Dear Bazzers
Image courtesy of Sebastian Moronell.
Chola,
I promised to send you something, as I am the one returning home.
Memorable landmarks along the way:
a) O.R. Tambo International Airport; Africa’s finest, now a deserted wasteland. A packet of crisps whilst waiting for the boarding call. Why do they always make sure flights to Lusaka are in the most out-of-the-way corners of the terminal?
b) On the Boeing; something like a prayer slips through my mouth; I heard Boeings were burning up. Across the Savanna, and then the Zambezi.
c) Kenneth Kaunda International Airport; honeycomb façade, built by the colonial government in the 60s. Next to it is a new one being built by the Chinese with steel and glass. The taxi drivers waiting by the entrance ask my father and I if we need a fare
d) The tarmac hums sweetly beneath the tires, but we turn left and right, never giving the road enough time to sing its ballad to the end. Eventually we hit Leopard’s Hill.
Obi Okonkwo, the protagonist of Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, returns to Nigeria after studying in Britain. With Nigeria on the cusp of change, he subsequently enters the civil service wide-eyed and principled. If you have read the novel, you know that Okonkwo’s fate rests like that of his forefathers — in agonising failure. With cynical prose Achebe declares that perhaps the most perverse failure is vanity: the vanity of returning home.
I’m sure all of us (perhaps not you, Chola) have felt responsible to this relic of the 19th century – the nation-state. I know I have, and I have traversed those landmarks on the way home in hopes of serving it. Arriving home, then, is always met with a strange expectation of service, of duty — to the strangers who mark this land with you and I. And most of them shall forever remain strangers, as will I — just another kid from the tropics coming home to renew his residency permit.
Yours,
Sebastian.
Image courtesy of Sebastian Moronell.
Bazzers,
I was telling a designer whose work I admire greatly about the odd novelty of having grown up, sort of, in an airport — the one you now call the Kenneth Kaunda International.
In my adult years I've tried to determine what it is that lights up my soul, the many times I've had to escort someone heading off somewhere ... Is it the idea of finally leaving, of standing so close to the time-portal I can almost see the other side: a place where I can pony dangerous ideas, or not fail alone in the pursuit of crafting marketable literature?
I think not, actually ... The twinkles have slightly more to do with being there after school in my childhood, waiting on my old man to clock out, spritzing round the place as the planes floated down or away. The tea was always in paper cups, and always exceptional. Every time I corrupt a mug with milk, I'm just trying to white it the way they did.
Anyway, I dig the way you know things one would have to read in books no one bothers to re-issue anymore. That'll be a handy trick at parties full of sophisticated artists, or "motherfucking philosopher-poets," to quote Paul Beatty :).
I guess it's bad for both my literary and street cred that I've never actually read Achebe. I run on the same instinctive gas, and abundant word-of-mouth, that enables me to surmise what it must feel like to slog through Infinite Jest or flutter through Jane Austen's worlds. I don't want to stray too far from the point here — which is that, yes, coming back tends to have an egoistic complication about it.
The last time I came back from anywhere, all my suspicions about the free world confirmed, I was hell-bent on executing immediate escape — if possible right there, at luggage claim. So we are strangers to this land for different reasons. You, I guess, for not being sure whether this country actually wants your duty, your service (am I right?); and me, for simply needing to self-actualize, somewhere my passions are commonplace, round every fifth street corner.
We're not going to do the politics of it or anything — but there's a gaseousness to it; living in a country where you always feel like, or always seem to just be passing through.
CC.
