Publishers Weekly
12/05/2022
Art critic and journalist Iduma (A Stranger’s Pose) delivers an immersive memoir about his uncle and namesake, who disappeared during the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s. Iduma, an Igbo who was born and raised in Nigeria, wades through murky family history following his father’s death in 2018, drawing on family interviews, visits to war sites, and academic research to piece together his uncle’s last days and reveal the connection between his death and the political upheaval in Nigeria at the time. Iduma’s uncle, who enlisted in the Biafran Army just before the war started, was killed after providing cover for his comrades. As Iduma grapples with his own grief, mirrored by his father’s losses, including the death of Iduma’s mother when he was a child, he wonders “how to transfer a man’s consciousness to those he leaves behind.” Throughout, Iduma reflects on the power of family to both unite and divide, and as he weaves his background into Nigeria’s historical tapestry, he acknowledges how his heritage is reflected in his uncle’s story (“to be Igbo in Nigeria is to be a victim,” he concludes), eventually finding peace in his uncle’s choice to sacrifice himself for others. Iduma’s unraveling of the past is bound to leave readers eager to uncover their own family secrets. Agent: Alison Lewis, Frances Goldin. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
Traveling through Nigeria, Emmanuel Iduma confronts and contemplates the wounds left by the Biafran war: death on a mass scale; deaths in his family; griefs, angers and questions that still plague the living. I Am Still With You is both epic and intimate. It gives us the beauties and consolations of an ethnical imagination.”—Margo Jefferson, author of Constructing a Nervous System
"I Am Still With You by Emmanuel Iduma is a lyrical investigation into the nature of being, history, the collective memory of Biafra—a dark chapter in world history. Iduma writes with such startling clarity that the book ultimately becomes both powerful and transcendent."—Chigozie Obioma, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities
"[A] moving memoir… a deeply felt eulogy for those who were lost and a sobering reflection on the shame that comes with silence."—TIME, "The 100 Must-Read Books of 2023"
“Quietly brilliant…Iduma blends travelogue, reportage, criticism, memoir, and history in a hypnotic tale…What emerges is both an argument for narrative that resembles life — narrative that refuses to hew to the conventions of genre for the sake of it — and a subtle critique of the idea of genre itself.”—Vulture
"This adroitly crafted work seeks closure for 'a generation that has to lift itself from the hushes and gaps of the history of the war.'”—The New Yorker, "The Best Books We Read This Week"
“As he searches for an uncle, missing since the 1967 Nigerian-Biafra war, Iduma’s conversations and chance encounters begin to fill the gaps memory cannot. He doesn’t know how the ‘fragments of the story fit together,’ but the journey teaches him how to grieve everything he, and Nigeria, have lost.”—The Boston Globe
“An expansive book…Through a skillful structure and expressive prose, I Am Still With You brings together probing philosophical questions about inheritance, cogent historical and political concerns…inventive, tender, and all its own.”—Lucy McKeon, Electric Literature
“In I Am Still With You, Iduma meets the lacunae of his uncle’s life head on, in turn confronting other painful absences within his family with a thoughtful introspection, using history, literature, the archive, and vivid encounters from everyday life to make a path across the abyss.”—Los Angeles Review of Books / LARB Radio Hour
“An often moving account of his consciously unsystematic journey through the former Biafra region, from conversations with close and distant relatives to chance encounters. Increasingly less interested in how and whether ‘the different fragments of the story fit together,' Mr. Iduma learns that he can go home again — and immerse himself in an ‘Igbo melody.’”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“A bold, poignant tale of speaking into the silence of history.’”—Shelf Awareness
“I Am Still with You is filled with such echo of loss, of longing, so much that before you are halfway in, the mood envelopes you. It takes skill to deploy this in a way that is not easily seen on-page but is instead felt.”—Open Country Mag
“A poignant story rescued from…silences and lacunae. A powerful contribution to modern Nigerian history, particularly significant in an age of ethnic conflict around the world.”—Kirkus Reviews, *starred review*
“Searching war-scarred Biafra for traces of his uncle, a writer grapples with gaps in his family’s history and his own bifurcated identity… [Iduma’s] contemplative, poetic search brings him closer to his wife Ayobami and reminds him that his life remains inseparable from the history of his homeland.”—Booklist
“An immersive memoir… throughout, Iduma reflects on the power of family to both unite and divide…Iduma’s unravelling of the past is bound to leave readers eager to uncover their own family secrets.”—Publishers Weekly
