I answered and it was from one of my father's cousins. She was overjoyed to connect with me. She told me through tears that she had spent years looking for us. That they all knew that there was family somewhere in America - beloved family - that had been lost. She had combed through the internet to find us and had found my phone number on an old business listing. She asked about my mom and brother, I said that both were well, that Aham had two little girls and I had a little boy. She asked for our address to keep up correspondence.

About a week later a giant box arrived at my door. It was packed with expensive toys for the kids, gold jewelry for my mom and me, beautiful trinkets for Aham. I delivered the gifts to mom and Aham and suddenly dad was back in our life again. It was all anyone could talk about. Our family in Nigeria. Our family that hadn’t forgotten us.

The cousin kept calling every few days to check in. "I love you" she would end each call. "Um, I love you too," I would say to this stranger and every time my stomach would knot up. Aham went out to visit them in New Jersey. He told me that it was an amazing visit. "you should visit them Ijeoma, you need to know how amazing that family connection is," he told me.

Eventually I stopped returning our cousin's calls. She left a voicemail crying, asking what they had done to cause me to forsake them. Our father's actions were not her fault, she pleaded. Please, just call or send a letter. I didn't reply and she didn't call again.

I didn't know how to explain that their love felt suffocating. That the name Oluo had been nothing but a source of pain for me and my family for my entire life, and yet I seemed to be the only one who saw it. I didn't know how to explain that I was Americanized, that family here was something much more conditional and localized. That Americans cut off family all the time. That I didn't know how to love someone just because they shared my blood.

Even though I didn't hear from that cousin again, she must have shared my contact information with my father, because I did hear from him again. He desperately wanted to talk with me, he said. He was in the hospital and didn't know how much time he'd have left. We set up a phone call, and at the designated time the nurses brought him from his hospital bed to the phone. Over the scratchy line he told me that he was sorry. That he had always loved us, that he had missed us every day. "I will make it all right," he said to me.

But first I needed to help him. He was sick, and Nigerian doctors could do nothing for him. He needed me to send money. He needed me to bring him to America. "Please, you must forgive me," he insisted.

"I'm sorry Sam," I told him, “but I have a family here to care for. I have a mom who raised us in complete poverty alone. She needs my help. I have a child you’ve never met. He needs me. Everything I have goes to my family here.

I was not lying. I didn't have money to send or to use to bring him here, none of us did. I had just done my budget for the month and after accounting for bills and food and gas, I had negative $20. Our little family survived for years off of microloans we made to each other, sending $20 or $50 back and forth that we knew would need to be returned within two weeks. I had nothing to give my father, financially or emotionally.

He tried to call a few more times. I didn't answer.

Months later I got a call from a different number in Nigeria. This time I answered. It was my brother Eze, a brother that I had never spoken with before. He was calling to tell me that our father had died. I talked with this complete stranger about the death of another complete stranger for a few minutes. I honestly don't remember any details of the conversation beyond that.

After hanging up the phone I texted my then-boyfriend.

"My dad died." I said.

He texted back, "wow, are you okay?"

"Yes." I replied.

"Okay, I'll call you later when I'm off work."

I sat in my living room and marveled at the nothing I felt. My father had just died. I would never get to know him, never get to build a relationship with him, never get to yell at him to his face or hear his explanations. There was no closure and yet this chapter was most definitely closed. I searched my body for anything, any grief or sadness, and there was nothing. And the overwhelming tragedy of that sat like a stone in my stomach.

I did stay in touch with my brother in Nigeria, much to my surprise. It was mostly due to his perseverance. He would not be ignored, and being close to my and Aham’s age, he had more ways of keeping in touch of us via social media than our older relatives did. There was not a photo we could post online that he wouldn’t comment on, not a week that would pass without an email or DM.

He sent a video of our father's funeral. He was a great man, Eze insisted, and I would see how much the community mourned him. The video arrived along with photos of our father and the family in Nigeria.

I showed mom the photos. "Wow, he looked so old." she said. He was old, and the ability to watch him get old was another thing that my mom had been denied. He was young and she was young, and then suddenly he was old and then dead.

