At CORA Book Trek, Uche Nwokedi Unveils Memoir

Yinka Olatunbosun

A rare moment of engagement was witnessed at the May edition of the monthly literary series CORA Book Trek, held on May 31 at Roving Heights Bookstore in Landmark Place, Oniru, Victoria Island. The evening reading and review session featured Uche Nwokedi’s debut memoir, ‘A Shred of Fear.’ The book review session attracted the friends and associates of the author as well as prominent members of the literary and arts communities, including culture activists Jahman Anikulapo, Wale Ojo, and Sandra Mbanefo-Obiago.

The CORA BookTrek, a fortnightly author-audience interface, is a book culture in Lagos that helps to deepen literary appreciation and audience engagement with the published text.

In an atmosphere of banter and book signing, the senior advocate and author, Nwokedi, read copiously from his book, ‘A Shred of Fear’. The memoir is a childhood account of survival and hope through the trauma of war.

He was seven when the war began, and he and his family would spend the next three years as refugees in their own country. The book brings dramatic events vividly to life as it tells a compelling tale of courage through a dark period.

Anchored by Nigerian writer, journalist, and Secretary General of the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA), Toyin Akinosho, the author fielded questions from the audience. In his introductory remarks, the author admitted to being slightly nervous at the start of the book-reading session.

“My training and practice as a lawyer allow me to be calm,’’ he began. “I was invited by Wale Ojo to contribute a chapter to the compilation of stories that we were writing about children in the Biafran war. I did my 5000 words and read it to Wale. He said, ‘This should be a book.’ I was committed to the project. Two years later, they hadn’t finished the book. The book was something I discussed with my family and my wife. She is also an avid reader. She would say, ‘What can you remember? What smell can you remember?’ I started to think of the sound and smell, and the memories came back. My challenge was to tell it in a way that people would grasp. Each chapter has an epigraph. That is another layer of storytelling. That epigraph is taken from something that speaks to the war.”

Nwokedi further gave an insight into the socio-political context of the work and the layers of inference embedded in it.

“As some of you might know or may not know, Christopher Okigbo was part of the creative group that Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe were a part of at the University of Ibadan. One of the things that led me to start researching his poetry was a book I read. I read Ali Mazrui’s ‘The Trial of Christopher Okigbo’ in my A-levels. When I read the book, I disliked the man. He concluded in the book that Christopher Okigbo died for a needless cause. When I read the poem ‘Elegy for Alto’ by Okigbo, written shortly before he died, it was a prophetic poem where he talked about military rule.”

The author admitted that no one actually prepares for war. It is usually the climax of a series of conflicts in the country. The conversation in the room revolved around the issues of memory, fidelity to the truth, trauma, and healing. Nwokedi revealed that while writing the book, his older siblings remembered some of the war accounts that he had forgotten but decided not to include them in the book. For him, the idea was to tell his own side of the story that he still remembers.

With reference to the Egyptian pilots mentioned in the book and the role they played in the Nigerian Civil War, Akinosho remarked that much effort is needed in the understanding of sociology in Nigeria.

The author, who is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, is a principal counsel at Uche Nwokedi & Co. Aside from being a reputable lawyer, Nwokedi is also a playwright and producer. His play, ‘Kakadu the Musical, is one of the earliest world-class musicals of the 2000s and the first Nigerian musical to be staged in South Africa’s largest theatre hall in Johannesburg. He is the creator and producer of EVE, a now-rested weekly legal soap opera that ran for three seasons.

Earlier this year, CORA featured the works of three authors at the BookTreks, including Vincent Maduka’s REEL LIFE: My Years Managing Public Service Television; Simon Kolawole’s Fellow Nigerians: It’s All Politics; and Musikilu Mojeed’s The Letterman: Inside the ‘Secret’ Letters of former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo.