I was born, like everyone like all my peers with a map I did not draw, and spent half my life folding it back to its original creases, pretending I had never opened it to a country called elsewhere. Elsewhere is a beautiful liar, fluent in every language the heart wishes to hear.
It promises the coconut will be sweeter on the other tree, that the well is deeper in a stranger’s yard, that the song sung far from home is somehow truer than the one hummed at your mother’s stove. I drank from elsewhere for years and perceived my thirst as ambition.
An old Ewe woman who sold sour apples at the edge of Newtown, a woman who, like me, carried my hometown folded somewhere under her tongue once told me: the lagoon does not leave home to find water, it only remembers, moving, where the sea already is. I did not understand her then. I understand her now; in the way one understands the Accra floods only after your roof has failed.
There is a wisdom older than any single voice, passed hand to hand like bread still warm and fresh from an oven no one remembers building. There is a saying old enough that no one recalls which tongue first spoke it: the wound is the place where the light enters and I have carried that sentence like a coal in my pocket, useful mostly for its warmth, occasionally for its burn. My grandmother, who read proverbs and lived like one, said it differently: God does not close a door without leaving His hand on the frame. Same door. Same hand. Different tongue for the same mercy.
There are cities that no longer exist except in the shape my mouth makes when I say their names. Like the old Keta which is now under water. This, too, is a kind of homeland not stone, not paper, not flag, but the specific ache of a word that still tastes like your mother’s kitchen though the kitchen burned or moved or simply grew old and quiet without you. Exile, I learned, is not always a border you cross. Sometimes it is a chair at a table that used to be full.
But grief that is only grief is a lagoon that has forgotten the sea. It must be allowed, eventually, to arrive somewhere. An elder from Anyako, whose name I will not spend like a coin but whose bearing I have tried all my life to inherit, taught without a single lecture that dignity is not the absence of wound but the posture one keeps while wounded the spine that remains a question mark for no one, the walk that does not apologise for having survived. He wore his losses the way certain trees wear the marks of old lightning: not as shame, but as biography written in bark.
Sophistication, real sophistication, is not the cut of the cloth. It is knowing which silences to keep and which to break, knowing that a proverb offered at the wrong hour is a stone thrown at a bird already flying home. The tongue must learn, as the drum learns, when to speak and when merely to breathe. There is a saying from the West African griots: the axe forgets, the tree remembers. I have tried, in my own conduct, to be the kind of man the tree does not need to remember against.
Work, too, has its own scripture, though few read it as such. I have watched fishermen at Anyako mend the same net inherited from a previous generation, patching what the water has unstitched, never once cursing the water for its habit of unstitching. This, I think, is the difference between labour and bitterness: the fisherman does not ask the lagoon to stop being a lagoon. He only asks his hands to be faithful to the mending. There is dignity in a task repeated without applause — the woman who sweeps her threshold each dawn though the wind will scatter it again by noon, the farmer who plants knowing the rain may or may not keep its appointment. Their faith is not naive; it is disciplined. It says: I do not control the harvest, only the planting, and I have decided the planting is enough of an answer to give the world.
What is love, if we are speaking honestly, tallying our debts before the reckoning closes for the night? Love is not the fire, fire consumes what it touches, and calls the ash a victory. Love is closer to the oil in the lamp: quiet, patient, spending itself so that something else may see. The old desert saying goes: a guest is a gift from God who arrives with his own provisions. Every person who has ever loved me arrived exactly this way — unannounced, provisioned, temporary in the manner all gifts are temporary, permanent in the manner all gifts leave permanent marks on the table they were set upon.
I no longer believe in wasted years, though I once wept over them as a merchant weep over spoiled fruit. A year is not spoiled simply because you did not sell what grew in it. Some years exist only to teach the roots patience this is not failure, this is agriculture. The Japanese have a word for the beauty of the broken bowl mended with gold; I have no bowl, but I have a chest, and it has been broken and mended enough times that I have begun, quietly, to call the cracks ornament instead of scar.
Here is what I would tell the boy I was, if the boy I was could still be reached by any language: do not marry your worth to the opinion of rooms you will eventually outgrow. The room does not remember you the way you remember the room. Walk toward what makes your hands useful and your silence comfortable, and let the rest arrange itself the way birds arrange themselves on a wire — not by command, but by some old agreement none of them wrote down and all of them keep.
Forgive the ones who wounded you, not because they have earned it, but because carrying a stone up a mountain for 40 years is a strange definition of winning. The elders of the lagoon used to say: the same water that can drown you is the water that carries you home meaning: do not run from what teaches you, run toward the far side of it, the way a swimmer does not fight the current so much as angle across it, letting the water do half the work of arrival.
And love your people not the idea of them, polished and displayed like an heirloom you are too afraid to use, but the actual difficult daily them: their coughing in the next room, their silence over dinner, their forgetting of your birthday and their remembering, decades later, of some small kindness you had entirely forgotten giving. This is the whole of it. The whole damn point, I say to you. This is the only inheritance that does not require a lawyer.
And love your children, if you are given any, not as small versions of your unfinished ambitions but as strangers you have been trusted to introduce to the world gently. They will not remember the gifts as clearly as they remember the tone of your voice on an ordinary Tuesday. Time, with children, moves the way the tide moves at Anyako so slow you cannot see it working, and then one evening you look up and the whole shoreline has quietly rearranged itself. Do not mistake their growing for a loss. It is only the lagoon doing, again, what lagoons have always done: making room for more water without ever announcing the labour of it.
I am much older now, in the arithmetic of years if not of wisdom. And still I return, evening after evening, to that unfinished sentence the sour apple seller left me: the lagoon does not leave home to find water. I add to it only this, in whatever voice the years have left me: nor does the heart. It only travels, sometimes very far, sometimes through countries with no name on any map, to remember slowly, painfully, and then all at once where the sea has been waiting for it all along.
BY V. L. K. DJOKOTO
The writer is a partner of D. K. T. Djokoto & Co
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