Folks:

I just wanted to share these reflections with you and I hope that some of
you, if not most of you, will relate to it in some way. I had started
writing this a while back and just recently had a chance to finish it up.


“And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and
know the place for the first time." (T.S Elliot)


Enjoy.


-BambaLaye
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The Homecoming:  A Letter of Reflections


Dear Kambia:


It has been more than two decades and I have since reflected.


That home for me has become an imagined space that evolved through layers
of memory, nostalgia, and desire. My expression of the desire for home has
become a substitute for home, which embodies the emotion that is attendant
upon the image in my mind. My home is the creative interstice: between The
Gambia (I have learnt in the papers that I had it wrong without the “The”)
as it was when I left over two decades ago - in whom belonging was
ambiguous and contradictory and from whom it was necessary for me to
escape - and a Gambia of un-convoluting heritage, The Gambia as it perhaps
could have been or might become later on. Between the past and the future,
my memory and my imagination, lies the shrine I call home.


Because my home is very much longed for but irretrievably absent, I have to
feel it as tangible. For the sake of sanity, I will live and I will write
in terms of absence, of absent and or questioned present time. Not for any
imagined or remembered existence or rather an absent presence. Yes! That’s
my state of instant reminiscence if you wish. The Gambia, my home.


The Gambia my home is a reality which for me is an expectation, a dream,
whereas my current abode is an expectation, a dream, which has become a
reality. The grass is always greener on the other side. My new world never
fulfils its expectations, and my old world is growing sweeter with
distance, and this sweetness is making me more bitter. Absence makes the
heart grow fonder, they say. Yet I am engaged with an imagined space that
cannot be reached: isn't that what gives me the defining characteristic of
a Diasporan? Self imposed that is.


Kambia, of many of my losses as a Diasporan perhaps one of the most
devastating is the loss of that which I may not even realize I have at
home. That which makes The Gambia home, the stuff that I took for granted,
which I have recognized yet lost; this loss is as irretrievable as the
desire for its restoration is insatiable. The Gambia is everything that my
current abode is not. It has become obscene and unbearable, perhaps
unlivable; it is insecure, the sanctuary of the corrupt, and the familiar;
where living on the edge can - at least from a distance - become shrouded
in nostalgia.


It struck me, after a few years in America that I had given up something
very precious by leaving The Gambia. Maybe it was just nostalgia, but in my
mind’s eye my life before America seemed somehow charged with meaning.
Every day had been a struggle against howling moral head winds coming from
every direction. I had lived amidst the stark difference of good and evil,
surrounded by magic and mystery, myth and superstition. Nothing in America
could ever compare with so powerful a set of social intoxicants. In
America, my soul is next to being impoverished.


After all Kambia, this may be a sweet thing to end. I may have to put
myself through the cold sweats and sickness of withdrawal just so I can
start anew, and experience that wild rush of social intoxication as if it
is for the first time. Coming home to The Gambia is going to be like that.
In America, I may not be the happiest man alive. Yet I wake up every
morning inside my own dream. This is the point in my life that I have been
dreaming toward. How do I express such a joy? The joy of the American
dream. All I can say is: even though happiness such as this may be unique,
even though I know in my heart it can't last forever, even then I would
wish for nothing deeper or greater. I would wish for nothing like what
prevails in The Gambia today.


Let’s admit it; lately it has been much easier to find reasons to celebrate
the dystopias in The Gambia than to welcome the utopias therein. Do we
really have a choice though? This is true not only in the context of what
may or may not be deployed and processed in our minds, but also because our
expectations do not usually correspond to the reality on the ground. The
level of satisfaction in the living conditions of Gambians cannot rival the
desire I have activated in my mind. The mental energy I have expended so
far on the image of The Gambia in absence has, on many occasions, proven to
be incommensurate with the reality of The Gambia at present.


