Home: where our journeys begin
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ISSUE: 11/29/07 > Opinions > Home: where our journeys begin
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Managing editor Adaeze Elechi is a junior Journalism major. |
I began really traveling when I was 5 years old. My father, a Shell Petroleum Development Company engineer, was assigned to a project in the Netherlands. He bundled up his family and off we went to a strange country that we would grow to love, despite its none-too-subtle dislike for us.
Growing up in Holland was difficult. The white Dutch kids stared at me because I was black, frequently called me names in the public playgrounds and asked one of my Nigerian friends if her father was a monkey and where her tail was. The adults looked at me from the corners of their eyes as if I were a wild animal and they weren’t sure when I was going to attack. Even though I learned Dutch, and I let them say my name however was easiest for them (“A-Dei-Zah”), they still didn’t take to me. I sought comfort in my family and the international community at my British primary school where everyone was different.
Six years later when I was 11 and my father’s project was done, he turned down going to Venezuela for another project, and we went back to Nigeria. On the flight home, I was excited. “I’m finally going where I’m like everyone else,” I thought. “I’m going home!”
Not so.
When we arrived at the stuffy, disorganized international airport in Lagos, Nigeria, I was floored. The electricity in one section of the airport was off; the escalators weren’t working and dim emergency lights struggled to illuminate the chaos. Standing one level above what looked like a writhing body of insanity, my eyes widened as I watched people shouting across the room at one another, bribing immigration officers, waving off touts that hovered around them and their luggage like flies, hungry for money. This wasn’t the home I’d envisioned for months and longed for.
We spent the night at a Sheraton hotel in Lagos; the next day, a small aircraft took us to Port Harcourt, the beloved city where I was born and had spent my first five years, living, playing, growing. We landed on a military airstrip that they had allowed Shell to use. (About four years later, the military would discontinue this privilege).
In Port Harcourt, I saw family friends that I hadn’t seen in six years. Everyone had grown so much and the kids my age had weariness in their eyes that belonged to people three times their age. The country was already wearing them thin.
I would greet their parents, “Good afternoon, Aunty.” “Good evening, Uncle.” Their parents’ eyes would widen with fascination. “Nnenna,” they would say to my mother. “See how your daughter has become Oyibo!” (Oyibo is a Pidgin English word that means “white man” or “white woman.”) I would stand in slight shame, staring at my fiddling hands, as they would comment on how Holland must have been amazing. “Look at how healthy and fresh they look!” they would say, referring to my brothers and me.
Coming home and not being the same person, or rather, not being like the friends I had left behind when I was 5, permanently damaged my relationships with them. I think they believed I felt I was better than them because I had a subtle British accent and my clothes were modern and new.
When we went to my parents’ villages it was worse. The children I use to run around with half naked in the rain, searching for tadpoles, wouldn’t even treat me as their peer. They brought me food and drink like I was an adult guest and left me to sit with the adults discussing politics.
They giggled at me and my Western clothes like I was a foreigner, and when I spoke they stared at my mouth. It was especially bad when I spoke my language. (Apparently, to them I sounded like a white person). I was a specimen under a microscope. I suddenly wanted to discard what I thought was a modest pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Most of all, I wanted to stop talking.
I stayed in Nigeria this time for seven years. I went to a boarding secondary school, an 11-hour drive from my city, the month after we got back from Holland. That was where I killed off my “British” accent and took to climbing cashew trees in my uniform for the cashew apples. Even though the older students would call me from studying at night and tell me to say lewd things in Dutch while they rolled on the floor in laughter, I still felt that here I could reinvent myself, become like everyone else and fit in. That didn’t work out: I liked to listen to rock music; the other students, who only had hearts for hip-hop, couldn’t understand it. They couldn’t understand me.
When I graduated after six years, my parents had me do the awkward “gap year” where I did odd jobs and tried to “mature,” as my mother put it. I can honestly say it was one of the worst and best years of my life. After spending most of the six years at school, I was no longer a real resident of my home in Port Harcourt. My parents weren’t who I had romanticized them to be when I left home as a nervous 11-year-old. Or perhaps I was the one who’d changed. I constantly fought with my mother and I cried more than I had in all my six years of secondary school. By the time I left for college, I was able to draw the conclusion that I would never be able to live with my parents as I once did, banishing myself from home. I could only visit. Realizing this was the best part of gap year.
Coming to America, I braced myself for being yet again another specimen to be probed, examined and tested. I expected haughty condescension, but that was not what I found. Students would say things like, “I know this is a stupid question, but do you, like, have cars in Africa?” I would grin and say something tongue-in-cheek like, “No we ride on elephants’ backs to the grocery store,” until I’d see in their eyes that they seriously wanted to know. “Yes,” I’d say. “We have cars.” They treated me like a wonder, a fascination.
Again, here, the people marveled at my accent, which they swore was British (clearly I didn’t do a very good job of killing it in secondary school). They were fascinated that I had a native tongue. “Say something in your language,” they would say, eager like little children. “Ututuoma,” I’d say. “It means, ‘Good morning’.” They would declare that it was “so cool” and then they’d leave me alone. I let them pronounce my name in a way that was easiest for them to say, and so I became this person, “A-Daisy.” I tried, yet again, to slay the lingering British accent and adopted an American one in the hope that I could fit in and make this my home. But somehow, I still didn’t quite fit.
I found that I wasn’t quite African American enough to thoroughly jibe with that group and call it home. At the same time, I wasn’t white or Hispanic to fit in their categories either. Here I was again: a floater. A homeless nomad.
For all the years I have lived I have only fully felt at home somewhere between birth and 5 years old: Port Harcourt, (but you and I know that it’s home no longer). After that, I’ve been chasing this “home” thing and never seem to find it.
During this year’s annual humanities symposium that focused on travel I discovered something as I listened to travel writers, faculty and students share their experiences in voyage: No. 1, I’m not alone in the search for a niche, and No. 2, perhaps I’m chasing the wrong thing.
Someone said during the symposium that the idea of “The Home” is changing. For many, no longer is home some house on a farm with a front porch with rocking chairs, and the scent of Mom’s sausage and eggs wafting through the house on Saturday mornings. Home has become what one makes it. Home has taken residence in hearts. It is now what’s familiar, what makes us smile, what motivates us, what we love, who we love and, sometimes, what scares us.
Home is the white chocolate truffles I can’t get enough of; it’s the feeling I get when I talk to my friends about nothing over dinner; it’s the smell of my mother and it’s laughing at my father’s jokes. Perhaps now, for me, home is traveling to places I will never be fully understood.
