“Immortality: London Bridge Is Falling Down”
First in line in the series, this is a bold new fictionalized look at the promise of eternity and immortality and this considers the subject from the superstitious/African point of view.
An Unending Dream!
We crave immortality but one beautiful sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, Emily Nnenna Dim (POV), invited to receive it, is afraid to die before getting it. Only because she’s in love. She is a celebrated senior at her Baltimore, US high school because of an extraordinary intelligence and academic excellence. That is, until her mother shows up, with her father and brother in tow. Only, they are dead, and are always preceded by a mystic version of the famous “London Bridge” nursery rhyme that drives Emily mad! Emily doesn’t understand how to accept and juxtapose/superimpose her “yolo – you only live once” new age Western ideology of death being the end with her African tribal belief that the dead are not dead after all when this is explained to her plus she’s very afraid of the spirits and these drive her to manic insanity.
Following this conflict and an unending illusory dream, life before death, life after death comes alive as beautiful Emily finds herself naked in varying periods, stages and places during the formation and development of the earth and the beyond, and literally goes crazy, because her dead family return from the grave – just for her! As her perfect life turns topsy turvy, she flees from Africa to America and back again, first to escape her family, next to be exorcised of them. Finding out what love means, she decides which world to live in, and whose love to lose – or pursue – between her boyfriend and her ghost family.
After she had that first visitation in school, Emily’s primary contradiction began to center around whether she actually believed the dead can return, whether the dead can arise and haunt the living before submitting to what Silvia and Granmama took to be truth and agree to going back to Africa for a cure. She didn’t get the chance to resolve this mentally before she got to a state where she was ready to do anything to get the situation resolved!
Knowing her past as a child and how she came to be in the US, she didn’t talk about it but she thought about it constantly, read books, searched the internet and studied the subject of immortality, of the dead haunting the living, of the state of the soul and body before, at and after death, of out-of-body experiences, of ghosts, of life after death. She tried to learn whether the dead can speak with the living, whether they can reach out from the grave to communicate with the living, and such. So far, none of her research had given her any satisfactory explanation or helped her find meaning. There was still a great deal of uncertainty around these issues for her. Was it even possible or true? Was it just a ruse? She still wondered! The more she kept having these strange, otherworldly dreams at nearly sixteen years old, she more she needed to know! The more she tried to satisfy her curiosity but getting nowhere, the more afraid she became. Could it really be true that her dead family, especially her mother, would come from the grave to haunt her?
For her there were too many persons in the West who didn’t believe in ghosts or such things and there were too many persons in Africa who believed in them. The contradiction, for her, was staggering, finding less and less common ground.
The story series features ideologies from African Religious Tradition of Ancestral Elders, Spirits, Animism and Animatism, Roman Catholic immortality and purgatory, Protestant Resurrection, Islamic Barzakh and resurrection, Egyptian immortality of the soul, Babylonian eternal soul, Celtic Samhein and much more.
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