I hadn’t given much thought to this question until I was confronted with the thoughtful bursts of a girl in her 20s emerging into her own life. The question of home first inserted itself into my mind when I moved to Vancouver, and until then, home had always been my 50’s house in DC. It was almost right after the universe had been brought to my infantile perceptions, that I was carried to this destination in a white thick cloth, securely lodged in my mother’s arms. In it, I watched my little brother grow up, my parents become weary of my teenage angsts, my hairstyles change, friends come and go, and the recurrent New-Years parties, set in a disguised garage better suited for the occasion, that undulated with waves of excited voices and dancing steps to Congolese music. Over little past a decade, I accustomed myself to the sounds of the cracking wooden floors, the clinking silverware, and the intermingling of my family’s voices. Quarrels and joys, winter mornings and snowy nights, slow Sundays and stressed Mondays, this house had witnessed and been home to it all.

This sense of home would be re-asserted daily during my continuous and stable living there with my family. But come 6th grade, we moved to my mother’s parents’ country of origin: Mali. There, home could only be temporary. It was given we’d only be staying for a few years. We’d rentend out our D.C. house, thus renovating it and painting the walls with new bare layers veiling our previous existences. The new house in Bamako could only be a temporary home as I’d known my real one was just on hold for the moment. Though even as such perceived, this house couldn’t really encompass the same definition of home as that of my original one. She didn’t know our stories, and we didn’t know hers. We were as much strangers to this house as it was to us. Three years could only change this by a small margin.

Things were different once I returned to DC. The continuous history I’d once been involved in creating within it was now staggered somehow. Plus, my teenage years gave me a different outlook on things that altogether rendered me with a more unaware sense on the significance of home. My underlying feeling was that home was where I felt comfortable in psychological terms. It expanded from my house to all the places where I’d recurrently gone to between home and school, and where I built up stories of the moments within them. This was the time of my teenage bliss. However my teachers’ constant pressings on where I was to go to college, and what I should be enticed to study, cut too short for my liking, this social and familiar time, transfiguring it into a mournful few years in which I bitterly and inwardly resented my impending separation from my familiar nest. 

It was a few years into studying in Vancouver that the question of home made its appearance. There I’d felt most at home in first year. I’d made friends with similar cultural backgrounds to my own, making it easier to joke about things like 5 hour long Nigerian movies, and displaying my cultural homes. This wasn’t the case in my years enrolled in a British high school. My backgrounds came off as too outside of the general sense of sameness and belonging. In second year I moved into an apartment, filling it with objects and photos from my DC home, in an effort to recreate what I longed for. It didn’t prevail. Roommate troubles, the diminishing gregariousness of first years settling into second, mixed in with my philosophical crisis on the makings of my society, and the lifelessness of these imported objects, all contributed to rendering Vancouver the furthest place from home. So much so, that after 3 years I got fed up, packed my bags, and returned to my home in DC. 

Although this house and its stories of my family will probably remain a defining element to my sense of home, I’ve seen through moving around the world, and traveling for shorter times, that home is truly, as they say, where the heart is. I’d first heard this sentence long ago, agreeing passively to it, as if it was an evidence that required no further reflection. But in the globalized world we live in, the heart is not always in a place it can call home. When starting a new job, or moving to a new country, we often feel strange to a place to which we may be even more strange. We can grow attached, indifferent or disgusted by its new foreign customs. We might get along well in it, or we might have trouble and settle into a passive and mechanic existence with no love for the place we’re in, thus permeating our willingness to see a place as home, or we take up a new destination we hope will better tend to our hearts’ comforts.

Home is where my heart is, and my heart has always lied in those of my mother’s and father’s, the beats of its affection always guided towards sincere family members and friends. The constantly changing physical landscapes of my whereabouts have complimented these beats. This is why my family house in DC, the little French bakery I’ve worked at since I was 14, Costa Rica with my best friend Tori, the dusty roads of Ivory Coast that lead to my cousins’ house, and the South-Eastern French rural paysages and its innumerable outdoor lunches, are all places where I’ve been made to feel a belonging. Having a globally nomadic lifestyle, my sense of home, outside of geographical concerns, has at its essence, always been where those who make me feel accepted and whole are. 

The world had been in existence for a while. It lived and breathed in still harmony. Its humans belonged to the beginning of time. They filled the space with their laughs, their whispers, and the constant beat of their million hearts. There weren’t many rules and those that did exist were thoughtlessly appropriated by each. They concerned moderation, sincerity, and careful demonstrations of love and respect. They weren’t seen as rules, but more-so as a common logic to employ in the goal allowing the world’s harmony be perpetual. 

There was however a rigid rule, concerning the containment of evil in the forbidden tree.

On a sunny clear-skied afternoon, a young girl with gold and brown curls, Pandora, lay about the grass with her gaze focused on the clouds above her. A ruffle close to her ears stole her attention. Rolling over on her stomach, she peered through the grass, her sight following the sound. Chin on the ground and squinted eyes, she located the moving thing, sliding and contorting. It was long, with curious yellow and black patterns. It had eyes like shining black almonds, a thin flat face with a long slit denoting its large mouth. It had a tongue like an arrow split in half, appearing and disappearing with hisses. 