“[A] haunting new memoir… Those interested in personal stories about Nigeria will likely enjoy this book.”—Library Journal
“His contemplative, poetic search brings him closer to his wife Ayobami and reminds him that his life remains inseparable from the history of his homeland.”—Kirkus Reviews
“In this melange of reportage and memoir, Iduma sets out to learn more about his uncle, and by extension his family.”—BuzzFeed
“In clear, elegiac prose, Iduma’s search leads to an affecting conclusion.”—The New Statesman
“A precious and lucid account on an event which is still insufficiently covered in the African media.”—The African Book Review
“A vital recollection.”—OkayAfrica
“His narrative captures the poetry of living and dying. Its language, with its ability to transport me through time and across space, beckoned me to travel.”—Brittle Paper
“A genre-defying work, I Am Still with You is a quest, both spiritual and real, a travelogue, a memoir, and a history of Biafra. It is a requiem to war’s unburied and unsung. It is a record of a writer’s mind grappling with the consequences of a national and personal loss. Acutely observed, hauntingly rendered, and deeply affecting—a masterful achievement.”—Aminatta Forna, author of Happiness and The Window Seat
“Like Manthia Diawara's In Search of Africa, Emmanuel Iduma's story of a nation's making—and unmaking—is rooted in a personal search for a lost individual. I Am Still With You is a moving account of a return, and a profound, elegiac plea for recognition of both the living and the dead. A compelling, sharply-observed story of discovery, beautifully paced and haunting in its details.” —Amitava Kumar, author of A Time Outside This Time and Immigrant, Montana
“To the daughter of a Nigerian man, long gone, this book shines a light through the silent fog that shrouded our past. It is a gift of understanding, for me and countless others.”—Rachel Edwards, author of Darling
“This expansive yet intimate memoir is about the author’s attempt to discover what became of his uncle. It is also an illuminating reckoning with the legacy of Biafra, a nation that continues to exist in the imaginations of many decades after it was defeated.”—Amazon Book Review
Library Journal
01/01/2023
Understanding a family's past during wartime is at the heart of Iduma's (A Stranger's Pose) languid but haunting new memoir. A noted art critic and author, Iduma returned to Nigeria to find information about his namesake: an uncle who died during the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s. Along the way, he reunited with family members and learned more about the civil war that resulted after years of British colonialism. This book is most effective when Iduma focuses on post-colonial Nigerian history and his family's role in the fighting. The pace slows when he details his day-to-day observations of modern Nigeria and his own upbringing. Iduma has fashioned a memoir that combines family stories, travelogue, and a lesson in Nigerian history with his personal narrative as a married art critic living in New York City. VERDICT Those interested in personal stories about Nigeria will likely enjoy this book.—Leah K. Huey
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2022-12-09
A pensive quest for the truths of a civil war in the author’s homeland of Nigeria.
On July 6, 1967, “after a year and a half of cataclysms,” Nigeria collapsed in a civil war based on ethnic divisions among the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo peoples that had long simmered under decades of British colonialism. The Igbo, Iduma’s people, occupied the region called Biafra, which calved off as a self-styled independent republic, causing the central government to declare war—which it called a “police action”—in order to keep Nigeria whole. After a genocidal conflict that lasted more than two years, Biafra was reassimilated into Nigeria. Born in 1989, Iduma grew up in a country where memories of the conflict were silenced. As he writes of his cohort, “we are a generation that has to lift itself from the hushes and gaps of the history of the war.” After living in New York for years, he returned to Nigeria to seek answers to his many questions, not least the fate of an uncle who disappeared during the war. How did the other young men of his family survive? The author concludes that they must have been protected by warlordlike military officers who threw some soldiers into battle as cannon fodder while keeping themselves far from the fighting. One refrain that Iduma’s father often voiced of his brother, he learns, was a simple question: “What if one day he returned from nowhere?” The chances of that remain slender, but, after all, other Biafrans lived in exile for years in places such as the nearby Ivory Coast before returning. In all events, Iduma is scarcely alone: A third of Biafran families, he reckons, “could speak of someone who did not return.” Though his own findings are far from definitive, the author delivers a poignant story rescued from those silences and lacunae.
A powerful contribution to modern Nigerian history, particularly significant in an age of ethnic conflict around the world.