He did look old in the picture. We didn't know how old he actually was, because he didn't seem to know. Mom said that records weren't kept that meticulously when he was born. On My birth certificate, he listed his age as 35. On my brother Aham's birth certificate, he listed his age as 33, even though my brother is 18 months younger than me.

A few days after the pictures arrived Aham called. He had found an official notification of our father's death posted online by the Nigerian House of Commons. Samuel Onwuzirike Oluo, House of Commons member from 1992-1993, had died at the age of 75.

"Seventy-five," mom said with astonishment. "That's older than my dad."

A new picture of my mom emerged with this information. Not the portrait of a weak woman clinging to delusions about a man she loved. Instead I saw the twenty-year-old college student who was lonely and scared and away from home for the first time, falling for a worldly-seeming man of 44, who promised her that she would be forever taken care of, and then abandoned her with two young children.

It was astonishing to realize that my father's passing was significant enough to be mentioned by the House of Commons. I knew he had been "in politics" as mom had said, but not that he had fulfilled his longstanding dream of being elected to office.

I went home and decided to watch the video that Eze had sent. To watch the great funeral procession to see what else might surprise me. Maybe I'd feel something.

I placed the VHS tape into the VCR and pressed play. The video started up with images of a dirt road with small buildings along it. This was not a large village, that much was clear from the opening segments. The camera blurrily panned around to focus on the coffin. Glimpses of the brightly patterned cloths of wrappas and geles whizzed past on camera before the vcr started making a weird noise and the screen turned to static. The machine let me know, through it's loud gurgles that it had found the quality of the tape lacking and had decided to eat it. I quickly got up, hit stop, and extracted the tape from the VCR, it's tape ribbon hanging out like mangled entrails. I carefully wound it back up and hit play again. The tape was again injested by the vcr. Stop, wind up the mangled ribbon, try again. After third round of gurgling noises from the machine. I gave up. I took the tape out one last time, wound it up, and placed it in the back of the movies shelf.

A few months later I graduated college and moved back closer to family with my boyfriend. The tape was lost in the move.

Eze and I began corresponding more and more. Often talking about Nigerian politics and comparing it to American politics. It felt safe to talk with him. He didn't mention our father very often, and it felt like a way to connect with this part of myself without the overwhelming expectation that usually came with any family discussion around Nigeria. One day, he mentioned that he would likely be coming to the US for an internship later that yer. I told him that if he came in the summer, he might be able to make Aham's upcoming wedding. Eze took that invitation and booked a five week visit to Seattle.

Aham and I were nervous to meet our brother. This person we didn't know, who loved us so clearly. We had no idea what to expect. Our one interaction with our father had gone so horribly wrong. What if this was a disaster? But Eze was coming whether we were ready or not. He would be staying with me and my kids until the wedding, so that Aham and his fiancé could focus on wedding planning. After the wedding, he would stay with Aham and his new wife.

After waiting for him to come through customs, our brother greeted us with a broad smile. He was short! Aham and I are both tall. Aham is 6'6 and I'm 6 feet tall. Mom had always explained our height by saying that our father's side of the family was tall. But I stood a good head taller than Eze. "I thought our family was tall!" I exclaimed and Eze laughed.

I brought my brother home and he unpacked a large suitcase full of gifts for us all. Clothing for the adults, vuvuzuelas for the kids, which I still haven't forgiven him for. My youngest, at 6, would greet the dawn by running outside in his underwear with the vuvuzuela in hand, gleefully waking the entire neighborhood.

The boys loved Eze immediately and he loved them right back. He took his role as uncle very seriously. He played games with them, gave them lengthy uncle lectures, and made them clean their room.

A few weeks after Eze arrived, Aham called me with a request. He was working on a project around Eze's arrival, a story project that he thought could be picked up by larger outlets. He had been recording conversations with mom and Eze, but wanted to record a conversation with all of us in one room. "I know you don't like to talk about dad and all that, but I think it will be a great talk, very healing," he said.

