Playing the Music of Dead Men
How did I get entangled with someone who couldn’t say my name correctly? Brenda came to me from the place where the word awkward was first mentioned. I’ve tried to convince myself that what I feel towards her isn’t exactly love. Not lust either. Maybe something in-between.
Things get more awkward each time she dances to dancehall or rap, and suddenly stops to wrap her hands around my neck and look into my eyes. It has been reassuring, this gesture, as though she shares my thoughts and strives to convince me that we aren’t a mismatch. But I think we are two extremes struggling to fit into one emotional space. It hurts when I think that music, with all its overwhelming emotional force and spirit, is our primary object of difference. She loves almost all pop-genres save blues and soul. To her, I am the one who plays the cartoon music of dead men.
Before I met Brenda, I’d never thought of myself as someone who plays the music of dead men. It means nothing to Brenda that I play piano works of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. The highly-rated, technically-demanding works of these composers are nothing more than film music for cartoons to her. ‘These men died decades ago. Forget about them,’ she would say. She jokes about how people who compose and play my kind of music are cursed with long unpronounceable names like mine. This is the part that worries me the most.
This will be the sixth week and her sixth visit to my place since we met at a poetry reading in Atlantic City. I had gone to read a new poem I had written about a knuckle-cracking piano work of Rachmaninoff’s that had left me saddened because I was unable to play it after several attempts. It is strange how I feel that writing a poem about a failed attempt at something would somehow make me feel better. It never works. But I still do it anyway. I was welcomed on stage with applause, and laughter, after my name was mispronounced for the umpteenth time by Jon, the event anchor. I had spent some time teaching Jon how to say my name correctly. Yet, he managed to say ‘Delunechoku’ instead of ‘Delunebechukwu’. Everyone knew he hadn’t said my name correctly. Even though none of them could pronounce it either. Once, Jon had asked me to use my last name instead. I wrote my last name on his list of performers. He looked at it and shook his head slowly. How can someone who couldn’t say Delunebechukwu be able to say Mmaduaburochukwu? That must have been the day he gave up learning to say my name. I think about this sometimes and I’m tempted to agree with Brenda that a long name is a curse. In my case, my first and last names—being too complex for weak foreign tongues—may be something worse than curses.
I finished the reading and raised my head to applause from the audience. One girl did not applaud. She sat cross-legged on the second row, looking unimpressed the entire evening.
After the reading I walked up to her.
‘Hi, good evening. My name is Delunebechukwu.’
‘Brenda Bernard. You can call me BB.’
We shook hands. My eyes stopped on a rose tattoo on her right arm. I complimented her tattoo and she managed a little smile, as though she was doing me a favor. She had the aura of someone who was hardly impressed by anyone or anything. I could have just walked out of the gallery and headed home. Instead, I felt the urge to satisfy my curiosity by asking what she thought about my performance. ‘I’m not really a fan of poetry’, she said, and continued talking about how she had to escort an old friend to the reading. She had lived in Atlantic City for over eighteen years but it was her first time at the gallery. I introduced myself as a pianist and graduate scholar at Stockton University. Our conversation steered towards her musical choices and her penchant for dancing. That was the moment she came alive. I was about to answer her question on the kind of piano music I play when a tall lanky guy walked up to us. I recognized him as one of the poets who had read that evening. He had read a poem about ice-cream, chocolates, and a dancer lost in a song.
‘Oh, meet Bob Jones. We were classmates in high school. He brought me here to listen to him read from his forthcoming collection,’ Brenda said. We shook hands.
‘I enjoyed your poem, man,’ Bob said. ‘Where are you from?’
‘Mays landing,’ I said.
‘No, I mean originally.’
‘Nigeria.’
‘That’s cool. What’s your name again?’
‘Delunebechukwu’
‘Oh my days! That’s a paragraph right there. How many letters now? Twenty?’
‘No.’
‘So, what does it mean?’
‘Stay calm and focus on God.’
‘Wow! That’s way too cool, man. Too cool. For me, it is more like “stay calm and do not forget to say my name correctly” or something like that.’ He laughed and nodded, willing us to join him. We didn’t. He continued: ‘But you know it’s damn too difficult to say right?’
‘No. You haven’t even made an attempt’
‘Right. Right. That’s true. But what’s the short way to say it?
I ignored the question.
He swallowed hard and excused himself.
I exchanged contacts with Brenda and promised to call.
1 Comment
Four pages of interesting story.