All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.  ~Anatole France

In 1994 when I went home one of the things that struck me was how much things had changed and how upset I was at not finding my childhood paradise there (never mind that it was no paradise to start off with!)…. until I went to my old school and made that comment and one of the teachers pointed out that from where she stood not much had changed and infact it was me who has changed so much and was looking at old things with a new set of lenses  … she was spot on… as we lament the passing of the old and reluctantly extend a welcoming gaze to the new we venture onto that  age old dilemma borne of nostalgia… for a lost world… and at times for a world that never existed in the first place….

Listening to PIA give an interview on the eve of the Sawa Youth Festival I could see the radical change-hungry young man he must have been back in the days when he was lambasting society that wasn’t focused on the type of change he was proposing (they were building churches where he foresaw schools!!), I could see a zealot with values that kind of floated slightly above the Eritrean horizon of the time… the let down for me came in the realisation that whatever the details of that dream was the reality has fallen far far short of that and there are moments when I am convinced that he is as much troubled by the distance between him…. his aspiration and the reality just as much as we are.

…during that particular interview I could see something different in him…. again I am sure it was not so much any change in him but a slant I may have adopted just at that particular moment…. Right then it was neither a dictator nor a charismatic leader that I saw…. I saw a dejected young man whose dreams had been hijacked… infact what I saw was not so different from that which I see in the young refugee men and women that have become a common feature of the streets of London…like him they have lived long enough to have had the brightest of dreams only to be dealt a grim harsh reality….they blame him he blames everyone else… in everything else they are the same…

In PIA, I found a person located in a tangle of actual and theoretical contradictions…contradictions between his own beliefs and preferences… contradictions between his deeply entrenched persona and the urgent political concern for survival…so many ‘if onlys’… too many lost opportunities and much loss…layer after layer of last ditch measures that would finally put a line across all that has gone wrong to give him and his dream one more positive start… another day one! I sometimes even wonder if he wishes that someone would stop the world revolving for a tad enabling him to step off for a bit and sort himself out…

Now it is so easy to see the dictator I love to hate…. Just as I am sure it is so easy to see the hero that so many love celebrating… but it was damn hard seeing a person just like me…. One who has managed to inflict so much damage to what he has paid so much to build… what a pain!

…over the weekend I finally got so fed up of my children fighting over control of the remote-control and I took it off of them unplugged the telly, confiscated all their electronic gadgetry and told them to go away and find themselves something else to do… a couple of hours later I found them playing snakes and ladders…on floor in the landing! Perfect!!

Why I know change is coming to Eritrea? …. Now that we all know that EDA is no alternative made in haven and PFDJ is not the government of dreams either i.e. the remote-control for flick changing has been taken off of us I believe it is time to venture onto the landing and negotiate the ups and downs of mundane nation building…

Across the bridge of tolerance on the meadows beyond the Nostalgia river banks there is an Eritrea  that is all ours (warts and all!!) and we will never get there without letting our deeply polarised idiosyncrasies behind…on the road that we are currently travelling to get there… there really is no there…honest… ask PIA!!       

PS: The quote "There is no there there" appears in Gertrude Stein's Book Everybody's Autobiography_. When Stein returned to California on her lecture tour to the United States in the 1930s, she wanted to visit her childhood home in Oakland, CA. She records that she could not find the house. Hence, "there is no there there." –Sonja Streuber