Home

The loss of Nubia for some is no tragedy, no great loss.  Just a set of villages that were standing in the way of progress.  Time will erase the sounds, the smells, the tastes of home.

As we wrapped up and reflected on our visit to New Halfa, the site where my father’s family was resettled, and walked through my father’s house, the question lingered.  Was this home for the Nubians or part of a long, incomplete journey.

Throughout history, Nubians have always made journeys.  Nubian archers were always a part of the ancient Egyptian armies, and more recently British colonial armies.  Nubian fathers have often journeyed to distant cities to earn a living for their families.  But the value of these journeys was always measured by the sweetness of coming home.  Perhaps this entire episode is just another of those journeys, and around the corner will be a forest of the familiar date palms and the silvery water, contrasted with the vast desert and wide sky.

Our history is made by journeys.  Moses had his exodus to the promised land.  The Prophet Mohammed fled Mecca and established Medina as a capital of tolerance.  American settlers had their manifest destiny.  MLK walked to Birmingham, and Selma, and saw the mountaintop.  These were all painful journeys, but fueled by a mission; the idea and hope for a new beginning in a destination that would be called home.

But the journey to New Halfa was different.  There was no will to leave the beloved home, so closely tied to their identities, beliefs, stories, myths, not for hundreds of years but for thousands.  In so many words the elders explain that they are hoping, searching for the cool, clean water of home, and find none and remain parched.  They are weary, understandably. Few understand what it is like to roam the earth in exodus but without a promised land, like itinerant soldiers with no possibility of relief or recuperation, to wander not for forty days and forty nights, but for fifty years.

In the great tradition of jazz music, a composition starts with a recognizable melody, a chord progression and cadence that is well understood and familiar.  Say, Miles Davis with the call and response with the bass at the beginning of So What.  We all recognize these few bars, connect them to some experience in our past; and anticipate the journey to something new.  He then drops an octave and joined by cymbal crash, announcing the start of the journey; the musicians step into the wilderness, drawing from their inner depths passion, anger, whimsy, or indifference as the case may be.  The tension builds as the journey wanders off into changes of chords and moods, silence, virtuoso riffs, or less so.  But in the end, the musicians look up, acknowledge to each other that it is time to bring it home.  They return to a few bars of the melody of the opening.  By returning to the familiar, we comforted and grateful for the journey.

What is home?    Home is not a roof, or walls or even a location. Home is belonging, legitimacy, authenticity, a place to set roots, to leave a trace of one’s existence on the face of this earth.  Home is a place to realize ones dreams and rest one’s soul.  As this generation of Nubians passes from this world to the next, I sense that their souls are not at rest.

At the same time their commitment to the new land is too tenuous.  This land is capable of providing, but this sense that they are in a land not of their own choosing may ultimately seal their fate.  Only by committing to the land will they prosper.  The younger generation appears ready, but it is not clear what it would take, after fifty years, to make this land home.

For the Nubians in the diaspora, the improvisation does not seem to end.  The music goes on and on, pain for some, joy for others, they struggle to return to the original bars, but the notes are gradually forgotten.  What is not clear is if the new song will at all reflect the sound of the water wheel and the birds, the wind flowing through the date palms, the spirit of the river and of Nubia.