Passenger X
I am travelling back home after a year of absence away in Sawa, taking academic and national service. Never in my eighteen years have I ever been away from home this long; the longest I have ever been away was the one month compulsory school summer work in a village only eighteen kilometers away when I was fifteen.
Seven hours drive in from Sawa, the long procession of buses carrying us returnees home docks in Asmara. In the bus station, thronged beofore us like the hair on our head, are persons, nears and dears, waving at us, cheering us in welcome, restlessly awaiting for their respective loved ones to come out of the bus. Inside the bus, returnees from Asmara wiggle, jostle their way through the dense bodies, tumble out of the buses, like a baby out of the womb, onto the waiting arms of family and relatives. And huddle
Wistfully, I witness these bare, emotional scenes of reunion through the dust-caked glass window of my bus. This is a scene that has played out in all the towns we passed through, when the buses alighted those whose homes are in these towns. Mine, my reunion, even after reaching as far as Asmara, has to wait, wait for at least twenty-four hours, for home is still seven hundred kilometers farther away, in the town called Assab. Stretching between me and home is a largely dusty, bumpy, treacherous dirt road.
I am in that lone road home now. The bus moves torturously, painfully slow. Or maybe it is pressing the dirt-road thinner and longer, as does rolling pin to dough, as it moves along. In any case, we are not moving fast enough. But then I doubt if a jet can take me the seven-hundred-kilometer-distance home fast enough.
An eternity later, I reach home, to my own reunion, my deferred reunion, to a flurry of ululation, cries, hugs, popcorn strewing, neighbors’ congratulations…
Evening. The dust of emotion has settled. I am home alone. This is when reality sets in, reality comes home, so to speak, hours after I do in my person, the reality that I hate my home, the home I have come hurtling to. Home is the last place I want to be in, after my grave. The stifling reality of lack and limitations, destitution, my siblings and I have been brought up in comes back to me, full force. I recall the countless nights we went to bed in empty stomach, our tender stomach scourged with hunger at age when no child should.
I remember the last day before my departure to Sawa, Baba defers giving me the money I need for my leave till the last minute, when I am about to get on the bus, when he fists it into my palm. Inside the bus, I open my palm to find that it was only two hundred-Nakfa notes, worth only a meal in a restaurant. I wept silently most of the way to Sawa. Growing up, we were treated to their endless shouts and fights. All these have scared the joy of childhood out of us.
This is the home I have come back to.
The unpleasantness around the memory of home, my brought up in it, has receded over the months I have been away; in its place, the heat of a year-long absence has cast this mirage of longing. It is this mirage that has brought me hurtling home; mirage, nonetheless, that has turned into a thin air only few hours into my return. Thus, now, I sit in this room, wallowing in my misery, desiring to flee away from it, for good, only hours into my return.
That event happened nineteen years ago, a snippet of memory, distant yet obstinate, playing from the archive of my mind. I look back on this event now as a thirty-seven year old grownup man, a college lecturer with a second degree, and I see that while so much time has since elapsed — the Earth has completed nineteen rounds around the Sun — I have not moved an inch in life from this event.
My life has stalled.
I am still the same passenger, in the same journey, the travel to Assab, along the same dirt road, coming to the same, disagreeable reality, as though on account of some glitch in nature, my life came to a standstill at that point; that my existence has since been rerun on a loop of the same event.
That point in time, nineteen years ago, alone in the room, disillusioned, discontent, was supposed to be my point of departure, away from the disagreeable reality I was born into, grew up in, into the future of my truest desire. The year-long academic, military and social training in Sawa that I returned from is actually a national rite of passage, whence we come of age, readied me for the departure to make my own future, reality.
Nineteen years on, however, I have yet to depart from this reality of stifling lack and limitation. I have not budged an inch from the reality I have sought to flee away from for two decades.
…. Here lies the root cause of my existential failure and woes: I am a passenger in the travel that is life, passenger in my own priceless existence, no less a passenger in life than I was in the bus that brought me home from Sawa.
