Ngozi Isabella (Chioma) Ogbuji
I’m going to start blogging again. My brother, Uche, and I blogged on Posterous, but it went dark, and many of our articles didn’t make it through the attempt to archive them in Posthaven.
To get the juices flowing again, I’ll (for now) re-post some of the articles that I’m able to restore from the Way Back Machine archive. My current additions to the original article text are indicated in italics.
First, the article I posted the day Ngozi was born explains the meaning behind her very long name and the importance of that moment in the narrative of my life.
December 11, 2008
Initial ‘portrait’ shot of the new baby!
Ngozichukwunyere means the blessing that God (or heaven/celestial, by my interpretation) gave. My name (Chimezie) is an Igbo invocation for (May) God resolve. My interpretation substitutes the ‘abstract’ notion of the celestial for the word God.
My name was an invocation by my father to resolve things, and after everything that has transpired, Ngozi is the gift or blessing that may bring about this resolution. My dad prefers to call her Chioma. It means “good god.” Again, substituting the idea of the celestial (as a stark contrast to phenomena of the ‘terrestrial’ ) for the Islamic/Judeo-Christian notion of God/god, you have the idea of a benevolent circumstance or fate.
Kwenu.com (which has also gone dark) has an excellent volume of decent translations of Igbo names. It also has an excellent overview of the concept of “Chi” in Igbo mythology. Ironically, this concept strongly correlates with my understanding of how the celestial interacts with the terrestrial, the rule of natural law, and its relation to myself and humans in general. The traditional Chinese word “Chi” has a similar connotation:
the life-process or “flow” of energy that sustains living beings are found in many belief systems, especially in Asia.
Igbo mythology and ancient Indo-Chinese spiritual philosophy have much in common. They appeal to me in the same long-lasting way that the meanings invoked by my children’s names appeal to me and preserve meaning to my/our journey. So, in the end, it is not so odd that I have come to find myself interested in their spiritual philosophy as a way to understand the crazy world that I live in
