V.S Naipaul’s 1961 novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, describes the slightly unfortunate Mohun Biswas whose desire to find independence in a home measures up to his search for personal identity and a root. Biswas’ predicament is hinged on the current subject of our issue. Through our theme of “Return,” we are attempting to argue for a reshuffling, reappraisal and reworking of the ideas around destinations and stops. We feel that the general thinking about destinations is incomplete. We view destinations as journeys half gone, restless batons; a measured pause, rather than an unbound speed. We recognise that destinations are only reached halfway. In the ordered or disorganised system of the universe, many of us meander through ends which we have made into destinations, the end of our journey. It could be with our work or the other vast passions we may undertake. But our truth is that there is no end in sight. We find new families in new, distant cities; we often assume new names after marriage, we make new friends, and we get new jobs and change careers. How pleasing it is to move through life and find new destinations wherever we stop.
Harbours tell us there is no longer a need to travel and feel the wider wings of the world. They create a construct that limits our need to hop on and keep sailing. Destinations suggest rest. They provide ease, closure and a peace the subject of perennial wanderlust may never feel. Destinations could be home, could be the far-reaching ends of morality, and of evil. They are the roads and paths we travel in. Destinations are the end of a journey. Where yours end, mine may begin. Where mine ends, yours may start. Time levels the field for all. It dictates the dispersion of homes. Admittedly, I’m deeply fascinated with the idea of time, across which the great orbit of our existence rotates. Time is a dictator of what is, what may not now be, or the things that may never be. Across time, destinations are created and destroyed. Homes are displaced through genocidal actions, war, crisis and famine. Seeds are thrown across the world to grow someplace else and create new roots. Home is therefore not so much an idea of space as it is a matter of time.
Sabah Carrim’s featured interview contemplates genocide and the complexity of the agency of humanity, particularly womanhood. Carrim’s women search for homes and sure harbours, be they temporal or spiritual. Carrim responds to me saying, “…women are still fighting to restore our status as human beings who deserve respect, and who ache for agency and autonomy in a world where these are more easily offered to men.” There is a great preoccupation with space in Carrim’s work. She puts people into places and re-creates them. In Carrim’s The Evil in Me, the narrator, through a seemingly light-hearted conceit, announces from the beginning: “my husband has brought me on pilgrimage to Makkah and Marina to rid me of evil.” This revelation opens up a Pandora Box. Carrim’s idea of physical misplacement is held up by Laurène Southe’s brilliant first line in “Ndako Na Ngai, or My Home”: “sometimes, a piece of home lands on the tip of your tongue/ as it dissolves into smaller pieces of digestible joy.” The death of home rests usually on the division of its constituting parts. An African proverb says that “the strength of the broom lies not in the power of a single frond but in the resilience of its united fronds.”
Home absolves, sometimes, as it dissolves. In Azaiouris Y. Zeon’s “history and checkpoints,” the poet points out that, “you have heard of how places open fresh eyes into the body…” In Zeon’s brilliant, sizzling poem, the poet talks back to war and the restlessness and destruction it carries on its heels. Eventually, Zeon says that “…home can be found in other places.” Alas, Mathew Daniel adds in “Remnants,” “…distance is abandonment.” Home dissolves, and oftentimes it absolves. And sometimes, too, destinations do not end in homes or happy places. Like Naipaul’s Mr. Biswas, we may keep searching for homes that will never fit us. Home is Amanie Mathurin’s young protagonist and the pain she feels from the sudden death of her father. By the end of the story, there is a continuation. You may be able to see Mathurin’s bitter suggestion that the end of a journey is only the beginning of another. Destinations grant closure.
Inimfon Kufre Inyang-Kpanantia exudes the familiar diasporic sensibilities of identity mismatch and rootlessness, borrowing from Naipaul’s thoughts. “There is not much to say about this room/ cluttered with books and festering of mosquitoes.” Inyang-Kpanantia’s imagery called to my mind the strange and culturally eclectic secret bedroom of Tayeb Salih’s even stranger character, Mustafa Sa’eed. We destroy quicker what we do not understand than are we able to come to terms with what we are unable to destroy. A return to home could mark the inevitability of the destruction and reconstruction of the familiar and unfamiliar in it.
Chyna Cassell’s prose runs on the smooth rhythm of jazz. Her words rebound with the momentum of good music until they touch base in the end. Cassell’s protagonist in The Latecomer walks through paths and finds no destination, even until the end, signalled by her exit from the house of The Latecomer whose symbolic tardiness is a subtle metaphor for the things that would be, and of his own unpreparedness to be in the space of the narrator. Time and place hold hands again here, and Cassell, an artful puppeteer, plays well with both. In a similar vein, Promise Chinonso Udechukwu’s The One You Broke features a voodoo-like binding of souls and the narrator’s need to find a home to return to.
As always, the editors are happy to present this latest collection to you. The poets from within and across Africa are brave and cunning with language. From fatal hurricanes in the Caribbean to flavoured poems from the Congo, it gives me such great happiness to announce this project. The characters in all the contributed works show us life at home in Africa and away from home. We hope that as you read you go into this journey with us to rediscovering the quotient of destinations, reshaping the ideals of the end, renegotiating home as well as the notion of time. It is our greatest wish, moreso, that the poems and short fiction in this issue bring you closer to a new understanding of return.
Nzube Nlebedim,
Ibadan, Nigeria.
