This realization that there is no permanent home, no permanent ground, just rupturing places and condensing fields of welcome—only for a while—drives us to find new kin in plants and mountains and human others. As your mum and I are deepening our accountability to you, we meet the many others who are your parents as well—the cow down the street, the wet anointing she spills on everything, the moon that nods as we stroll by.
We are learning to see that we are in this together—and nobler words could not be spoken at this time of vexed exclusions, legitimized exterminations, and weaponized boundaries. This is a time to linger at the edges, to lean into the troubling intersection points where the differences between me and you, us and them, queer and straight, nature and culture, living and nonliving, man and world, are not given and done, but still in the making. This is a time to stay with the trouble of knowing that there is no becoming that is not a becoming-together.
The things that stand in the way are “aspects” of our ongoing reconfiguration. Enemies, bottlenecks, seething memories, gnarling fetishes, haunting creeds, howling specters, grumbling boogeymen, careening splinters, frowning clouds, green giants, gaping holes, chuckling forests. The challenge is not to go “through” them and come out unscathed on the other side. The invitation is to know them, to stop for a drink, to resist unsheathing a sword, to be grateful for a wound, and to share a joke with shadows. The challenge is to gasp—as microbiologists do when they see that the bacteria that inhabit our bodies exceed the cells of our own bodies—as we realize how strange we are also.
In small ways, we are coming to see that the things we name as obstacles are invitations to shapeshift—to reconsider the genealogy of the forms that we have assumed, and to work with others to see what we might become. If you are looking for the path that’s most promising, look for the one with the dead end. The unmapped one haunted by swirling ambiguities and moaning ghosts and Sphinxian riddles and yellow slit-eyed peering shadows. A good journey is about dismemberment, not arrival.
Encircled by crumbling fences and by an encroaching wildness, without maps and without answers, we will have to improvise if the sun is to shine on us tomorrow. The world needs you to fly, to rush into virgin fields and, with hands outstretched, pollinate the flowers; to walk out on that career path that everyone feels is so important to have and spend time listening to the throbbing melodies of your own heart; to witness the sun rising as if for the first time; to experience unbridled fear at the precipice of life and realize you’ve been anointed; to hug a confused stranger whose brisk steps on the concrete pavements of our civilization are his only claim to meaning; to wait for guidance from a tree; to protest carbon markets and the extinction of our earth-siblings by standing still in the rain; to do something preposterous; and to tell us why one and one could equal sixteen. These are the days of ritual, of changing parameters, of paradox, and of humble courage. These are the days of realizing our best answers and questions are always provisional. These are the days we must fall apart to become larger. These are the times of many voices. When those haunting have to be met … because the future is not fixed, and the past is yet to come.
Dear Dad,
Packing our bags of new clothes that Wednesday morning at the embassy was the most difficult thing I had ever done. Mummy had told us the week before we set sail that you might not come back with us to Nigeria because the government needed you there. There in the raging wars of Kinshasa, in 1993. She wanted to palliate the effects of the inevitable. But we knew. I remember feeling this heavy gravity that pulled down everything within, as if I had swallowed a wrecking ball. The thought that I might not see you again, and know you as the hero you were, frightened me.
We drove in the embassy’s Pajero SUV to the busy docks. You were smart as usual, eternal in your manly haircut, rich mustache, and impeccable command of the French language, which you spoke with when you passed instructions to your officers along the way. There was a lot of commotion when we arrived. There were blue helmets with sturdy guns in their hands—the UN soldiers on peacekeeping missions. The world was angry that the French Ambassador was killed. But they almost killed you too—and I was grateful that I had a father who could never die. Who was the suited equivalent of a superhero. Who would live forever without a strand of gray on his head.
The airports were inaccessible, so you and your colleagues had determined that we would take the ferry across the Congo River, and sail to Congo Brazzaville, where we would be received by the Nigerian Ambassador there. There was shoving and pushing, and you occasionally had to wade in to make sure we were not harassed by those who wanted to be paid for carrying our bags.
We got on the ferry, and I remember you kissing mum good-bye, leaning over to us with stinging tears in your eyes. You promised you’d return, that you’d come back soon. We hugged you tight and didn’t want to let go. But we had to. I had to.
And when the boat started to drift away from the quay, you stood there on the platform, your legs an actionable distance apart—a long cool figure cut out from the pestilence of the background, silhouetted against the din of the ordinary.
You did come home many times after that, until the day you came home in a box. But that final posture you assumed on the quay, as our ferry drifted farther and farther away from the concrete shore, will always remain for me your final stance. Your good-bye tears.
