Flipping through the pages of Nicole Krauss’ Great House, one is confronted by the eternal interplay between the continuum of human lives on one hand and a sense of home on the other, where the idea itself is an annunciation of a sacred vesting of the fluid intangibilities of thought, finally brought to life, breathed into being by the comeliness and certainty they instruct. And so, in the preservation of that solitary insistence, nothing corrodes the pure essence that pursuit embodies. From time to time, we are nonetheless presented with a resistance seeking to uproot the individual from the permanence he has come to know, for in that home is a refuge for more than one; of memories, musings, and thoughts, practices and cultures, all frozen in time, communing with it and hatching, from that communion, a religious preservation of the moment.
The burgeoning question I now suppose is: Where one goes when home is taken from you? What now houses the anguish that results from that gross injustice? The repercussions of historical tragedy or personal trauma are great and, sadly, provide us fodder for the justification of even greater injustices. Perhaps the reason histories are replete with replications and recollections of these vast and potent tragedies is not so that we execute them with greater precision but to realize the depths our (in)human iniquities must not venture. And there lies the perennial rebuke, that martyrdom that latches on at all costs and flouts the call to self-preservation, proclaiming with one earth-shattering shudder “We must all die to protect it, to immortalize the essence of our being“.
The answer then presents even scarier possibilities, the abundance of which collective sentiment arbitrarily evokes, with the same wantonness the removal proceeded and with which it is remembered.
And then we are back to asking, “What sadness do we inherit and, of it, what do we give to those who come after us? And how is it preserved?”
Of the many responses that there are to chaos, there is always a naming that precedes the eventual violence that erupts because of it, which is then woven into the assemblage of exiled reservations that entire families dip into to disappear, albeit momentarily, from the dystopia the past enlivens.
Wasn’t it Morrison who suggested that when chaos resists, either by reforming itself or by rebelling against imposed order, violence is understood to be the most frequent response and the most rational when confronting the unknown, the catastrophic, the wild, wanton, or incorrigible? And you find this swatch reconstructed across continents, echoing the remonstrations of what was, what could have been and pursuing in the darkness a glimmer to torch the path so frequently trod.
Luqman Hussain is a lawyer and poet. He is a graduate of Ahmadu Bello University and is
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