Ejine Olga Nzeribe, Flora Nwapa: This Book Must be Written

Ibadan: Kraft Books, 2024, 207

ISBN: 978-9-7891-8 837-6

Flora Nwapa: This Book Must be Written is a comprehensive compilation of the life and times of Florence Nkeiruka Nwanzuruahu Nwapa, commonly referred to as Flora Nwapa, by her first daughter, Ejine Olga Nzeribe. Her story of Flora Nwapa is a narration about and a conflation of good life, exotic pedigree, sound and timely education, sophisticated socialization in the family, society and career, as well as a glamorous personal carriage. Nzeribe's book is segmented into eight chapters, which highlight specific aspects of Nwapa's life. Consistent with the subject of the narration, Nzeribe does not use the regular sub-titles and chapter titles that are common in biographies, such as “birth”, “parentage”, “education”, “challenges”, “career”, etc. Rather, the subtitles seem to be peculiar to this book; they include “The Important Things”, “Getting Things Done”, “Invincible Women”, “Service and Community”, “The Other Things”, “The Downsides”, “Memories”, and “She Lives On!” Interestingly, Nzeribe begins each chapter with a quotation that is related and significant to the chapter title. The title of this book, Flora Nwapa: This Book Must be Written, with the modal verb “must”, prefigures both the obligatory and audacious resolve to publicize the life story of Flora Nwapa. It essentially corresponds with Nzeribe's explanation that efforts were made in the past since the demise of Flora Nwapa to write her biography, but none succeeded. In 1995, two years after her passing, Nzeribe, along with her mother's close friends, Prof. Akachi Ezeigbo and Dr. Nina Mba, decided to write a book on Nwapa. They held meetings, and planned out the book's structure, and assigned roles accordingly.

IHS [Jesus]

The account of Robert Browne,2 draper, Richard Curson, Thomas Spencer3 & Alex[ander] … 4, taylor, Proctors5 of the Church of St James of Louth, all receipts and expenses on Sunday the Octave of Easter 1527 until the Octave of Easter 1528.

Item received of churchwardens year afore of money good & ill – 60s 11d.

Sum.

Item received 2nd Sunday after Easter – 4s 5d.

Item received 3rd Sunday after same – 4s 2d.

Item received 4th Sunday after same – 4s 3d.

Item received 5th Sunday after same – 3s 4d.

Item received Sunday after Ascension of our Lord – 3s 8d.

Item received Sunday Pentecost – 3s 10d.

Item received Trinity Sunday – 5s 5d.

Item received 1st Sunday after – 2s 1d.

Item received 2nd Sunday after – 3s 1d.

Item received 3rd Sunday after – 3s 7d.

Item received 4th Sunday after Relike Sunday3 – 4s 2d.

Item received 5th Sunday after – 3s 10d.

Item received 6th Sunday after – 3s 3d.

Item received 7th Sunday after – 3s 2d.

“To the concerts trooped all Jerusalem Society, English, Jewish and Arab and Jerusalem was often full of distinguished visitors.” Thus did the violinist Margery Bentwich describe the first seasons of the Jerusalem Music Society, which she founded in 1921 together with her sister Thelma, a cellist, based on the model of the South Place Institute concerts in London, where they regularly performed trios with the young Myra Hess in the years before their immigration to British Mandate Palestine in 1920. In their chamber music performances, the sisters, who had performed under Henry Wood at the 1918 Proms, were partnered by such international virtuosi such as Stefan Ashkenaze (a Tchaikovsky trio in 1924), Schnabel (Beethoven and Schubert 1934), and Huberman. The society's admirably multicultural accessibility, while attesting to the “universal” aspect of music, belied its Eurocentric orientation. Yet over a century later, one may appreciate a transformation in the repertoire of Israeli art and popular musics, responding to the challenge of balancing regional and global influences, in a multiethnic and multicultural synthesis that has evolved from the early encounters with the East.

