The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling

* * *

Jijingi wanted to write down some of the stories of where the Tiv people came from, but the storytellers spoke rapidly, and he wasn’t able to write fast enough to keep up with them. Moseby said he would get better with practice, but Jijingi despaired that he’d ever become fast enough.

Then, one summer a European woman named Reiss came to visit the village. Moseby said she was “a person who learns about other people” but could not explain what that meant, only that she wanted to learn about Tivland. She asked questions of everyone, not just the elders but young men, too, even women and children, and she wrote down everything they told her. She didn’t try to get anyone to adopt European practices; where Moseby had insisted that there were no such thing as curses and that everything was God’s will, Reiss asked about how curses worked, and listened attentively to explanations of how your kin on your father’s side could curse you while your kin on your mother’s side could protect you from curses.

One evening Kokwa, the best storyteller in the village, told the story of how the Tiv people split into different lineages, and Reiss had written it down exactly as he told it. Later she had recopied the story using a machine she poked at noisily with her fingers, so that she had a copy that was clean and easy to read. When Jijingi asked if she would make another copy for him, she agreed, much to his excitement.

The paper version of the story was curiously disappointing. Jijingi remembered that when he had first learned about writing, he’d imagined it would enable him to see a storytelling performance as vividly as if he were there. But writing didn’t do that. When Kokwa told the story, he didn’t merely use words; he used the sound of his voice, the movement of his hands, the light in his eyes. He told you the story with his whole body, and you understood it the same way. None of that was captured on paper; only the bare words could be written down. And reading just the words gave you only a hint of the experience of listening to Kokwa himself, as if one were licking the pot in which okra had been cooked instead of eating the okra itself.

Jijingi was still glad to have the paper version, and would read it from time to time. It was a good story, worthy of being recorded on paper. Not everything written on paper was so worthy. During his sermons Moseby would read aloud stories from his book, and they were often good stories, but he also read aloud words he had written down just a few days before, and those were often not stories at all, merely claims that learning more about the European god would improve the lives of the Tiv people.

One day, when Moseby had been eloquent, Jijingi complimented him. “I know you think highly of all your sermons, but today’s sermon was a good one.”

“Thank you,” said Moseby, smiling. After a moment, he asked, “Why do you say I think highly of all my sermons?”

“Because you expect that people will want to read them many years from now.”

“I don’t expect that. What makes you think that?”

“You write them all down before you even deliver them. Before even one person has heard a sermon, you have written it down for future generations.”

Moseby laughed. “No, that is not why I write them down.”

“Why, then?” He knew it wasn’t for people far away to read them, because sometimes messengers came to the village to deliver paper to Moseby, and he never sent his sermons back with them.

“I write the words down so I do not forget what I want to say when I give the sermon.”

“How could you forget what you want to say? You and I are speaking right now, and neither of us needs paper to do so.”

“A sermon is different from conversation.” Moseby paused to consider. “I want to be sure I give my sermons as well as possible. I won’t forget what I want to say, but I might forget the best way to say it. If I write it down, I don’t have to worry. But writing the words down does more than help me remember. It helps me think.”

“How does writing help you think?”

“That is a good question,” he said. “It is strange, isn’t it? I do not know how to explain it, but writing helps me decide what I want to say. Where I come from, there’s a very old proverb: verba volant, scripta manent. In Tiv you would say, ‘spoken words fly away, written words remain.’ Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” Jijingi said, just to be polite; it made no sense at all. The missionary wasn’t old enough to be senile, but his memory must be terrible and he didn’t want to admit it. Jijingi told his age-mates about this, and they joked about it amongst themselves for days. Whenever they exchanged gossip, they would add, “Will you remember that? This will help you,” and mimic Moseby writing at his table.

On an evening the following year, Kokwa announced he would tell the story of how the Tiv split into different lineages. Jijingi brought out the paper version he had, so he could read the story at the same time Kokwa told it. Sometimes he could follow along, but it was often confusing because Kokwa’s words didn’t match what was written on the paper. After Kokwa was finished, Jijingi said to him, “You didn’t tell the story the same way you told it last year.”

“Nonsense,” said Kokwa. “When I tell a story it doesn’t change, no matter how much time passes. Ask me to tell it twenty years from today, and I will tell it exactly the same.”

Jijingi pointed at the paper he held. “This paper is the story you told last year, and there were many differences.” He picked one he remembered. “Last time you said, ‘the Uyengi captured the women and children and carried them off as slaves.’ This time you said, ‘they made slaves of the women, but they did not stop there: they even made slaves of the children.’”

“That’s the same.”

“It is the same story, but you’ve changed the way you tell it.”

“No,” said Kokwa, “I told it just as I told it before.”

Jijingi didn’t want to try to explain what words were. Instead he said, “If you told it as you did before, you would say ‘the Uyengi captured the women and children and carried them off as slaves’ every time.”

For a moment Kokwa stared at him, and then he laughed. “Is this what you think is important, now that you’ve learned the art of writing?”

Sabe, who had been listening to them, chided Kokwa. “It’s not your place to judge Jijingi. The hare favors one food, the hippo favors another. Let each spend his time as he pleases.”

“Of course, Sabe, of course,” said Kokwa, but he threw a derisive glance at Jijingi.

Afterwards, Jijingi remembered the proverb Moseby had mentioned. Even though Kokwa was telling the same story, he might arrange the words differently each time he told it; he was skilled enough as a storyteller that the arrangement of words didn’t matter. It was different for Moseby, who never acted anything out when he gave his sermons; for him, the words were what was important. Jijingi realized that Moseby wrote down his sermons not because his memory was terrible, but because he was looking for a specific arrangement of words. Once he found the one he wanted, he could hold on to it for as long as he needed.

Out of curiosity, Jijingi tried imagining he had to deliver a sermon, and began writing down what he would say. Seated on the root of a mango tree with the notebook Moseby had given him, he composed a sermon on tsav, the quality that enabled some men to have power over others, and a subject which Moseby hadn’t understood and had dismissed as foolishness. He read his first attempt to one of his age-mates, who pronounced it terrible, leading them to have a brief shoving match, but afterwards Jijingi had to admit his age-mate was right. He tried writing out his sermon a second time and then a third before he became tired of it and moved on to other topics.

As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant; writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.