By Fola Ojo
City life anywhere around the world is not a static life. It is an ever-swinging living. A fuselage of nagging noise. A hotbed of hustles and bustles of gutsy men and women. Everybody is in a mad and maddening rush, panting in anxiety after something unseen. Every man is on their feet. Countless women are not at ease. They all spin about in a hurry, going somewhere. Even with self-immersed pressure to break through big into a stratosphere of financial comfort, at the end of the merry-go-round, most of them end up nowhere near their dream. City life anywhere around the world is not a static life. It is an ever-swinging living.
Where I was born is not comparable to Himalaya, New York City. Its size is not a match for the sprawling Tokyo township. Where I was conceived, born, nourished, and nurtured will always be called home. Home and its homeliness are an unforgettable experience. Home is different from where I’ve resided and called home for almost four decades. The latter is on the other side of the Universe. Between Brookshire and Houston, roads are big and beautiful. Vehicular traffic is crazy and hazy. Houses are massive and monumental. On this side are posh and plum cars. Paved streets glitter like gold with their beaming radiance. On this side, light from electricity powered by gas, wind, solar, and some coal does not shut off. Power failure is rare. Potable water gushes out of faucets without ceasing. Life on this side of the world is all bling-bling. But it’s not close to where my heart is. There’s something indescribable about my home and its homeliness.
Home and its homeliness frequently cause a stir and gnaw in me that just won’t stop. Daily, I carry a burning hunger that won’t dissipate. I breathe with a hanker for the quiddity of life at home. It’s a desideratum and thirst for the peculiarity of its systemic composition. You can call it a raging famishment that the glitters on the other side of the universe have not succeeded in subduing. The more I try to burke it, the higher the spiking of the desire for the same. I have travelled around. I have seen places and garnered experiences in some twenty nations and still counting. There is nothing compared to the serenity of home and its homeliness.
At home, you aren’t coerced to communicate in an idiolect that’ll twist your tongue and break your jaws. Open your mouth to speak; hearers know what you mean without misinterpretation. The purity of the air you breathe will loosen up your heavily congested lungs. The morning dew will daze you if you are seeing it for the first time. The sweet and clean water flowing quietly in a nearby stream can heal the sick.
At home, you can dump the city and travel far off into the belly of the village. The typical Nigerian village is where its houses are made of mud, and where dry, dirty but sturdy leaves steadily hold up the roofs and prevent them from caving in under a severe storm. The village life is where the mother-chicken spreads her wings in anger and in intense pursuit of a trespasser considered a threat to her kids. In the village, the boisterous bleating of goats and sheep sounds like a coordinated lyrical lullaby, sending you into an unintended dance. It’s a place where the white man’s fluorescent cannot take the place of the illumination coming from a handmade pottery lamp soaked in red oil. Between the city and the village, home remains home with its homeliness.
As early as 4am, you are woken up from your bamboo bed by the persistent crowing of cocks and the endless chirping of unnamed birds. In wee hours, cracking sounds of your neighbours’ bamboo doors signify the beginning of another day and a scheduled trek to the family farm 20 miles away. And on the farm, you leap in joy when your locally made steel-trap ensnares a big fat animal that will not dump high cholesterol in your bodily system when fried or roasted.
You return from the farm, and masquerades are out in hordes, barking in croaky, gravelly voices, causing the baby in the womb to leap and skip in trepidation. I just love the village life where the baby-masquerade hunts village kids with his torturing whips, and adults are forced to scamper around, hiding from the rage of the ‘heavenly-being’. It’s the village life where families huddle up at eventide around village lamps, sharing stories and singing folksongs as everybody wriggles their waists to the rhythm from the tough and big bellowing village ‘gbedu’ drums.
In the village, is where in Aurora, the neighbourhood sweet cold river flows with fragrance and purity; so soothing to the soul as you scoop it down your throat. It’s that village life with its resounding quietude, which allows you to hear a pin drop one mile away. Surrounding hills and mountains are a big part of the beautiful scenery that makes visitors stand and watch in awe. In the village, everybody knows everybody from ten generations past. You are told stories of the gallantry of your descendants and how your great-grandfather fought some wars and triumphed over foes from distant lands. In the village are renditions of beautiful songs passed down from generations unending and continually rehashed in my ears by the 110-year-old Mama whose gaits are as steady and as tough as a teenager’s.
Right there in the village is the small sanctuary where worship of God continues as it was passed down from ages. The people trust their clergy as the mediator between them and God of heaven. He manipulates and exploits nobody for a pot of porridge. He wants no private jet or limousine; his feet are his conveyance. He knows that his duty is to carry the people’s burdens on his heart and shoulders before God. And gladly the people respond in kind and in love.
Armed robbers hate it in the village. Petty thieves know how arduous it is to get away with their evil adventure.
There is peace accompanied by tranquillity because politicians’ abodes are far from here. Nobody is beheading anybody because nobody wants to become governor, and nobody is jostling to be president. Not in the village where its revered king is lord, and the village-headmaster is the sole custodian of literary wisdom. In the village, “Google’ is seen as a competing voodoo, and technology from the Western world is a trespass. I lost the energy for this side a long time ago! Not too long from now, I’ll be back in the loving embrace of home and its homeliness.
I am not too far away from the seventh floor of life. The hustle for money and mad dash for cash and its splendour is no longer desperately in the play. With modesty and wisdom, I ploughed through that long and lousy lane earlier in life. No, I’m not in the league of Aliko Dangote. I am thousands of miles away from the swagger borders of Deji Adeleke, Davido’s father. And for certain not in the cohort of Bola Tinubu, who is “Mr President”. I am enlisted in the league of the contented. Righteousness with contentment is a great gain, remember? Today, I grind and continue to grow in that modestly great gain. When I think about home and its homeliness, the innermost feeling is mollifying. It is joy like a river.
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Fola Ojo
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