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
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