Vagrancy, Permanence and the Sense of Home 3

The nomad has, as one of his rewards, the landscape that opens itself up for discovery and an enlarging of the mind's horizon. And as he goes along we get a sense of his feelings in the way he reacts, by what he says about what he sees. Does he breeze through the land barely noticing things, or is he intensely aware of his surroundings?
Salia as our nomad in Fishing for Our Father meanders his way across the land, naming watersheds and situating them spatially. This spatial orientation reflects man's relationship to what he knows (and might even come to love). As the Mende saying goes: "When you don't know someone, you call them, 'Friend.'" (If you knew them you'd definitely call them by their names and not some condescending "my friend.") Salia knows the country and he names it appropriately. As he goes in circles like an eddy following the rivers and streams, he reflects on life, on the relationship between the cosmic and temporal realms. He digests and integrates what he comes across, hence the admixture of the outside world and the inner thinking of the nomad. But isn't that what we all do, taking in and integrating the situations we encounter in real life?
We can call Salia Koroma the singer-poet of the land on the strength of this one song. We see in his encyclopaedic enumeration the lyrical and elegiac, the national and personal come together beautifully. We see in this song, with its incantatory litany of place names and geographical features, an artist deliberately mapping out the spiritual and secular domains of man, and also the national and personal landscapes. In this light we see how deserved his national and academic honours were in his last years. This is a love song to our land and it touches us where it should; we feel the squelch and smell the mustiness of the rain-drenched earth; we see earth-coloured rivers, and we feel the dampness of our country in the rainy season. This was Salia Koroma's gift to us, that we see and feel differently and more intensely about the land he so loved and knew.