I have a daughter now. I’m sure you know that because you haunt me. Even now as I write this, in a room flooded by the light of the golden California sun, and with an empty chair in front of me, my tears remember the hands that once wiped them. Alethea is my daughter’s name. She is beautiful and strong and carefree and deliberate in one lump of embodied goodness. Her mother, whom I call Lali, but also goes by “Ej” and “Ijeoma,” is your daughter; you’d have been proud of her and cared for her just as I do.
I write you to remember you, dad. To let you know I see you standing on the quay even now, when leaves rustle with passing wind, when your wife and my mum calls us on the phone, when your granddaughter asks about you and calls you “Yummy grandpa”—that’s the way she sounds when she calls your name, “Yòmí.” Most of all, I see you when I remember the promise I made to Alethea, to be a good father for her, to worship her mum, to think with her, to listen to the ghosts that wander the streets as they whisper about worlds forgone, and to live in small places where I never forget that to be Alethea’s father is the deepest honor the universe bestows on me.
I love you. Don’t leave me alone.
Epilogue
Re/turn
That night, the door came down. The men brought it down, kicking it in. I held you through the latticed window, my hands wet from your tears. When the door came down, your mum ran into the room and picked you up, spinning you around. “Mama!” you cried. And for a moment, the whole world was still—all of Chennai silenced, even the petulant ladder that had been croaking its disagreements a little earlier—as things came together, as the wooden notions of our separation came apart. I watched you in your mother’s hands, through the window, tired but grateful.
I remember you smiling as you held Lali when I got back into the house. Everyone shed silent tears—your Indian grandmother, always loath to show emotional fragility, pretended she had something in her eyes.
From that day forward, we never let you wander behind closed doors again.
Even now we won’t allow you the old luxuries of thinking you are alone, for you are not. You remember this and remember this good: you never have and never will be alone.
I never did find that last hush. After the four you and your mother found, the last one never came by. I saw plenty of hushes after that, but they didn’t call out to me. I called on Bàbá to know his feelings about this. He didn’t pick up the phone. I even made a trip to Nigeria, to his town, to seek him, but on getting to his home, I met a woman who told me he had moved away somewhere else. By this time I had been seeking hushes for years, finding only nine out of ten. The tent
h hush must have sailed long before I could reach it.
And yet, I think there is wisdom hidden in not arriving, in not reaching the destination, in not figuring out the answer. This is why I wrote these letters to you. Something tells me that if the eyes that fall on these letters were to look around them, they might alight on that tenth hush, and meet themselves in a new way.
Home is such a slippery concept. She misbehaves. She shrinks and then vanishes in the tightening grip of your efforts to own her. Maybe there are no words to finally rope her in. In the stead of words, a gasp: home is then that moment when you, in a fit of sovereignty, would have given names to the glory-weary sun, and to the council of mountains that hum gently in his praise, and to the sea that yearns to be reunited with her lunar lover in the sky, and to the splendid assortment of color and texture and bulbous shapes that hang from trees—names for all—and then turn away satisfied, only to hear behind your ears the whisper of the world, “You! We shall give you a name too!” It is not enough to find one’s way home. Arriving will not suffice where naught is still, where everything moves.
So do not pray to arrive safely. There is room for that, of course. Do not yearn too much to win the trophy. To break through the line. To win the seat. To find the mountain peak. Surrender to the journey—in the ways only you know how to. Let the loamy fingers of this dark soil envelope you, unmake you, fiddle with you, disturb you, unsettle you, conspire with you, and birth you.
For me, this feeling of home … it looks like my own father, your grandfather, standing tall at the quay, saying good-bye. I can still see him there: silhouetted against a background of camo-wearing soldiers, walkie-talkie-toting suits, and white open-air jeeps with the letters UN painted in light blue on their sides. Tears stream down his face as he rushes us aboard the ferry that will carry his family, his wife, and three of his four children away from the pillage and the murmurings of a full-scale war that is afoot in Kinshasa, Zaire, and across to the neighboring country of Congo-Brazzaville. I feel his prickly mustache as he presses his face into mine, explaining what I already know at that point—that Daddy isn’t coming with us back to Nigeria, that the Nigerian government has requested all families of its diplomats to return to the country on account of the civil unrest provoked by insurgent Zairian soldiers protesting their flamboyant dictator-president, Mobutu Sese Seko. I feel the unspoken promise of reconciliation in his smile, as the anchoring ropes come undone, and the ferry drifts out, dancing on the currents in the wake of other departing vessels. This, all of this, is how home feels.
Home is your mother, in whose entrails and dust I will be entangled with—long after memories are congealed into new stars.
Where you are going, we cannot come.
