KWEE Liberian Literary Magazine Jan. Iss. Vol. 0115 May Issue Vol. 0515 | Page 28

Liberian Literary Magazine Promoting Liberian Literature, Arts and Culture Where is Home? Where do you belong? TEDxGroningen palaces up in distant Asia; reunioning in Virginia or simply playing board games in Brewerville under cozy mango and butter pearl trees close to the river, we always had a homey home in our gatherings. But then the speaker, in a rude awakening, yanks me out of the reverie with his very next question- Where do you belong? For the love of Pete, I thought, how could he? But quickly I realized the gravity of the question. The question demands nothing out of us as the first does. It simply bares the reality, albeit crudely. It does not want flowery answers; it does not confine itself to simplicity or complexity. It just exposes the truth- our deepest fears, our vulnerabilities; our limitations but most of all, our perception of self, essence, nationhood and the value attached to one of the existential questions. One can’t conceive that question without seriously looping through the issues above. Home, you see, is a location. It is fixed, finite. Granted we can make home anywhere, but in truth I believe, we are only recreating the ‘ideal’ picture, which we really know to be localized in our thoughts or memories. This, I argue, is a location that is finite. This is what makes the house, city or location ‘home’ for us. This in my opinion is constant and as noted before, is transportable. It is a fixed concept that is movable- not in its essence but in its container or host. As the host moves about, the ‘fixed’ ‘home’ moves. In our case, having each other around made it possible to live those memories, to reinvent those shared experiences and to develop new ones in the comfortable knowledge that we had all the ingredients of home. Thus, subconsciously, we noticed not the fact tha t we had no need for the ‘memory’ or ‘thought’ since we were ‘living’ or experiencing them in real time. They were no longer spaces stored away; filed for use when we needed to comfort d. othniel forte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0 mVa7d08tg Vamba Sherif opens his TEDx talk with a most basic, ‘simple’ question. It is not only powerful in what it seeks of us an answer, or what it demands from us in reflection. It is more powerful in its simplicity than anything else. As a firm believer in ‘simpler is better, I could only admire the question. However, it runs deeper than this for me. As one who has lived half my life in the diaspora, nothing is simple about this question. Ironic right, considering the opening above? Coming from a small but closely knit family, home always transcended the idea of physical location. Home was always not a building; it was more of an environment. Having my siblings and loved ones, [which by the way was almost always the case] made the concept of home fluid. It was a reinforcement to our number family ‘rule’- Family First. The consistency of having family always around, did more than comfort us, it embodied the creedo uno; it made it alive, more than mere words, perhaps even more than an indoctrination. I guess in these regards, it secured us in the notion of home and erased any doubt. Because we moved around some, this came in handy. We could be on a mission school in Sierra Leone, or the Cote D’Ivoire; we could be roaming beautiful 28