Homeward Bound!

After a long four months of school, tomorrow afternoon I am headed home and could not be happier. For your listening enjoyment I recommend Simon and Garfunkel's "Homeward Bound", and for your poetry enjoyment I share Es'kia Mphahlele's "Homeward Bound".

Mphahlele was born in South Africa in 1919 and applied for a permit to leave his country permanently in the mid 1950s before entering into exile in 1957. He lived all over the world before deciding to return to South Africa in 1978.

While its perhaps insensitive to compare my own excitement about going home for Thanksgiving with the much more complicated emotions of a patriot in exile returning to his homeland, I think both create an opportunity to interrogate our own relationships with "home" and the relationship we perceive others to hold with their own homes.

Also, as the holidays approach I invite you to keep all those who for whatever reason cannot return home: remember refuges, soldiers, alienated families.  I hope everyone finds peace in a feeling of "home" that brings the same comfort and happiness as would a physical presence.  

I read Mphahlele's poem as a profound gesture of acceptance; he distinguishes between expectations and reality and accepts the imperfections of his homeland.  His emphasis on topography (mountains) seems to reveal a preoccupation with the surface compared to what lies below and behind the surface (e.g., the sky as a permanent yet changing background for the mountainscapes and the emphasis on imagery of light).  The speaker seems to have reached a peace with his "home" by the poem's resolution, "you need not look just the way I want".

Homeward Bound

by Es'kia Mphahlele

The mountains that I like

and do not fear

don't stoop over me

like giant apes marooned

on a patch of Time;

they are the forms beyond,

holding down

the edge of blue

and etching with a light

of ever-changing tints;

--they can look the way I want them.

I do not like the lights

that come at me

and stab and flail

and blind the eyes of night

that bounce and cling on tarmac;

those shimmering faraway bodies

softly throbbing

tell me and love

that coffee's on the boil,

she's listening to my footsteps;

--they can look the way I want them.

But you beside me here--

the contours of

your mountainscape

lead me to sniff at the corners

of your passion and sprawl

in the light and shade of your valleys

reminding me clearly

distant sights

can easily become

explosions of a mood;

so let us ride along 

through dewy midnights

dewy dawns

and tumble gently into

disemboweled noontides;

--you need not look just the way I want.

Mphahlele, Es'kia. "Homeward Bound." Against Forgetting : Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. Ed. Carolyn Forche. Boston: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 1993. 718-19.