In truth, I have always been a passenger in life, even since before I was born, from when I was a fetus inside Mama’s womb. Passengers were I and my siblings in the life we were born into and passengers we remained till the age of eighteen. But then, being a passenger is not a choice when one is only a child, is it not? A child is a passenger in the life driven by intimate adults about him. However, when the child turns eighteen, reason, the faculty to discern what is right from what is wrong ripens in him. He crosses to adulthood. This ripe reason is the driving license of existence, so to speak. This is when the child-turned-adult gets off the life he has been in as a passenger since before he was born, head to the vehicle called self that has been in waiting for until he receives his driving license, reason, gets behind its steering wheel and drive his own life.
The same ripe reason has since been sounding the alarm, incessantly, forewarning me of the much too heavy, obscene cost of remaining a passenger in life, after childhood, a passenger in life for life; that henceforth, I have to pay for the fare with my human dignity; that I cannot continue to take the ride as a passenger anymore without diminishing myself as a human being. Many a time, heeding to this plea of reason, have I got off the ride I had been in as a passenger, headed and strove to drive my own existence.
However, the task has proven too much than I could force my weak flesh to undertake. Thus, I threw my arms up in premature despair, leapt out of my own bus, abandoning, discarding it in the middle of nowhere, and have sought rides in cars of those who cared to give me a ride to wherever they happened to be headed.
Hence, remaining a passenger past childhood is existential choice I have made, time and again, succumbing to the weakness, pleasure, comfort of my flesh, in my failure to rein in the pleasures of my flesh, in allowing its pleasures to grab me by the scuff of my neck and run me around. I have since thus shied away from, shirked this existential obligation.
Thus, I have hitchhiked my way through existence. Nineteen years on the road, here I am. Home. Only home is not home. Almost two score years of hitchhiking through existence have brought me to reality, destination, home, worse than the one I returned to after a year of absence, a reality where I do not have a shelter over my head I call my own; I am at work I detest and thus a mediocre at; and I get paid much less.
I have recently come upon an epiphany, a divine intervention, an awakening, the epiphany that all the years of my life I have lived in illusion, the illusion that my life is this independent ride in a bus driven by wiser, intimate adults.
I woke up to the truth that my life is no independent ride in a bus; that what I mistook for a bus is but a tiny cabin, one of the many, many cabins, in one large, large train ride that is human existence. Nor have the adults I have shared the ride with maneuvered my life. (In fact, the steering wheel in the middle of the cabin that we take turns in steering is a make-believe one that gives us only the semblance that we are maneuvering our lives to our will).
My parents have most certainly never been its drivers. (It drivers, ensconced in the helm, farthermost of the train, away from our reach and sight, whose presence we feel in their tangible absence are the few iron-willed among humanity, the one percent, who possess the strong will, conviction, perseverance to drive their own existence).
My parents were no less passengers in the reality they welcomed us into and reared us in when I and my siblings were kids. In truth, they were driven into a reality that made it hard for them to provide for us. Still, that does not make them any less guilty than the creators of the prevailing realities of lack and limitation. Others’ reality does not have to be ours; it becomes ours when we let it be, when, in succumbing to the weakness of our flesh, we get on that train, abandoning our individual self.
I say this also of the parents I share with the whole of the human race, our progenitors; they lost their battle to flesh; let flesh In losing to their flesh we inherited defeat from them; human existence from birth is but wrestling against this defeat that we are no match against.
The prevailing realities in the world are destinations that the few persons of iron-will have driven us to. In these realities, the rest of us live on the crumbs that fall off their table; the crumbs too we buy with obscenely inflated price of our human dignity.
We are not unwitting occupant of the disagreeable reality we suffer in. This ugly reality we dwell we have contributed in building with our own infirm hands. We have been conscripted against our good sense in the building and furtherance of this reality, when we forsook the existential assignment of building our own reality. Thus says William Blake, “I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another man’s”