It is a development which has paralleled the increasing centrality of world music since the 1980s and a climate of postmodernist experimentation with traditions and sounds from different cultures in new combinations distanced from the Eurocentric auto-exoticism of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

There once was a matchmaker who arranged what turned out to be a very happy marriage. Sadly, the husband died all too early, leaving behind a distraught wife. At the burial ceremony, the deceased man's wife could be heard sobbing in the most heartrending way, and eventually she had to be restrained from throwing herself into the open grave. The matchmaker happened to be present and offered to carry out the ancient mourning ritual of rending the widow's garments. First, he tried to comfort the young wife, counseling her: “You have to accept the workings of providence.” Then he asked: “Tell me if I should rip your garments from the front or the back.” The woman wailed and cried: “Why should I care? What use is my life now? Cut wherever you like, it's all the same to me. The world has no more meaning for me.” “The thing is,” continued the matchmaker, “If I rip from the back, you won't be allowed to marry again.” “Marry?” the wife wailed without stopping, “Who could think of marrying? My happiness is gone. The world has no value any more for me … Still, I’d rather you cut from the front then.”1

This short story was one of many that journalist and ethnologist Binjamin Segel cited to explain “The Forms of Jewish Folk Humor” in an article from 1911. Perhaps readers are encouraged to wryly shake their heads at this widow's apparently insincere expression of grief.

‘Nymphs, i.e., goddesses of springs and their care, were introduced in this way, and at last, Lares and Penates inhabited the earth, so to speak, as familiar gods.’ With these words, Michael Suchenschatz, professor of Sacred Scripture at the Faculty of Theology at Vienna, mentioned Roman mythology while commenting on the Gospel of Luke during the 1410s. Times were turbulent in Central Europe, burdened with the Hussite wars and preoccupation with heresies; yet no other biblical commentary at the University of Vienna looked so far afield for inspiration and became so absorbed in extra-theological material as did Suchenschatzʼs. Both its approach and its extent render his exegetical enterprise perplexing. Instead of offering traditional authorities and interpretations on Scripture, Suchenschatz includes lengthy analyses of pagan mythology, astrology, oneiromancy, geomancy, necromancy, and demonic magic to interpret the miracles and deeds of Jesus in the Gospels. While all this seems to fit the older impact of pagan learning and craving for ‘novelty’ in Bible commentaries, in Suchenschatzʼs exegetical work it comes close to jeopardising the framework of both the genre and the theological project. Commentaries on Peter Lombard's Sentences, which were also taught at the universities and integrated new concepts and arguments, mainly from philosophy, did not introduce such controversial elements. Peter Lombard himself alluded to a nymph only once, in his commentary on the Psalms.

The change in the second half of the nineteenth century to a ‘positivist’ view of nature in European society is not the end of organicist thinking, for one notes that organicism reasserts its influence in the advanced scientific notions of the twentieth century. In his chapter ‘The Cosmic Joy of the New Science’, science writer and historian Peter Marshall describes the turn in the twentieth century to a science that connects us once again to nature:

Similar to what was experienced in the early nineteenth century when nature was viewed as an infinite source of becoming, the new modern science returns us to a view of nature that redefines separate areas of knowledge in an attempt to connect them all into one grand theory, a theory for everything (TOE). In both his special theory of relativity (1904) and general theory of relativity (1915), Einstein proclaimed that the so-called fixed laws of nature – e.g., those that govern gravity, velocity, space, mass, energy and time – are not universal or fixed but relative to one another through an observer. In a sense, the observer redefines the reality of the surrounding environment through an active integration of the world being observed – a perspective that is wonderfully defined in the thought experiment ‘Schrödinger's Cat’.