I arrived at mom's apartment with trepidation. I could smell the Nigerian food she had spent all day cooking. My mom is not a good cook, but Nigerian food, she can make. Somehow, in the few years my father and her were together, she committed the detailed recipes to memory. My mom can’t make spaghetti that anyone would want to eat, but her jollof rice could win awards. I entered her small living room and there were microphones stationed over the couch and chairs, indicating where we should sit.

For the first half hour or so mom and my brothers all talked about dad. Eze's appearance in our lives and his favorable stories of our father had validated every hope that my mom had held of our dad's greatness. I listened in silence to their stories and felt...itchy. Nothing felt right, I was hyperaware of my surroundings, of the scratchiness of the sofa beneath me, of the fullness in my stomach from the food.

Aham kept trying to draw me into conversation, but I resisted. They started talking about what dad would have done, had he lived longer. He would have been more involved with our lives. He would have come to Aham's wedding, they insisted. It was enough to finally force me into the conversation.

"I'm glad you came instead of him," I told Eze, "you being here means a lot. You aren't our dad and you aren't his mistakes. You are just our brother, so I'm glad that you came."

"Sam would have made you think otherwise," Eze replied with a chuckle.

I tried to push back, with what I knew about myself, but I was quickly cut off. I didn't know, because I didn't know our dad. He would have worn me down. He would have impressed me. He was a great man.

I gave up on trying to speak as they all talked about the overwhelming greatness of this man they all hardly knew - Eze included. Because one thing he had made clear in his earlier discussions with Aham was that our dad was not very present in his life either, even though they lived in the same area. He could count the times he had been in the same room with our dad on two hands. But he was still a great man, and somehow, magically, if given more time - maybe if he'd lived to 80 or 85 - he would have become the man they all dreamed of.

"Don't you see him in her?" mom interjected, " She doesn't know it."

Eze agreed. I've never been more insulted in my life.

I tried again.

"I don't think you understand what it's like to watch the people you love most in the world go through so much pain, because of someone who's not here. And that was my only wound. I never felt like I wish I had a dad. Never. I don't think I ever thought that. I never thought "I wish I had a dad." What I remember thinking was, "I wish my mom wasn't so heartbroken all the time, and crying all the time. And I wish that she was happy -"“

"But that's because you didn't know him," mom interrupted. Aham started to try to stop her, but she insisted on launching into a long story about how impressive our father was. How he had won over hostile people in the most difficult situations. It was a story we had heard many times before.

"I don't know what that has to do with what I was talking about," I said with frustration, when she was finished.

"He was an amazing man -" mom started.

"He was an amazing man who left his kids and sent two letters in 30 years." I insisted.

Mom started to argue again, to insist that her version of dad was the one I needed to believe in.

My eyes filled up with tears of frustration.

"Maybe this is why I'm not good at these sorts of conversations in groups," I said, "because I feel like everyone tries to make their personal reality everyone else's reality. For me, it doesn't mean anything to me what type of person he is. Because he had no part in raising me. No part at all. If anything, he was detriment to my upbringing."

I could feel my throat closing around tears as I talked. I took a breath, "And I don't want anyone to push him on me. I don't want to think anything about him. Because he chose not to be here."

"You're my brother," I said, looking at Eze, "because you're here, and you're being my brother. You're my brother."

There was silence for a few moments. Eze replied that everyone had the right to feel the way they do.

'They do!" mom agreed excitedly.

"But I tell you," Eze continued, "If Sam was here today, you probably would have been mad at him for one week, two weeks, three weeks. But he would have found his way into your heart."

Mom readily agreed. They continued conversation like I hadn't said anything. I stayed silent until Aham turned off the recording equipment. And I left quietly.

A few weeks later Aham texted to tell me that the story about our dad, about Eze's visit, was gong to be on This American Life. It was a dream come true for Aham. "Your contribution really meant a lot Ijeoma." He said to me. I didn't reply.

When Eze returned back to Nigeria, Aham made plans to visit the family there soon after. He came back from his trip gushing about his experiences. "You have to go Ijeoma," he said to me. It was beautiful. He was instantly connected to family. All they did all day was visit family, traveling all over the region to spend time with people.

