And suddenly, you want to hear his voice.
One evening in Enugu, I rang up my father. I hoped to hear a softness in his voice. It had been months since we had spoken. Earlier that day, when I got home from work, my mother told me he had called her to say he was hurt that I hadn’t reached out in so long, especially since I was his first son.
“Why don’t you call your father?” my mother had asked in a soft voice you would think she were on the verge of tearing up. “Onyebu, he’s still your father, no matter what.”
Yet I wasn’t completely shocked to catch the stiffness in his tone as I greeted him. You see, my father wasn’t the sort of person to wear his emotions on his skin or in his voice. Although there were exceptions — when he was enraged, and his eyes bristled with the colour of hot coals, or when he laughed until his eyes misted.
“Ehe!”
“How are you, sir? How’s work?” I asked.
He responded in a mirthless voice, “We thank God. He’s always faithful.”
I allowed my imagination to run wild, picturing a moment when the hardness in his voice thawed, and his dark face softened, until he cleared his throat and began to ask how I was, how I had been coping with my mother away from him. Or, at the very least, how my day was. I wanted him to ask me about my job, to offer some advice or consolation after I whined about the pressures and frustrations of teaching at a private school and the salary that finished even before it arrived.
Instead, he said, “Hope you’re still going to work. Continue o.”
The rest of his words were promises and assurances that he was still working hard to get me a better job in Abuja, that I should keep both faith and hope alive, and that soon things would fall in place.
The call ended.
Still wearing my office clothes and shoes, I sighed and fell face down on the bed.
Maybe I wasn’t disappointed that my father, who held one of the prestigious positions at the Ministry of Solid Minerals Development, Abuja, couldn’t successfully cast the net of his influence into the deep and get a better job for me, and had been feeding me with only promises for some time now. After all, he had succeeded in giving me the required university education, and he wasn’t under any obligation to get me a job. Maybe I was disappointed in myself and angry at the same time for the bridge that existed between my father and me, this bridge that had created an awkwardness in the way we communicated, my inability to see my father beyond a man saddled with the responsibility of providing for his family.
Beyond fatherhood, I wanted to see him as a man with real tender emotions.
…
Somewhere in your subconscious mind, a dark version of him is unearthed.
Growing up, I saw my father through the lens of rage. It was easier for me to carve out this single perspective of him because he was always upset, always shouting when things were moved from their positions.
Once, he raised his voice and accused everyone of taking his money, which he had kept under a neatly arranged pile of clothes in his wardrobe. That day, my father charged around the house and set it aflame with his fury. We were forced to search every nook and cranny of our bungalow until he found it himself, under his bed. He didn’t apologise to anyone. But it was the first time I caught a glimpse of something the shape of guilt in his eyes, in his clasped hands. Sweat beads drowned his face and chest as he averted his eyes from us like a child caught stealing from his mother’s purse, then ordered us to leave his room.
When our father descended on my siblings and me with a whip or punished us for certain unruly behaviours, it appeared as though he was determined to scrub away our offences from our bodies, like he was trying to exert his authority over us rather than correct us out of love. Sometimes, he made us sit in the air for hours until our faces were coated with sweat and we began to cry from the pain burning up our waists; but he threatened to whip us if we wiped the sweat off our faces or straightened our backs. Other times, the punishments were milder as we knelt on the floor, closed our eyes, and raised our hands above our heads. We remained this way until he was ready to bring the whip on our backs.
And yet, for strange reasons, I wasn’t so bothered or angry with him or his methods of pruning us into obedience. Maybe because he gave us sweets and biscuits, as if to buy our forgiveness.
But I became infuriated when my parents’ quarrels translated from the usual verbal outburst into a fierce physical combat, where they hit each other like enemies reenacting an old feud. I was probably thirteen at the time, and I couldn’t help but envision my father in that light. Even when we spent a few weekends before the TV, watching WWE, I turned to my father often, and was certain that the smile on his face, the thunderbolt of his laughter, was a ruse to conceal his true nature, which was a warped sense of bitterness and anger.
But even then, I didn’t see my mother as a good person. Even though I sometimes rushed into the scene to protect her from my father’s rage, becoming the speed-bag that received all the blows intended for her, I only viewed her as a weakling, a woman who couldn’t stand up for herself — a woman who seemed to surrender too quickly and easily to defeat, rather than seeing every challenge as a door to something better.
At the time, my mother had been disengaged from active service as a secondary school bursar, and I saw another version of her I hadn’t known. She appeared comfortable in her suffering, almost used to the smallness of her life, the routine of sleeping and waking up, making our meals and sitting all day before the screen, watching Africa Magic and Telemundo.
