S(H)IBBOLETH: Homeward bound

Who cares about home? Does home really matter? Where is home?

This Christmas, many city dwellers in Nigeria remember home. The long buses and the short buses will head for the “far” East and the “remote” North and the “magical” West, braving potholes, police harassment, armed robbery attacks, and of course the risks attendant with petrol scarcity. The call of home is loud and eloquent in the hearts of many, saying Christmas is never Christmas, New Year never new, unless the city goes to meet the village.

The city and the village are arguing, very bitterly. Each claims to be home. The city says to the village: “You are naked, old-fashioned, crude.” The village tells the city: “You are certainly better because of your incoherence.”

I sympathize with the village really. You see, the village sent many of us out to the city, to be its “eyes” and “ears” in this thing called modernity. And the village keeps waiting for the return of its ambassadors. But the ambassadors may never return, even if their Naira and Dollars and Euro return. The ambassadors are very happy to have escaped from the darkness and dreary innocence of the village. The ambassadors and their children long to forget the paths to the stream, to the farm, to the hunting grounds.

My children, born and bred in the city, touched by the civilization of the city, hardly know the village. They do not know the secret pact between the city and the village. They cannot understand how the city longs for the village and why the village needs the city. They cannot understand why the village does not want to become the city even when it loves the city and things from the city. The village for them is that strange place where Daddy was born and where he has made a nest, where he visits from time to time and comes back with village things – palm oil, udala, okazi, ncheleku, etc – and of course, stories.

Daddy always brings back stories – about this kinsman or that kinsman who has died, about this or that neighbour who has tried to trespass into the family land, about this or that village conflict that involved police arrests, about so-so-and-so persons reportedly wanting to use juju to halt the progress of the family, about abductions and armed robberies, about bad roads and ritualists and shrines. And just after telling his stories, he plays one Nollywood home video about evil men in the village and then the picture of home is complete. The children, greatly thrilled, conclude: Daddy’s village is fiction! When the city becomes too choking, that’s when I remember the village; that’s when I long to escape again, back to my nakedness and innocence.

There is always a pull towards home – that location that we often imagine as our own, that we often think is where our gods and goddesses reside and from where they preside over our affairs, that location where we always have that feeling that we belong, where our umbilical cords were buried at the foot of some palm tree. The cord, we have always believed, connects us eternally to the Motherland, to whom we will always return, for our ancestors insisted and inscribed in our hearts the creed that the kinsperson’s head must never get lost in a foreign land.

But you see, our ancestors, too, had to move from one geographic location to another, which means that “home” always moved. “Home” has never been one place. And the gods and goddesses are spirits, not physical beings, and are therefore not restricted to one particular physical space called “home.” I suppose the gods and goddesses of our ancestors moved with them as they sought new habitats in a world where things have never remained the same.

As the village recalls its ambassadors this Christmas and the city begins to frown and threaten that it will break diplomatic relations, I realize how living and acting in the in-betweens of culture and space represents the character of the travellers of life in my country. I realize how “home” has become multiple for many citizens: home in the village, home in the city, home at home, home away from home, homes in-between homes, homes tangible, homes intangible, home as somewhere and home as nowhere.

As many head for “home” this Christmas, may the homes in-between not make the journeys interminable. May the village home behave as a true home. And may the city recover from its loneliness as well as its desire to reclaim its noise that has travelled to the village.