The Face: Cartography of the Void

Chris Abani

• Publisher: Restless Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781632060433
• eBook ISBN: 9781632060143
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

"A fascinating meditation on identity that explores the novelist's own mixed heritage and mixed feelings….A true citizen of the world….With great insight and compassion, Abani reveals that behind his—and every—face are unseen scars." —San Francisco Chronicle

In The Face: Cartography of the Void, acclaimed Nigerian-born author and poet Chris Abani has given us a profound and gorgeously wrought short memoir that navigates the stories written upon his own face. Beginning with his early childhood immersed in the Igbo culture of West Africa, Abani unfurls a lushly poetic, insightful, and funny narrative that investigates the roles that race, culture, and language play in fashioning our sense of self.

As Abani so lovingly puts it, he contemplates "all the people who have touched my face, slapped it, punched it, kissed it, washed it, shaved it. All of that human contact must leave some trace, some of the need and anger that motivated that touch. This face is softened by it all. Made supple by all the wonder it has beheld, all the kindness, all the generosity of life." The Face: Cartography of the Void is a gift to be read, re-read, shared, and treasured, from an author at the height of his artistic powers.

Alternately philosophical, funny, personal, political, and poetic, the short memoirs in The Face series offer unique perspectives from some of our favorite writers. Find out more at www.restlessbooks.com/the-face.

This Is True

1. My dead father and I look alike. I wear his face.
2. My father tried his whole life to be a good man.
3. My father was generous to the world and to strangers.
4. My father was stingy at home, with money and his emotions.
5. My father made strangers laugh.
6. My father and I have never laughed together.
7. My father cheated on my mother constantly.
8. My father grew up poor. His father was a houseboy for Catholic priests.
9. My father wore his father’s face.
10. My father barely spoke to his father.
11. My grandfather tried to keep my father from taking the scholarship the Church offered him.
12. At twenty-three he had never been more than a hundred miles from my town.
13. At twenty-three, my father left for the University of Cork, Ireland and later Oxford.
14. My father was the first university graduate from my town.
15. My father came back in 1956 with a white woman.
16. My father married that white woman in 1957 in my small town.
17. My father beat my mother. Often. I still carry the guilt of my helplessness.
18. My father, outside of monogamy, was the most honest man I have ever known.
19. My father made me the man I am today.
20. My father loved me even though violence was his preferred mode of affection.
21. My father was raised to be a warrior.
22. My father was a school principal.
23. My father was a member of parliament in the first republic.
24. My father was a state superintendent of schools.
25. My father was the federal commissioner for public complaints.
26. My father was a customary court chairman.
27. My father was not required to be a warrior in any of these roles.
28. My father brought the war home to us every night and fought his demons.
29. My father’s demons were his family, apparently.
30. My father tried to self-medicate, but the alcohol only made it worse.
31. My father educated me.
32. My father kept me on the straight and narrow.
33. My father taught me that, even when it hurts you and others, loyalty is absolute.
34. My father tried to beat the creative and artistic leanings out of us.
35. My father wanted us to have sensible jobs.
36. My father played jazz piano at Oxford.
37. My father is easier to love as a spirit, a ghost, than as a man.
38. My father’s face stares back at me from the mirror.
39. My father has been forgiven.

This Is Not A Sitcom

To say it is important in Afikpo for a man to have children, male children in particular, is to understate things. It is in fact essential. A man’s progress in Afikpo culture, the various titles he can take and the honor they bestow, is only possible through sons. Sons are so important that if a rich man doesn’t have a son he will “borrow” one, a surrogate, pay for his initiation into manhood, and thus advance his own status as a man who has birthed a warrior. Since girls in the old days were often married off early, the idea of lineage is only possible with sons. A woman who has sons is important; her marriage may fail, she may be a bad cook, but with sons she has status amongst women and respect from men. And so my mother, a foreigner, a white woman, became a favored adopted daughter in my father’s lineage when she gave him four sons in succession.

When a son is born, it sets off a series of rituals towards manhood. Events which not only advance the status of the son but also bring prestige to his father.

Traditionally children are born with the mother kneeling or squatting low, and the newborn touches the ground on its way out of the birth canal, cementing the connection between the birth mother and the All mother, the earth. Childbirth is an exclusive arena for women in Afikpo. Not even male herbalists or priests attend a birth unless it is absolutely essential. It is the exclusive work of women, not because it is demeaning; on the contrary, it is because it is elevating. The ability to give birth in Afikpo cosmology elevates women to the level of the creator. It is a moment of primordial con...

Table of contents

• Threshold
• Caveat
• A Slow Violence
• Orientation
• Photographs
• Call
• Face Value
• The Performance
• On Beauty
• This Is True
• This Is Not A Sitcom
• Text Message
• To Chew Pepper
• Lavender
• The Terrain
• This Is Hope
• Pater Nostra
• The Architecture of Loss
• This May Not Be True
• Truce
• Coda
• Comfort
• About the Author
• Colophon