I was truly happy with him. It really did seem to heal a wound in him, the wound of our father's rejection. But as he told me all of the reasons that he was certain I should go, I felt like the air was leaving the room.

"You don't know how much you need to go Ijeoma," he said, "Trust me, I know you."

After Eze moved to Seattle the following year, both brother's teamed up in their campaign to get me to go to Nigeria with them. I know that they were doing so out of love. Because it would mean so much to them to be able to experience this homecoming with me. Because they genuinely believe that it would be healing for me. But it's a love that feels like sandpaper, softly grinding away at the rough parts of me into something more smooth and placid. And it may seem like an improvement to them, but it's still a part of me that I choose to keep, whether they like it or not.

My refusal to go "back home" has been a point of contention. Not only with my family - but with just about any other Nigerian I encounter.

Let me tell you how an Uber ride on the east coast goes for me.

Driver, in Nigerian accent: "Hello! It says on here, "Ijeoma." Is that correct?"

Me, settling in, knowing what is coming next: "Yes, that is correct."

Driver, after a few minutes of silence: "Ijeoma. How did you get that name?"

Me: "From my parents."

Driver: "Do you know what that name means?"

Me trying to withhold my irritation so that I can get to my destination safely: "Yes."

Driver: "What does it mean?"

Me: "A good journey."

Driver, nodding that I do, in fact, know what my own name means: "So why do you have this name?"

Me: "My father was Nigerian."

Driver, now excited instead of suspicious: "Oh! Very good. Very good. So have you been home?"

Over the years, as my work increasingly relied upon travel, I began to greet the West African faces of my uber, lift and taxi drivers with wariness. I could tell almost immediately, from how the driver said my name when I entered the car, that instead of the opportunity to make a connection with someone of similar heritage, I was going to be interrogated with questions that always ended with "Have you been home?" Next would come a scolding lecture for the rest of the ride about how important it is that I go home. How tragic it was that I have not remained connected to my people. How my family must surely be beside themselves with grief that I have rejected them.

A few years ago I was trying to get to an event in Baltimore and couldn't get a car to save my life. After a half hour of trying only to have the driver assigned cancel at the last moment, yet again, I was finally able to secure a ride. I was flustered and exhausted and running late as I entered the car.

"It says here that your name is Ijeoma," I heard a Nigerian voice say.

Fuck.

The driver proceeded with the predictable line of questions and I was so tired and really didn't feel like being lectured. So as he started to talk about what a shame it was that I didn't go back home, I snapped.

"I'll tell you why I don't go home," I said.

I talked of the promises that my father made to his young wife. About his abandonment of his family here. About the two letters sent in 27 years. About the rejection of my brother here. About his neglect of my other brother in Nigeria. I said it all so quickly I was dizzy. Then, finished, I sat in the car, panting in silence. The driver seemed stunned.

"Waow, I can see now, why you don't go back," he finally said. "This is shameful, very shameful of your father. This is unacceptable in Nigeria, let me tell you. Nigerians don't treat their family this way. This is a disgrace. I am so sorry. On behalf of all Nigerians, I apologize for the harm your father has caused. Please forgive us."

We sat in silence for the rest of the ride while I wrestled with anger, guilt, and exhaustion. Eventually the driver stopped the car.

"We're here now. I hope that you have a beautiful evening," he said.

I got out of the car in a daze and he sped off. I looked around confused. I was in the parking lot of an apartment complex, not my event venue. I looked up the address on my phone and the venue was almost a mile away.

I sighed and started walking. No more cars for me that evening.

Despite our disagreements around dad or going to Nigeria, my brothers and I are close. I often feel like I'm not as close to them as they are to each other. But they have a lot in common and I think that their connection has helped both of them heal from some of the wounds our father left. But I love both of my brothers with all of my heart, and we do often enjoy each other's company.

Getting to know Eze over the years has been an adventure. He's a deeply emotional person who wears his heart on his sleeve, while also keeping very important details of his life secret. One day I ran into him at the theater. He was standing by the doors chatting with another theatergoer. I went up to say hi and I noticed that he had a full arm cast on one arm.

