Kachifo

Let dawn come

I'm excited to share that the paperback version of my poetry collection 'You Used to Live Here' is now available for sale on Amazon. Please grab copies and leave an Amazon review. Thank you!

https://mybook.to/getYouUsedtoLiveHere

At the end of a phone call with his aunt, my son forgot what to respond to 'kachifo'. I whispered for him to respond 'ka'obo'. Again, I was reminded that when Igbos say 'Good night', we don't even mention the night. Instead we talk about chi, the dawn (interestingly, chi can also translate to ‘god’ or ‘God’). So when we say 'good night' in Igbo, we say—‘whatever happens after we part, let dawn come’. And the response reiterates the greeting in other words.

It's fascinating how much is said in so few words. How the Igbos see the purpose of nights as to birth dawns.

There's an Igbo proverb—'mgbe onye ji tetee bu ututu ya'—which translates to 'whenever one wakes up is their morning'. So even though people in the same time zone share common nights and daybreaks, in Igbo thought, each person has their very own proverbial day. Some people sleep long through life, some people live in summer afternoons. Some people alternate between night and day. In this proverbial day, the clock is at the mercy of the person and not the other way around. So you get to stay in the night and you get to call your own morning when you wake up.

One advice I got in 2024 that stuck with me was from two friends I've known for maybe 15 years. And they don't even know each other. I don't remember their exact words but at different times, they said something like — ‘what does it matter if you have to count and recount your teeth with your tongue and rehearse even the little things just so that you don't say or do something others might judge as less than perfect?’ Little by little as you adjust, readjust and worry yourself sick about what people think, you unwittingly shed those parts of you you should keep and keep those parts you should shed. And you may be too busy—too stuck in the night—to even notice. You forget who you are, who you want to be, as long as you convince yourself that other people think you are good. You can't spend time with the stranger you have become, so you find background noise to fill even those pockets of time life gives you to spend with yourself, those little opportunities for the onset of dawn.

Something started to break in me one summer night in 2024, while on a cheap airplane, unable to sleep or to find comforting distractions. I was forced to sit with me—a house seemingly well kept but inside choking full of cluttered emotions picketing for attention. That breaking thing might be dawn. It might be too early to call morning but I think the breaking is ongoing; tears now find slight excuses to fill my eyes, gratitude comes easier, the voice in my head is getting kinder. And I can see beyond the thinning fog that the people and things that truly matter are privileges that bless beyond comprehension.

Here's a wish for 2025—stay with yourself, kachifo!