My puerile twelve-year-old mind couldn’t imagine a scenario where my mother was perhaps unhappy with her joblessness, her inability to execute the things she once seamlessly did, to afford her personal needs and restock the house with foodstuffs without waiting for my father to take on that responsibility.
There were days when my father’s face took on a darker hue as he complained about our ravenous eating habits. But he was mostly angry about the empty tins of milk and Milo on the dining table near the kitchen door — tins he had bought just days ago.
“Just imagine. Who eats like this, for God’s sake? Am I raising animals here or human beings?” he protested, turning both tins this way and that.
My siblings and I stood at a safe distance, heads bowed and hands folded behind us, while our mother stood in a corner near the kitchen door. I felt a pang of pity and shame at the same time, but it was only a childlike guilt that wore off the minute he stepped out of the house. I scampered into the room, shrugging my shoulders as if nothing had happened. The following week, he returned home with brand-new tins of milk and Milo. We devoured them within two weeks.
…
Life will humble you.
Many years later, when I began to live with my mother in Enugu and foot some of the house bills and cater for myself, I discovered that sometimes being responsible came with risks and a burden that couldn’t be adequately explained, except they were experienced. My father didn’t have to teach me how he shouldered, and still shoulders, his responsibilities all those years. Life has a way of making you learn the most significant things through lived experiences.
Often, I would return home to discover that the yams I had bought a few days ago were gone, cooked and eaten. Every day, my bank account balance plummeted below my expectations. Despite my meticulous calculations, I couldn’t completely account for the debits and how I had spent my salary. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t complain to anyone. And perhaps, like my father, I bottled up my pain and anger whenever my mother complained that there was no food in the house.
There was one time she asked what I was doing with my salary. If I was incensed by her question, I didn’t show it. I only smiled and looked away. For Christ’s sake, didn’t she notice my little efforts at home — the yams and potatoes in the storeroom, the fish in the refrigerator, the bottles of palm oil and groundnut oil? Didn’t they count as something? Maybe she had every right to ask, but I felt hopeless even in my rage and sadness.
…
Take the time and patience to view him from multiple prisms.
At times, in our rage, we’re limited by our knowledge of people. We only permit ourselves to view them from a single prism. As such, we carry in our minds an ugly version of them, congealing into one-sided and often biased opinions of them. And this is perhaps the danger of a single story — you run the risk of presenting an aspect of the truth and not the whole truth.
For years, I had imagined my father as a dictator, a man who couldn’t feel anything else beyond his anger, so that I had misinterpreted every ray of joy, every moment of intense laughter as a subterfuge to hide his truest nature.
I wish I truly understood my parents, especially my father. I wish I had looked beyond his flaws, my own rage and sadness, and learned to tolerate him, like some of my siblings did, to be kind and gentle with him when he failed to love me the way I wanted, to grant me the space I needed to talk to him, to laugh with him.
With my father, I sometimes felt neglected and jealous, especially when he permitted my immediate younger brother to follow him on most of his evening outings, my brother shoving the details of their itinerary in my face the minute they returned home. What endeared my brother to my father? Did he feel a sense of safety around my brother, a tendency to be vulnerable, to trust my brother with certain secrets? Or did my brother try to see him differently, relating with him first as a person and then as a parent who had authority over him?
…
Look carefully in the mirror, you’re probably an offshoot of your resentments.
The first time I hit a girl, I was in junior secondary school two, and I was thirteen. I don’t remember what exactly led to the fleeting argument between us, but I recall how swiftly the conflict reached a boiling point and began to froth. I landed my palm on her face, and she retaliated almost immediately, slapping me back. Infuriated by the cackle of students around me and the demeaning realisation that a girl had hit me, I lurched at her with another slap, stamping the board duster on her face.
Almost at the same time, I retreated as she glared at me. I didn’t know why I scuttled out of the classroom, even when she was eager for reprisal, bounding towards me and flailing her hands. Perhaps I had glimpsed something else in her eyes — a helplessness that reminded me of my mother.
Although I haven’t completely gotten over the guilt of that ugly experience, I believe that writing this essay is a way of looking into the mirror, of seeing how different from my father I am.
Maybe on my father’s end, he wished he didn’t have to hit my mother every time they had a major dispute or disagreement. Maybe, beyond the woman who seldom provoked him, he saw someone else crumpled on the floor, blocking her face with her hands, a woman broken and helpless, a woman he had sworn before God and people to love and protect.