"What happened here??" I asked in alarm.

"Oh it's nothing," he said, and explained that he had broken his arm playing soccer. But a round of surgery later and he was on the mend. He couldn't see why I was making such a big deal about it.

When he's been hanging out for a few hours - especially if he's had a few drinks in him - he'll start to divulge some of his secrets though, in disturbingly casual ways.

One time we were sharing childhood photos and I noticed that a scar that he currently had on his face was not in the earlier photos.

"Oh that is because of the accident, he said," and launched into one of the most disturbing stories I've ever heard about a mass motorcycle accident he and his best friend were in where multiple people died, and his friend was left to die a very long and painful death from his injuries by neglectful and under-resourced doctors.

Some stories will involve staring down the barrel of the gun of Nigerian police officers, threatening his life for bribers, and end with him insisting that he "doesn't have time" for this, and passing their checkpoints anyway, wallet and body intact.

And sometimes, he'll talk about our father in ways that aren't glowing. I think that as he's been here and gotten some distance, and been able to connect with us - his siblings closest in age to him - he's been able to do a lot of work toward his own healing. And away from the patriarchal pressure of family that insists that you never say anything negative about your father - no matter how much negative there really is to say - he has been able to be more honest with us and himself.

My name, Ijeoma, is a classic Igbo name. I'm facebook friends with multiple Ijeomas - it's like, the “Sarah” of the Igbo community. And because of that, people assume from my name alone that my family is Igbo. That's an assumption that for most of my life I didn't challenge, because I didn't know that it was wrong.

I'm pretty sure that dad told my mom that he was Igbo, and he specifically picked an Igbo name for me. But my dad was not Igbo, he was Etche, an Indigenous community in the Niger Delta. This is something that Eze, a proud Etche man who had long been involved in Etche political activism, made sure we knew.

Sure enough, if you pull up the Wikipedia entry for the infamous 1992 government, my father is listed in there under the House of Commons: Samuel Oluo, Republican National Convention, Etche.

I don't know why he told mom that he was Igbo, that we were Igbo. Maybe it was just easier, because who outside of Nigeria even knows that Etche people exist?

But maybe it was the war.

I always knew that my father had fought in the Nigerian civil war for Biafra - the dream of a new nation in the Niger delta centered on Igbo independence from the brutal systems left over from British colonization, and from the violent oppression of Northern Nigerian power.

We don't talk about the war here in the states. We don't talk about its brutality. We don’t talk about the genocide that came with it, aided by western powers eager to secure the Niger Delta's oil, we don't talk about the millions who died.

But my mom would occasionally talk about the nightmares that would wake him screaming in the night, about the scars that she could feel up and down his back.

"I think the war was part of why he was the way he was," Eze said one evening after dinner and a few drinks.

I was thinking he was talking about the trauma of war. But no, Eze said, it was more than that. It was the shame.

"Nobody could understand why he joined the war. It was not our war," he explained. The war was being fought on our family's land, and was threatening their lives, but the war was not for Etche independence, it was for Igbo independence. And Etche people were just as persecuted by Igbo people as they were by other groups in Nigeria, if not more. But our father had decided to join the Biafran effort. Perhaps because he truly believed in the cause. Perhaps because he was an aspiring student of politics with big dreams of a prominent career. I think it was probably a mix of both.

After our father joined the war, his brother did as well, but for Nigeria. Eventually our dad's brother was captured by the Biafran army. He was tortured, and killed, Eze tells me.

The war was over after two and a half years of unimaginable brutality. Anywhere between one and six million people died. When you lose the war, the world seems less interested in counting your dead. Most who were killed were noncombatants living in the Niger Delta who were starved to death by Nigerian and British blockades that kept food and medicine out of the region for over two years.

Our father’s family was devastated by the war and the violent loss of my father's brother. And when it was all over and the dreams of a free Biafra had been crushed, my father didn't go home. Eze suspects that he couldn't face his family after all that had happened. He fled to Lagos, and then to America, where he met my mom.

