While I am very grateful to Life for family, friends, love and local pepper soup, I have always known that moving to another place, any place would be a total breeze for me. Like the rail track dweller, my sense of home is established very quickly the instant I am able to re-create those persona- defining rote and ritual.

“Dark days” is an award-winning documentary shot in the year 2000 by British born Marc Singer, about a group of people who, otherwise homeless, reside in the tunnels that align the New York subway.

I watched this 12 year old documentary a few weeks ago, and found a core nugget answer to something I had pondered on for years now.

Lets set the scene for “Dark Days”.

First, let us establish the setting; the New York subway transport system is dirty. Not dirty-compared-to-other-metropolitan-cities-of-the-world, but real dirty. Rats, food waste, cosmopolitan trash, urine and possibly other human waste have their smells baked intimately into several parts along its tracks.

New York is a frantic, populated city, which in spite of its “I-don’t-care-too-much-about-you-little-person” continues to have an appeal that is nearly hypnotic to many people. Hence, a continued population of chronic city dwellers, drifters, immigrants and migrants alike flock here still for a taste of the tempting Apple. The economics of housing this movement, as well as high living costs in an expensive city might be (some of the) reasons why it has a significant homeless population.

The documentary could have tried to focus on the individual stories of what caused these people to live within the curious shadow-places that are seen only in little flashes as commuters travel through them. But it doesn’t, forwards that narrative and instead it shows us how, very quickly for some, and not as quickly for others, a sense of space and ownership is established amongst the trash, in the no-place limbo of the rail tracks and perennial near-darkness.

With bits of wood, board, paint, gusts and memory, these people very quickly own a space, define it, refine it. They build doors, windows, grooming corners, somewhere to smoke. Some have kettles, mirrors, friends, pets, enemies, routines, all in a bid to establish a familiar around themselves early, like a cocoon, to perhaps to protect their minds from the feeling of being abandoned and invincible.

As one dweller tells another “You have to deal with it in your mind………. that you are homeless,……instead of looking for ways to push past it….”

And it is here that my story begins.

About three years ago, I finally embraced the idea of becoming an emigrant. It didn’t come easy getting to this place, though it was not for the popular or expected reasons. As much as I considered being an emigrant, I did not want to be described as someone who wanted to “escape” the limits of opportunities Nigeria, my country of birth and find an easier way out. I do not know why, and forgive me for this, but I have once, twice shared that pathological judgment of how “cowardly” this choice is.

For many, understandably, the idea of leaving friends and family, work, a familiar neighborhood is so difficult that only the best of opportunities for education or work could allow them make that decision.

Well, not me.

In various conversations with friends, I have gathered the emigrant experience from far and wide with various preferences. Some emigrants go places where the weather is like home; others want to be in a place where there is an equal amount of dark complexions that “look like them”. Some even seek out communities where the Nigerian food is plentiful and available.

“I never want to be farther than a 6 hour flight, from my Mother” said a work colleague of mine to me, dead serious.

All very fine reasons to establish what “home” means.  (and even then, for most this move is very temporary).

Reason enough for some in fact to say that emigration will always be a bad thing.

“You will be frustrated in another man’s land!” , “You will have to come back !” , to which I agree.

If indeed what I did was to “give up something” in search of “another thing”, then the odds of coming back “home” a little empty-handed are quite high indeed

But if, like for me,  the definition of home is a fluid thing in the first place, perhaps I therefore stand a good chance, no?

While I am very grateful to Life for family, friends, love and local pepper soup, I have always known that moving to another place, any place would be a total breeze for me. Like the rail track dweller, my sense of home is established very quickly the instant I am able to re-create those persona- defining rote and ritual.

A mirror, a not too needy pot-plant, that daily morning struggle with oiling the dry-spot in the middle of my back, favorite music tunes; some for running, some for doing dishes to, a window-ledge where I will quickly gather things-that-smell-nice, a desk knick-knack space for all my eclectic memento, the luxury of ten quiet minutes in bed before I leave the sheets, and Saturday mornings where tweezers in hand, I argue with my gray hairs.

These tools tend to ground me a place, any place and remind me that like a tortoise and its shell, I always carry my mobile happy-place on my back anyway.

Home for me, is a collection of my habits.

Any space that lets me perform them all, is fine with me.

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30 Days 30 Voices series is an opportunity for young Nigerians to share their stories and experiences with other young Nigerians, within our borders and beyond, to inspire and motivate them.

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.