part at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the etagree

198 On some Sundays, the congregation listened closely even when Father Benedict talked about things everybody knew, about Papa making the biggest donations […] or about Papa paying for the cartons of communion wine. (5) Papa Eugene‟s omnipresence as we shall see reminds one of Achille Mbembe‟s (2001) arguments, about how the father figure saturates postcolonial space, through his visibility and embodiment in the autocratic leader, who is sentimentally referred to as the father of the nation Papa Eugene is a ubiquitous figure, revered like God the Father. His presence in the household is smothering, and even during his absence, the schedules drawn and posted neatly in Kambili and Jaja‟s bedrooms act as portraits of his omnipresence. Interestingly, Papa Eugene‟s idea of fatherhood is forged from an anti-genealogy – of his hatred for his own father Papa Nnukwu. Papa Eugene in an Okonkwo-like manner despises his fathers weakness, accusing him of being a heathen and therefore a failure. He refutes his fathers paternity on grounds of religion, believing, with conviction in
Christianity‟s role in providing him an identity, education and economic success. He therefore embraces the paternity of his in-laws, of his wife‟s father, who was a staunch Catholic. He places a portrait of his father-in-law dressed in official Catholic regalia in the living room of his house. He proscribes, in his household, contact with his own father Papa Nnukwu, allowing his children, just fifteen minutes to visit him when they occasionally travel to their rural home in Abba. Papa Eugene, like Okonkwo in Things
Fall Apart rejects his paternity under the pretext of what Gikandi (1991) in his description of Okonkwo, calls “self-invention.” Okonwo builds the image, according to
Gikandi, of the “being-for-itself,”
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yet as Gikandi (1991:40) observes, the laws that structure the sons unconscious acts have been predetermined by the father Taken from Heideggerian philosophy this neologism, used by Gikandi implies “self-determination,” in reference to a being who as Jean-Paul Sartre says is abandoned to be free.

199 Papa Eugene‟s idea of self-invention, similar to Okonkwo‟s is an illusion, because the critical memory of his father, Papa Nnukwu, spurs his actions and motivates his sense of identity. He wishes to attain complete autonomy from his paternity, by rejecting his father. Throughout the entire story, we hear nothing relating to his mother. Indeed,
Kambili‟s sense of identity as she has been made to understand is paternal. The irony though is that Papa Eugene‟s alternative to his rejected paternity is maternal related he speaks fondly of his father-in-law who was a Catholic missionary in the colonial era. As
Kambili observes It was so different from the way Papa had treated my maternal grandfather until he died five years ago […] Grandfather was very light-skinned, almost albino, and it was said to be one of the reasons the missionaries liked him […] He insisted that we call him Grandfather, in English […] Papa still talked about him often, his eyes proud, as if grandfather were his own father […] Papa had a photo of Grandfather, in the full regalia of the Knights of St. John, framed in deep mahogany and hung on our wall back in Enugu. (67-68) Ultimately, Papa Eugene‟s idea of identity finds a patrilineal alternative in his father-in- law. It is also interesting that while Papa Eugene rejects his biological father on religious grounds, his father, Papa Nnukwu, has an interesting interpretation of their broken relationship I remember the first one that came to Abba, the one they called
Fada John. His face was red like palm oil they say our type of sun does not shine in the white mans land. He had a helper, a man from
Nimo called Jude. In the afternoon they gathered the children under the Ukwa tree in the mission and taught them their religion. I did not join them, where is this god you worship They said he was like
Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, who is this person that was killed, the person that hangs on the wood outside the mission

200 They said he was the son, but that the son and the father are equal. It was then that I knew the white man was mad. The father and the son are equal Tufia! Do you not see That is why Eugene can disregard me, because he thinks we are equal (84) For Papa Nnukwu, there is a cross-generational conflict where the power relations are reversed at least according to this mad logic of the trinity, as the narrator describes it in Things Fall Apart. Papa Nnukwu sees this conflict with his son as resulting from a reversal of power relations, caused by his sons religious beliefs. What is interesting though is that his sons name is actually invoked alongside that of the Pope and Jesus at the sermons in the Catholic Church at Enugu. Moreover, Papa Eugene is also portrayed as the biblical son Jesus, in an incident where after giving a hefty donation fora local church He led the way out of the hall, smiling and waving at the many hands that reached out to grasp his white tunic as if touching him would heal them of an illness
(90-91). One is reminded also of Arrow of God‟s ambivalent ending in which the people of Umuaro henceforth harvested in the name of the son.”
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