At times, I wonder what my father thought of me whenever I stood in the way of his punches, road-blocking them from landing on my mother. Did he see me as a traitor for taking my mother’s side? Or was he confronted by the image of tenderness that he had repressed in himself for so long? Perhaps embedded in all that heat of fury was a boy clothed in meekness and compassion, too, begging to be released.
…
Picture him first as a child.
Before he became a man, my father was a child who must have regarded the world with curiosity and wonder. His hometown, Ehugbo, must have shaped his understanding of relationships and marriage. Born into a polygamous family, my father must have witnessed different shades of love from his biological mother and stepmother, the fights between both women, between siblings and stepsiblings. He grew up with his father but never quite felt his presence. Maybe because my grandfather was always shuttling between menial jobs to survive, or maybe because he was inept at love, too, his affection springing from moral obligation rather than warmth. My father must have unconsciously absorbed this.
There is a masculinity my father inherited from his bloodline — a system that accommodates a man’s excesses while undermining women in the family, workspace, and sacred places. This showed in how he advised my brothers and me to be firm and wear a mean face when dealing with women, that nobody would take a man who was too cheerful seriously.
In Masculinity in Things Fall Apart, Nidhi Singh argues that Igbo society divides people, things, and actions into male and female, constantly distancing the two. This is true not just in Igbo society but across Nigerian cultural groups. From a tender age, boys are taught that their opinions are always valid, that they are above women, regardless of social rank.
Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart represents the average Igbo man steeped in tradition: dogged, broad-shouldered, resolute. He passes down masculine stories of bloodshed and war to his son Nwoye, who begins discarding his mother’s stories about the tortoise and tenderness to embrace his father’s macabre tales. Thrilled by their violence, Nwoye grows into a man with a warped understanding of life, one who sees nothing wrong with beheading for sport, who strikes his wife, apologises, and does it again, because he thinks forgiveness comes without a cost.
…
Listen to the mirror.
The mirror says I have more than just my father’s oblong forehead, wide-apart eyes, and flat nose. It says I’m a spitting reflection of his frailties. So, I cross-match my weaknesses and failures with his own and judge myself with equal severity as I would him. I haven’t trodden the path of sainthood to proclaim myself infallible, and it would be unfair to completely judge my father. He stifled his dreams just to accommodate ours. He didn’t further his studies when he had the chance because he was thinking of us. I didn’t come from a wealthy home, but I can’t remember a day passing without us enjoying three square meals. Even when my father wasn’t paid for almost twelve months — as was the case at that time with many workers at the national iron ore mining company, Itakpe — we didn’t go to bed on empty stomachs. Supplies kept coming, the storeroom was restocked with yams, bags of rice and beans, and yet none of us bothered to ask our parents how these items appeared in the house.
My father was also a jovial man whose jokes compelled you to laugh even when you didn’t want to. And yet, I allowed my anger and pain to take up the rooms in my heart meant for him, making it almost impossible to look at him with the unfathomable love and affection he deserved.
…
Look beyond his fallibilities and learn to love him.
I now treat my parents with kindness, pardoning them when their behaviours and approach towards life appear rigid, almost archaic. I don’t hold it against my father anymore when he offends me and fails to tender an apology, or when my mother complains about the slowness of my life, expecting everything good to fall into place at the same speed.
When my father doesn’t ring my phone for a week, I don’t wait for him to call, because it’s unlikely to happen. I call him, and let him fuss about his day, and sometimes, about my mother, who had provoked him moments before I called. I have learnt to listen more and not judge him, partly because age has devoured his youth, colouring his hair and beard grey, and I’m afraid of losing them to death’s grip, and because I want to be in the same space with him, to understand and love him from the perspective of a person, not just a parent. I’m learning to give him presents, not just on his birthday, to the same degree as I would give my mother.
He may not verbalise his gratitude like my mother, the way I want, but I revel in my small acts of kindness, in the hope that I’ll be fortunate enough to do bigger things for him. ♦
Gerald Onyebuchi Ewa is a writer from Ebonyi State, Nigeria. His works revolve around queerness, feminism, religion, and environmental justice. A finalist in the 2024 Gerald Kraak Prize, he was shortlisted for the Dream Foundry Contest for Emerging Speculative Fiction Writers in 2025. His works have been published in Isele, Ubwali, Oyster River Pages, Meetinghouse, Naira Stories Magazine, and elsewhere. His short story collection is coming in July, 2026 from Win’s Books Publishing.
