Just as birds fly home to their nests to rest when the sun sets, so does the human soul long for home in the evening of life. A tangible yearning, that is more felt than could be spelled.  

As twilight approaches, the shadow of life’s mornings encroach on the field of human memory and stirs the heart to a time of innocence. The sphere of his first sounds, sights, and smells. The place or rock from which the man was carved. The land whose features influence his future and define his unique identity in the vast sea of humanity. 

Home-land is the soil where a man’s roots are deeply entrenched, prior to the intervening forces of tropism.  The tree may thrive or strive distances away, but its roots run deep to a place that colors its leaves and shape its fruits. This is the soul of the diaspora.  

He yearns for home, but quite often, the things that made him leave have not left his homeland. Rather the lizards that once plagued the homestead, have grown into crocodiles. The winds that once breezed, have twirled into whirlwinds.  

He’s now an ‘immigrant’ in a new home and an ‘outsider’ in his homeland.  

No longer a brother, sister, or friend to his kinsfolk, but now a minefield. To be desired if it yields earthy minerals or despised if it doesn’t. Yet like Khalil’s river, ‘he looks back at the paths he has traveled, and the ocean in front of him, and there’s no going back.’ 

So he heeds the words of the prophet ‘to build houses, plant gardens and take wives and have children in the land of his sojourn’. 

(Jeremiah 29:5-7 KJV). 

Yet the yearning lingers, because the taste of hamburgers and French fries, fails to replace the innate relish of nkwobi or amala or arepitas and patacon.  

Every day he pastes his ears to the wind for good tidings from the homeland. But dreams don’t seem to bud there anymore. Hopes are nipped before they pop, like a fetus aborted before babies form. The regal dance of the past has morphed into a sport for rascals. Kingpins become king men. As much as the heart of the diaspora yearns, his soul may never physically abide beside his umbilical cords anymore. 

Times and seasons wash over the diaspora like sea waves upon shore sands in the lands of Odyssey. His trees are full of fruits (offspring) but the tastes and colors have changed. Their tongues are strange and their roots have intertwined. The family gathering in the village square and tales told under the moonlight is now done rotationally in glass houses between New York, Sydney, London, Madrid, Tokyo, etc.

Indeed the river has lost itself in the voluptuous arms of the human ocean in unforeseen intercourse. An irrevocable romance. The river lines are now blurred. Her tribal scents and sounds are submerged in the common monotony of the ocean waves. A new homeland? 

As days draw closer, the bones of the diaspora grow wearier. The quality of healthcare in his homeland can not sustain him nor their social structures yield any benefits to him. So he tarries in his abode. If fate flops, his tropical bones will repose in a cold cold land, and his colored spirit will roam unwelcome amongst foreign ghosts. Far from the waiting hugs of his ancestors.  

The dreams of the diaspora are often haunted by the phantoms of the homeland. Just as a root is contaminated, leaves a tree jaundiced. Yet the masquerades in this bizarre home dance are unbothered by the distant borders their dance steps perturb.  

The diaspora closes his eyes and pastes his ears to the wind yet again….and again… 

Nixon Uzoma is a dual Nigerian and Dutch citizen. A philosopher, poet, and president of Onix Incorporated and Onix Curaçao B. V in the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao.