Home for Christmas?

As I write, it is 5:19pm in Plateau State and 10:19am in Florida. A friend texts me from Nigeria that she is waiting for a Christmas Eve service to begin. I sit in my sister’s dining room, my laptop on a towel, so as not to scratch her polished wood table. I raise the blinds, […]

As I write, it is 5:19pm in Plateau State and 10:19am in Florida. A friend texts me from Nigeria that she is waiting for a Christmas Eve service to begin. I sit in my sister’s dining room, my laptop on a towel, so as not to scratch her polished wood table. I raise the blinds, and outside, I can see the top of a white picket fence, a few trees, lifting their arms to the sky, their uppermost branches swaying in the wind. Beyond that is the blue that only comes on sunny days, the brightness and crisp shadows belying the cold outside. By the windows, leaning their heads toward the light are red flamingo flowers, which we bought my sister when she moved into this apartment back in May, and white peace lilies given to the family when my grandmother died. The flowers that looked over my grandmother’s casket still stand tall, facing the light.
I feel like the house flowers these days, craving light. I am lucky that I am staying in coastal Florida, which is much further south than Wisconsin, where my university is, where it starts getting dark at 4pm in the winter. I think of light every time I go to church with my sister, a pleasant non-denominational sort of place with coffee in the foyers, sing-alongable music, and a lot of creative video shows, for which reason I suppose, they have painted the front of the auditorium black. I feel trapped whenever I go in there and they turn down the lights low as if we were in a cinema. I need windows, sun coming in, a glimpse of the sky.
These are things you think about in wintry America, light and people. (And of the strange new trends, such as men sporting long hipster beards.)
I went on a walk the other day, to the water that connects continents. I saw maybe six people on my walk down, a few high school girls giggling after getting off a school bus, a man walking into a Starbucks coffeehouse, a man bicycling along the water, and another two men jogging. The neighbourhood felt deserted. Where are all the people? I wondered. I mentioned it to my sister. “They’re all at work,” she laughed. As was she, spending her light hours in a hospital where she is doing her medical residency. I squat in her quiet house trying to finish writing my dissertation.
Handel’s oratorio “The Messiah” plays on Spotify. I am in the land of constant internet, where online music plays with hardly a hiccup. I once sang alto in a community choir performance of “The Messiah” back in Jos in 2002. I had to go in twice a week for months to practice. I would ride in with an old Sierra Leonean man, who loved classical music and loved singing. I remember skimming through Jos at night, seeing people at the little kiosks lit by kerosene lamps, laughing and gesturing, me sitting in the car in the dark where no one could see me, thinking how I could never belong like this, never sit effortlessly outside a shop gisting. How foreign I would remain no matter how much I wanted to belong.
Then I learned Hausa. I could sit in the dark with friends, not feeling so keenly the difference of my glow-in-the-dark skin. I felt alive then, at home. I wanted to be nowhere else in this world.
 Now the soloist sings:
“I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God, and in my flesh shall I see God. For now is Christ risen, from the dead. The first fruits of them that sleep.”
Tears come to my eyes. I think of my grandmother.
The morning of her funeral, I lay in the dark at 4am, waken by jetlag, my sister in the bed beside me. I imagined her now, Georgia Davenport McCain, as that beautiful girl from the photo, running in the light, into the arms of my grandfather, now that handsome young man from their wedding photo. Of both of them in that timeless place, laughing, youthful of body and face yet full of the wisdom of their years on earth.
The chorus sings joyously “Even so in Christ shall all, shall all, be made alive.”
Two nights ago, I dreamed of her, as the last time I saw her two years ago, with her white hair and polyester dress. She didn’t say anything to me, but she smiled, and then she ran, leaping along the roadside.
 “Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.”
The trumpet triumphantly sings out.
“The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible. And we shall be changed.”
The tears tremble in my eyes.
“Then shall be brought to pass a saying that is written, ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’ Oh death, oh death, where? Where is thy sting? Oh grave, oh grave, where is thy victory?”
***
The tradition of returning home to the village, the home of one’s ancestors, at Christmas-time echoes that archetypal return to Bethlehem that the Roman government enforced on the people of Nazareth. Joseph and his young pregnant wife Mary arrived in a village so full of returnees that there was no more room in the inn. They were left squatting in a lowly household where they lay the newborn in an animal feeding trough. They were poor people, homeless in this land of their ancestors. They were home but yet also strangers.
Last week we returned to my father’s village in Rigolette, Louisiana, for my grandmother’s funeral, where I see people who look like me, tall, dark-haired and dark-eyed. I sit with uncles whose voices I mistake for my dad’s over the phone. I meet with kin three or four times removed, and hear the gossip of a community that has lived together from birth to death, who know each other’s lives better than I know anyone, perhaps. There is something lovely about this—this sense of belonging that people have when they live their whole lives in a place.
The literary world right now celebrates cosmopolitanism and jet-setting, privileged homelessness, yet I find myself craving homes too, this soil in which our families have been rooted for the past hundred years or so before the last migration (because there have always been migrations), in a place where everyone knows everyone else’s story. Where neighbours bring “Row Gulley” home-cooking for the bereaved family.
At the funeral, I sat on the second row of the chapel with my cousins, gazing through tears and smiles at the shell my grandmother left behind. But I was a stranger too, to these people who knew my grandmother their whole lives, my mind split between continents, hovering over the ocean in between, searching for home.
This is what I think of the day before Christmas: of homes and of foreignness, of the feebleness of our short hold on this earth. Of that light-filled place where our ancestors wait for us beyond an ocean, which only takes a second to cross but over which there will be no return. At least not for now.
May the light that flows from that place lead us out of our darkness into the new year.