Pandora was curious. Never before had she seen such a creature. She’d heard stories of something similar from her people, but young and still discovering the vast grandness of the world she’d entered only a few years back, she’d been too distracted to listen to the warning stories about the creature. As naive as Eve, she got up and followed the crawling animal to a new unknown. By the time they got there, the sun was setting sending the sky in a fiery furor. She watched the animal slither around the base of a tree. Her gaze moved up the trunk, to the sole branch at her reach. The others protruded from the trunk much higher, intermeshing with each other, as if forming the bars of a cage nearly impossible to escape from. The red sky peered down through them, watching Pandora barely taller than a banana tree, as she tiptoed, reaching up to pick a fruit redder than the sky. 

The hissing creature seemed asleep, tightly curling the tree in its hold, as if a belt securing a waist. Fearing the incoming darkness, Pandora made her way backa to her village, biting into her fruit every few steps. Once back, she encountered her young neighbor Adamah, and counted him the story of the strange creature, and her delighted discovery of a new tasty fruit. 

“You’ve condemned yourself Pandora” said a low humming voice behind them. 

It was Sofos. The eldest of the village. He stood seated on a fallen tree trunk, looking gravely upon the two youths. Rising slowly, as if the weight of the world had suddenly been thrusted upon his shoulders, he reached out his hand to Pandora. 

“Come.” he said. 

Pandora, stupefied, put her hand in his and without a word went along with Sofos. They walked in silence for what seemed to her like an eternity. She’d occasionally look up to his face, wanting to ask, wanting to know, but the sullen grey tones ornating his struck features froze the words in her throat. 

They stopped suddenly, a few steps away from a lake, glowing in a moonlit silver. Sofos knelt down in front of the lake, peering down at his own reflection. He invited Pandora to do the same, but summoned her not to say a word of what she saw in the treading waters. More confused now than ever, she stared at her reflection, looking back at Sofos’ occasionally. 

Her eyes focused on every aspect of her countenance. She noticed the pleasing reflection of the moonlight on her curls, and the deep green of her eyes until it was all the could see. A smug smile formed on her lips. 

“I look…” she started, but Sofos interrupted her suddenly. 

“Pandora, you are the first fallen. You have cursed your senses and your words. You’ve bit into the apple of discord. It has blinded your heart’s sight with that one of your eyes.”

“What?”

“You have unknowingly broken the sacred rule that our people have had for eternities by biting into the fruit of the forbidden tree.”

She looked at him horrified, but something in her felt Sofos was taking her case too seriously. She felt unchanged, she looked the same; why was he implying such grave consequences?

“You may however redeem yourself and spare the rest of us by vowing to craft your speech impeccably; you must now choose your words, thinking carefully of them and their meaning before you utter them.”

She felt a pinge of rejection. Her traits contorted into the face of anger. 

“You’re a liar!” she yelled suddenly. “I didn’t do anything wrong, this is unfair! I do not care what you say, I am going back to the village, I will tell who I please of my day’s voyage, and I’ll tell all of them what a crook you are!”

Her screams had pierced through the night’s air but Sofos, to Pandora’s surprise, stood still, seemingly unabashed by the furor of her words. They stood facing each other, as if in a duel. 

She looked at his face, searching for a hint of reaction. Although still and calm, his countenance was hardened, struck by the hurt her words had caused. She felt hints of regret and shame shooting through her, but her newfound prideful will not to cave to her heart’s reason obscured them. She started turning away, heading back to the village. Before she disappeared completely into the darkness of the woods, Sofos in a last attempt at getting her understanding, reached her hand to her slowly disappearing figure:

“Pandora, the words you choose to speak, can never be unheard; they can never be unspoken; Once you have told a story, you can never take it back. Be careful of the stories you tell, and those you listen to.” 

—-

I loved this creative writing opportunity. Adapting the story to my own words seemed easy until I got to the end. I did most of my rewriting during that part. I found that telling a story, and telling it to an audience (i.e. family/friends) was a big part of what I enjoyed for this assignment. In comparing this assignment to a more ‘regular’ one like writing a term paper in the hopes of getting a good grade, I felt less limited. I felt I was really putting more of myself in the story, and not trying to sound a certain way or appeal to a more or less rigid system of analysis and grading. Thinking up the story and telling it out loud felt much more meaningful then when I started typing it. It was a lonelier experience, and I felt much more enclosed in my own thoughts. (Don’t get me wrong, I love that, but the experience is different when you have a live auditor whose reactions you perceive as you tell the story). I think this draws on what King says about “the printed word” not having a “master”, “voice”, or “sense of time and place”(154).

When coming up with my version of story I had Milton’s Paradise Lost in mind, although the references to it don’t really pull through in my version, the genesis, and drew from various creation stories I’ve read s from Indigenous peoples in the US, and from the middle east and Africa. I also drew from Greek mythology, mostly for the names of some of the characters.

Works Cited:
King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Peterbough:Anansi Press. 2003. Print.