I think my father really tried while he was here. I think he tried to rebuild his life and his name. I think a loving wife and two kids were meant to be a genuine part of his redemption story.

But then, in 1983, when I was only two and Aham was less than a year old, there was a coup in Nigeria. This presented political opportunity for our father. Another chance at redemption that he couldn’t pass up. He made plans to return home.

It would only be a few months, he promised. Once he was established back home, he would send for mom and us. We would all live together in Nigeria. We would have every luxury there. Mom would be the privileged wife of a very powerful man.

But the months passed and the excuses in the letters wore thin. Then the letters stopped coming altogether.

The political opportunities that my father sought didn't pan out. Eze says that his later business attempts didn't pan out either. The book he tried to write was never finished. Everything he tried would almost succeed, and then it would fail.

But when our father first arrived in Nigeria in 1983, pictures of mom, Aham and I were placed on the wall in his family home, given pride of place. Everyone knew about us. Everyone knew that he was going to be bringing us, the family in America, home.

"I think he was always trying to make it big so that he could send for you and give you all that he promised," Eze said, "but then he never did, and eventually he became ashamed. Then we weren't allowed to ask about you anymore."

Our pictures were taken off the wall.

In 1992 our father did finally achieve his lifelong dream of elected political office. But in 1993, just 10 months later, the government was dissolved in a military coup. Had he stayed in office for longer and been able to build a longer career, would he have sent for us? Would mom, after all her years of waiting, have taken Aham and I from everything we had known in America in order to fulfill her own lifelong dream?

I don't know, and I never will, because all my father is in my life is all that he wasn't.

Last week I was in discussion with Nigerian-American author Chigozie Obioma at a local bookstore, for his new book The Road To The Country. It is a stunning novel set in the Nigerian Civil War. For this book, Obioma did meticulous research and interviewed numerous veterans and survivors of the war.

The result is a book that is beautifully written and so brutal at times that it takes your breath away. We all know how it ends, on the grand scale. We know who wins and who loses this war. But in his description of the war - of the shocking violence that somehow becomes mundane, of the physical and mental weight of so much devastation – he manages to bring this massive war (the largest and most devastating war ever fought on African soil) down to a human level.

And in these stories of people enduring and committing such atrocities while the world looked on with apathy, I saw my father. I saw someone who was a part of a dream that turned into an unfathomable nightmare. I saw how there was no way he could have possibly come out of such a war unscathed. I saw someone who had seen and probably committed violence that he'd never before imagined. And someone who was determined to make it right - to make it all worth something - but he never ever could. Because what could ever make it right? We are all casualties of war.

I never felt more connected to Nigeria than I had while reading that book, even though I know that Nigeria is so much more than pain and brutality. But while I may never be able to truly understand my father and why he did what he did - even if I too, now am willing to occasionally indulge in fantasy - I do understand white supremacy. I do understand the violence of colonization. I understand what it feels like to scream out about genocide and have the world turn away from those cries.

I will probably go to Nigeria one day. Not now, likely not anytime soon. And probably not with family, at least not at first. I need to connect with the land first. To be in the place that has shaped so much of my life from across the world, without the weight of familial expectation that I've always felt on my shoulders. Perhaps I will go and I will feel nothing, like I did when my father died. And that's a particular heartbreak that I don't want witnesses to.

In discussion with Obioma about his book, he said that one of the difficulties of his book was how little Nigerians were willing to talk about the war.

"No Nigerian has mental health problems," he joked, knowing that his book had laid clear the mental and emotional tolls of war, "because we refuse to talk about them."

After this discussion I realized that my family had spent decades talking about my dad, sharing their feelings and their hopes and dreams. My brother had written about him multiple times, had even created a stage show and film about him.

And I hadn't. Outside of brief mention of him in a piece here or there, I've never willingly shared my experience or perspective about my father. Here I am, 43, a writer unafraid to say anything. And yet when I brought up my feelings around the book event up to my therapist last week, their eyes widened in surprise. I realized that I likely hadn't mentioned my father before in my years of sessions.

How Nigerian of me.