WHOSE WORLD WILL GIVE US SHELTER?

There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man; there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter? — Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman  

History has shown us that, as the universe advances, certain things get smashed on the path of time; things like ideologies, people and the worlds of people. On the one hand, there is the popular belief that time runs in circles, that the past – or some portion of it – is bound to resurface in every present. In fact, there is hardly any clearer way to judge the future when the eyes are not well planted in history, be it those of a child or a nation. If there really is any other, it is pretentious and vague!

Soyinka’s words are dark. Despite the fact that they are mere lines to be uttered on stage, the porous mind will find their apocalyptic meaning haunting. The idea from which it spawns is itself prophetic. It certainly suggests much more than that anxiety of an Iyaloja expressed to a defiant horseman of a dead king. In the play, Iyaloja warns of the consequences of denying ritual its proper course by leaving the bereaved royalty unaccompanied by a eunuch who already is bent on enjoying life with a fine bride he stumbles upon at the marketplace.

Of course, the Yoruba separates the universe into the human world and the world of deities. When the king dies, his horseman is bound to meet death. Where he defies that path, the native belief is that the balance of the worlds of the living, dead and unborn is distorted. But that’s just Soyinka weaving folklore in the most pensive of moods. The old professor could be saying more than what one would consider an ancient tradition. In it, there is the shocking truth that worlds are indeed not immortal. Like people and things, they can and do get destroyed. It brings to mind something trivial yet across-the-board: the idea of home and faraway places.

A footstep away from home could be an illusion. As the playwright himself is convinced, ‘the home is where it all has to begin from, literally’. These days the danger lies in not being able to tell the difference between home and its many globalized imitations. In a world where there is so little chance to miss home because it has become so easy to feel at home anywhere or because home is only a click away, Iyaloja’s words should come as a timely forewarning. ‘Whose world will give us shelter’ in the time that ours wilt to shambles because of our wanderlust?

Sadly, most would prefer to forget that the home is a place that gives meaning, not necessarily the suffocating airs of siblings and relatives but also the broader sphere from which one knows he has gained his first intimations, his first influence, and his first sense of belonging. 

As we move like the nomads that we are in a highly globalised world, home is what gives us political reality not just in the essence that it is the passport we bear, but also that it is the passport we set aside when we choose to adopt a different one.

Yet ‘home’ can suffer. It can succumb to illusions; get ‘smashed on boulders of the great void’. There, one finds a horde of citizens disavowing to their country in a bid to live the sensation that they are a part of a transnational world. One finds a native son losing a tendril of childhood to winter breezes. One finds the sweetness of exile turned sad in the recesses of the mind. One finds ashore a strange form of power fading at the strange loss of oneself.

Illusion or not, home is still that world without which no one will give shelter! The true nonentity is he who has become homeless. He has no entity to call his own, no path from which the universe knows he has curled from. It is then he understands the cruelty that underlies every silent hour of the beggar. No one will give him a home if he does not already have one. That is why those who choose to abandon their homes to claim political ties with other worlds must still be thankful that they have a home to abandon.

Still, to wander is not iniquity. Nonetheless, to avoid getting lost, we must have a home, and one close to the heart. Whether we are conveying ours and hoping to return to it in a future time or seeking to alienate our presences from it, hoping never to find it anymore, home is something that the soul needs to possess.

And if home is a knot on the teeth, we must put it in mind and struggle for its survival. There is no other space like it. It must be reinvented to sustain the power that subjects everything to change. In the end, no reinvention should make home unworthy of our labour.

Photo #1: taken by my younger brother , Emmanuel Oludipe

Photo #2: painted by Irene Jonker

Photo #3: extracted from http://narcisocontreras.photoshelter.com/image/I00008Jty.du7CZ0

Photo #4: extracted from https://thelyricaleye.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/st-street-names-ih-697.:

Photo #5: extracted from