My homecoming


In homecoming, Kambia, I may derive strength or tragedy. In homecoming, I
shall meet with my broken self, to be brought back to life. Giving me the
fulfilling word of life. Making me climb the last hill of the sun. I will
be certain; by such strength my triumph is assured. Without the strength I
will be denied the triumph and be left simply with one more - and perhaps
the ultimate - addition to a collection of my broken self. I know, I know,
homecoming can be an ambiguous and disorienting experience, with joy and
relief tempered, even eclipsed by other emotions such as disappointment and
unfulfilled expectations, disillusionment and even anger.


My experience in America has proven to be an interminable yet hopelessly
inadequate preparation for my re-encounter with home. My mind’s image of
home has propelled and perhaps lured me home and will probably abandon me
to the reality of something else. Homecoming for me is more like a dream -
I have the usual fantasies of return and recognition - an expectation
perhaps. Expectations that all my unformulated questions will be answered
and my fragmented memories will cohere in a recognizable pattern. That my
homecoming will have meaning and lead me to some kind of understanding. But
what if my dreams and expectations suddenly becomes an uncomfortable,
unexpected reality?


I am not looking for an answer. I have a life which have to be continued,
and perhaps that continuation is in itself something like an answer or as
near as one would ever get to an answer. It is the resolution and the
integration - of my dream, my expectation, and the reality; of the
Diaspora, the people, and the places; of the hopes and the disappointments.


No! You don’t have to tell me. I know, I know, I have been changed by
America, spoiled if you will. I must tell you though that some of the
essence of the process of my change shall be left as a legacy in America
and some I’ll have to bring home with me. I am anxious to have something to
show for the years in America, all those years of absence, years that are
varied and intricate in themselves. I could bring the world back to you in
The Gambia; the burdens and the insights of being away. I would return with
scars, precious gifts, and I will definitely see differently. I will return
as a divided self.


In my homecoming, I will probably have a different perspective and a fresh
insight on home, just as my stay away from home did to me. In the event of
my homecoming, that which was previously subconsciously absorbed and taken
for granted as home, then yearned for and re-created from a distance, will
become strange and unfamiliar. Home will be consciously seen and felt as if
for the first time. When I come home from America, I will probably be
overwhelmed by the feeling that I was seeing The Gambia clearly for the
first time. As T.S Elliot puts it: “And the end of all our exploring / Will
be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time." I
will know The Gambia for the first time.


However, there will be much, also, that I will return without. I know for a
fact that I will return without any real appreciation of what I am going to
come home with, without, or to. Frankly, I expect home to have been
irremediably changed in or by my absence; I expect to come home and find it
waiting, as before, as I remembered, changed perhaps, unchanged may be, and
all that. I expect to find both continuity and change, but more
importantly, my returning will have little or no effect on either.


Moreover, I expect not a hero's welcome, no large cheering crowd to await
my arrival, no ritual slaughtering of the fattened ram. Actually, I may in
fact, cower from such a reception. I know in my mind that people have grown
up, grown old, and died; that lives and relationships have changed, and my
long absence will probably be forgotten. Absence does strip away
attachments and connections, absence would have turned me into a stranger
who has little life left in that place called home.


Kambia, my homecoming is to come home to you, to come back to you, to
return to you, although there is also no coming home, no coming back, no
return. My homecoming is to arrive at Yundum, to travel the muddy roads, to
beat the dust off my shirt, to start again, to attempt to pick up the
thread in a place that in some ways can never be returned to and in other
ways was never left. My homecoming, like my home, can be anything I want it
to be.


My fear, Kambia, is that over the years, home itself and the reasons for my
return may have become more complicated and ambiguous than they seemed to
me. I am hoping though, that my homecoming will provide a different
perspective not only on The Gambia but also on America. I am hoping and
praying that my coming home will precipitate a continuation and further
evolution of the dialogue between my home, The Gambia and my exile -
America.


So what can I be doing now awakening from my sweet dream of returning or of
dreaming of that time away from my sweet home? Show me the way Kambia, the
way to go home. Home sweet home.


Your dearest, in dreams.

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