Issue 13: A Short Note On The Meaning Of Home

Thinking aloud about the meaning of home.

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

Home by Warsan Shire

I didn’t know how powerful these words were until I cried myself to the airport a few weeks ago. It suddenly made sense: the people leaving in droves: cousins, aunties and friends; the people who left a long time ago: strangers on the internet, lovers and church members. From Canada to Germany to Finland. It finally made sense. It’s the same way you don’t know where and how it hurts except it hurts you. Singing Japa is not the same thing.

Nigeria is the mouth of a shark.

Home is more complex than your country of birth, the land in which you spent your formative years with its bad roads, poor electricity, noise pollution and corrupt politicians.

Home is your mother’s warm embrace and the egusi soup she makes specially for you. It’s your bed, cramped next to your sister’s, facing the pile of books you’ve had since you were six: Chicken Little, Anna Karenina, Mother’s Choice, John Grisham. It’s the photograph on the wall, the big smile you had on your face the day you graduated primary school. It’s the sound of your dad’s feet, very distinct from you grandfather’s.

It’s the neighbors playing Christmas music three months before Christmas, leaving their decoration hanging until March. It’s the games: suwe, tinko, ten-ten. It’s brunch with your friends at high end restaurants, rolling your tongue to pronounce meals you’ll eventually hate (thanks to Suite Life of Zack and Cody, at least I can say Crème Brûlée), sleepovers, long drives where you sing “Holla at your girl”, your head out the window (don’t drink and drive). 

Home is not the mouth of a shark, Nigeria is.

Leaving Nigeria is easy, but how do you leave home, if it means leaving everything and everyone that loves you and everything and everyone you love behind? Some theories say you carry home with you, swaddle it in a blanket like a child, in your bosom, your scent, the tangible and intangible: photographs, long video calls into the night (whispering so you don’t wake your housemate), stolen sweatshirts, language, music, seasoning — curry, thyme, pepper. 

I was listening to a Ted Talk by Pico Iyer recently and was consoled in part by what he said:

“Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself.” 

2020 has made the definition of home even more complicated. With more people in one physical location for long periods, we’ve begun to look at physical spaces with contempt — and even worse, the other bodies that coexist in these physical spaces with us. No thanks to Covid-19, lockdowns, social distancing, quarantine. I remember once I got so tired of working from my room that I fell physically sick.

A few years ago, my grandmother was sick and in the hospital. Her heart was failing, but was so was her memory. I spent the night in the hospital in a bed opposite her. At some point, a child began to cry and she called the child my sister. She said, “Tobi, stop crying” and begged the child to come to her. Never mind that my sister was no longer a child and wasn’t with us. She insisted that the child was my sister. Later, she insisted that the hospital was her home. This wasn’t new. When I was a child, she often packed her bags and declared she wanted to go home. At the time, I didn’t know the home she meant was her husband’s house in Ilasamaja, the building she’d left years ago to raise my siblings and I. I was confused, what did she mean “home” — “ile mi”? I was heartbroken that she wanted to leave. Weren’t we enough for her to stay with us? Wasn’t I enough?

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We create new homes all the time: in the friends we make, the cities we move to, the songs we fall in love with. I think home is what you make it, how you define it, whether it’s a geographical region, a building, peace and security, your body or a person (a partner that snores waaay too loud!). However, home is constantly in a transitory state. What is home today, can’t — won’t — be home tomorrow. It’s the nature of our lives to evolve and for the world to constantly move in different directions.

Recommended reads:

From the footloose networker to the exiled migrant, home has been displaced by an idea that’s both elusive and contested: Nobody is home.

Modern Love: Why Did She Leave Me There? A young man returns to the Vietnamese orphanage he had spent 25 years trying to forget.

What’s your experience with home? Tell me.

This newsletter is obsessively listening to Christmas songs and watching Christmas movies.

Have a great week!