So take these letters, pack them in a neat heap, and burn them in a fire. Put the ashes in with us, where we now lie, in the single pot you’ve kept by your side throughout these readings.
Release us into the ocean wind, let her carry us away so we will always be close to you.
Run through the fields, my darling. Run to your new kin. To your new fathers and mothers. To the ones who hold you close as our dust churns a new night. Gather your children close—if you have any—and tell them of us, your mother and me. Especially your mother. Tell them of your mother.
And when you dance through the wisps of Thursday’s bright morning, know you will not dance alone. For we will haunt you. We are cool like that.
Notes
Prologue
1Hello, Alethea! Right, so I thought to include these endnotes to further explain or clarify aspects of the letters, and to pay homage to the many voices that speak through these pages. You should visit here often, if my writing does not already make you weary..
2James Odunbaku, “Importance of Cowrie Shells in Pre-Colonial Yoruba Land South Western Nigeria: Orile-Keesi as a Case Study,” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science 2:18 (2012), 234–41..
3This divinatory method is still practiced in syncretic religious ordinances by descendants of slaves shipped to the New World from the seventeenth century..
4Okonkwo is the tragic character in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (London: William Heinemann, 1968), whose exposure to colonial powers leaves him estranged from the community he had always called home, and—in the crisp telling of Achebe’s deft words—leads to his tragic suicide. I read Things Fall Apart for the first time when I visited the small library within the compound of the Nigerian Embassy in Kinshasa, Zaire. His story took on more urgent tones when I learned to see myself as a subject of colonial regimes, and sought a path of decolonization..
Letter 1
1In the Christian text, in John 14:2, Jesus, speaking to his disciples, promises them homes in heavenly places. Of course, there are some, including Wave Nunnally (“What Did Jesus Mean by ‘Many Mansions’?,” PE News, March 7, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/yatym9db) that dispute whether he was talking about palatial estates for each disciple, and suggest that there is a deeper subtlety at work in Jesus’ description of home..
2H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu,” Weird Tales February 1928..
3Markus Gabriel, in his book Why the World Does Not Exist (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015, 90), notes that we can only know sections of infinity and that there is no sensible way to speak about the real because “the world” is not neatly singular. It’s a sentiment I agree with because like other neorealists, Gabriel acknowledges that one cannot explain everything in a single metatheory. In fact, I would say with him that the true merit of any theory is not how much it tells us about things or facts, but how much it holds close and refuses to lose sight of its hubris..
4Matthew 5:14..
5Saint Augustine, Sermon 103, 1–2:6, quoted in Philip Schaff, ed., A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1896–1900)..
6Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 56..
7“Brick Like Me,” The Simpsons, season 25, episode 20, May 4, 2014..
8Genesis 3:9–10. My theology might need some dusting, but I often wondered why anyone could escape the all-seeing gaze of a supreme being. There are some commentaries that suggest God’s “Where are you?” was an inquiry about Adam’s existential condition, not his physical location. The distance was one of the heart, not of feet. Because Adam had sinned, God’s question was designed to force the culprit to examine his circumstances. So God asks not because he is ignorant, but because he seeks to allow Adam’s own agency to show itself, to give account for his recent behavior. And yet, my reading of the Fall—as a dissolution of the eternal or the notion of sin—generates a perverse plot twist that need not be factual (any more than any myth is factual) for it to be instructive, if only for literary purposes: God’s love shines through by his own coming undone. He is not left unaffected. Michael Marder writes in Dust (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, 36) that “God addresses his own regret of being dustless by creating the world and, specifically Adam and Eve, through whom he became dust vicariously, well in advance of Jesus’ incarnation.”.
9Marder, Dust, 44..
10Ibid., 38..
11Ibid., 49..
12Ibid., 36..
13Susan Hekman, The Material of Knowledge (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2010)..
14Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5..
15Modernity seems to me to be the set of practices that hope to expand the autopoietic (self-preserving dynamics) to the exclusion of the sympoietic (co-constitutive becoming). But, as is the thesis of this letter, there is no ideal explanation of the concept of modernity..
16I don’t mean to suggest that there is a uniform entity called “science.” There isn’t. But that’s the risk you get with naming things, or even speaking at all: you push out controversies, contradictions, inner tensions, particularities, and more. Th
e alternative is not to speak at all. And even that—not speaking—is populated with nuance and texture..
17Marder, Dust, 34..
Letter 2
1Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 4..
2Brunella Casalini, “The Materialist Bent in Contemporary Feminist Theory,” Periódico do Núcleo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre Gênero e Direito Centro de Ciências Jurídicas, Universidade Federal da Paraíba 2 (2015), 140, https://goo.gl/5SROkl..
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 36