Bursting out of a parcel that rests on a library trolley in a museum store¬room, this is how a naked Percy Grainger, whipping himself and posing for photographic self-portraits, opens Thérèse Radic's 1982 A Whip Round for Percy Grainger: (A Serious Comedy in Two Acts). This play, produced for Grainger's centenary year and published by Yackandandah Playscripts two years later, provides a largely chronological retelling of Grainger's life, pre¬sented in a heightened, almost melodramatic manner. In moving through a nearly eighty-year timespan, this play engages in remarkable depth with archival materials, often quoting letters and correspondence by Grainger and his friends and family verbatim. Much of the humour is derived from the earnestness of Grainger's written expression, presented in sharp jux¬taposition to his personal eccentricities and an often ludicrous framing of many of the events of his life.

Ilse Aichinger's “Spiegelgeschichte” (Story in a Mirror), written in 1948–49 and published in 1953, is the very short story of a young woman who dies following an illegal abortion. The nameless woman, who lost her mother as a child and had to help raise her younger brothers, begins a relationship with a young man, and after giving in to his pressure to have sex, she becomes pregnant. Unable to deal with the situation, the young man merely utters the name of the street on which a known abortionist resides. The woman undergoes the abortion procedure alone and in unsanitary conditions; after developing sepsis, she dies slowly and painfully, again alone, in a hospital bed. The story can be—and has been—read as a sad tale of a poor girl who got herself in trouble and paid with her life. The narrator's concluding words, “Still! Las sie reden!” (74, “Quiet! Let them talk!” 70) has been understood by most as an appeal for the acceptance of fate. Conversely, I believe that the story's impact lies precisely in its angry refusal let the woman be a victim and a corpse. I argue that the temporal reversal and the angry tone within the secondperson narration, beyond condemning the circumstances that lead to the botched abortion, create an emancipatory trajectory for its protagonist that is tied to a critique of patriarchy and of realism, and our interpretation has to contend with both.

In July 1733 Francisque went to Brussels to hire the Théâtre de la Monnaie for the winter season of 1733–4. On 3 August, he signed a detailed contract with the manager of La Monnaie, Jean-Baptiste Meeus, who, having no resident company, regularly let the theatre to French and Flemish touring companies. The contract, preserved in the Archives Générales du Royaume in Brussels, shows that Francisque was granted permission:

In a lengthy passage in the History of King Richard III, Thomas More described an interesting historical figure, a woman he calls Shore's Wife. More reflected on the London mercer's wife's journey from her city shop to King Edward IV's bed, the royal mistress's life at court, her good deeds, and her final disgrace during Richard III's reign. He dwelt on the character of Shore's Wife – she was witty, merry, and well-spoken, able to both read and write, intelligent and politically astute enough to become the king's special confidante – and he also noted her exceptionally good looks. At the end of this passage, however, More anticipated censure from prospective readers, who might think that the story of a mere woman of questionable morals would hardly fit alongside the dynastic battles, military heroics and political manoeuvrings that he was otherwise interested in:

As the strains of ‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’ died away and the cries of the seabirds were stilled, listeners to Radio 4 were presented with a presenter who was facing something of a problem. The host in question was Sue Lawley, the date was 4 November 1990, the show was Desert Island Discs, and her difficulty was how to introduce a guest. ‘My castaway this week is – well, what is he?’ she began. ‘His list of achievements is considerable, but they don't make it easy to define the man.’ He was, she went on, ‘A perfect example of a very British kind of person: historian, academic, public servant, and man of duty.’ This was Noel Annan, Lord Annan: intellectual historian; prolific reviewer; broadcaster and chair of an influential committee on the future of broadcasting; a past provost of King's College Cambridge and then University College London; a life peer and sometime vice-chancellor of the University of London; a former chairman of trustees at the National Gallery and president of the London Library; one-time director at the Royal Opera House and trustee of the British Museum. Annan was the panjandrums’ panjandrum, ‘the epitome of the Great and Good’, as his Times obituary would later put it.

When a young fellow of King’s, Annan's distinctive persona and plummy tones led his students to coin the term ‘Boommanship’.