Bonds, which tie people to the places they live - Essay Example

?There are bonds, which tie people to the places they live, the community that they were raised and the people they are related to. These bonds are afundamental part of who the human being is and it is very difficult to destroy that bond because to do so would be almost equal to destroying ones’ humanity. According to Flusser (3), it is often the fear of losing these bonds that keeps human beings in places where they feel most comfortable, even if in such places, they have very little freedom. However, there are times when people are forced to cut these bonds mostly due to circumstances which are beyond their control and these are instead forced to go with the flow, having to come to terms with their lost ties and attempting to form new ones with their places of adoption. It is often in the midst of an environment that is foreign to them that people tend to have a feeling of nostalgia for their previous lives, which was their comfort zone, and actually regret the cutting of those bonds, which tied them to their previous lives. It can be said that severing old ties or bonds is a necessary part of an attempt to gain one’s freedom from cultures, which have only a one-dimensional view of the world, and learning about other cultures. In this way, people end up being more cosmopolitan and by being cosmopolitan; it encourages them to have a more focused view of the world, free of the prejudices, which often make people very narrow-minded. The question that one should ask himself is whether they made the right choice in severing their old bonds or whether they should have kept these ties. One of the most important bonds that human beings have is the bond to family. This is the bond that one does not choose to have, and is instead born into and it is the closest bond an individual can have. Family is very important thing to the human being and it is the first society that he experiences. Not only is it the first socializing factor in one’s life, but it is also the most influential considering the fact that the parents often raise their children to be responsible and successful people in society and to do this, they instill in them the virtues which are considered desirable by the rest of the society. The bonds, which tie one to one’s family are often very strong, even though one does not choose which families they belong to, these bonds are permanent. The only way through which one can break the family bonds is perhaps through the death of all of one’s family, and this is a very rare thing. However, there are times when even the bonds of family can be broken. A good example of this is in Adichie’s Headstrong Historian where Anikwenwa rejects everything concerning his mother once he is converted to Christianity. Not only does the bond, which tied him to his mother, get broken, but also Anikwenwa ends up losing the virtues, which his mother had taught him since childhood, and instead, he adopts those from another culture. This severance of bonds is permanent, and mother and son do not look eye to eye on matters again until the former’s death (Adiche 212). In addition, another bond, which is also very hard to break, is the bond of origins. A person’s origins are very important to him and many people often display a sense of pride in it. When people immigrate to a new country, for example, they often take with them fond memories of their countries of origin and tend to compare their progress in their new home to that of their old one. Many carry the customs and practices of their old country to their new one and they continue practicing them due to their belief that the culture in which they were born is better than the one they have come to live within. Not only do they continue to practice this culture, but they also have great pride in it. However, there is often a great bitterness among the first generation immigrants to a new culture when their children and grandchildren adopt the culture of their adopted country instead of continuing with the culture of the old country. The younger generation does not often pay much attention to the traditions of their elders and because of this, their bond to their origins is mostly very weak and only a few links tie them to it. As time goes by, only a vague knowledge of their origins remains and eventually, it disappears altogether. This is true of Anikwenwa’s son Nnamdi who was born to a father who had started out practicing the traditional African religion but had later converted to Christianity. Nnamdi completely follows in the footsteps of his father’s later ways and does not put much value in the religion of his ancestors nor does he care about or is not close to his grandmother, Nwamgba (Adiche 215). The bonds of marriage and love are some of the most basic and important human ties. It is these bonds, which are the sources of all the others because they often lead to the family, which is the basic unit of a society. The bonds of marriage and love are as ancient as the human race itself and they are very important in any society. Strong bonds of marriage ensure that a strong family develops from it and the bonds of love ensure the unity of this family. A strong marriage has to have love; otherwise, it is more likely than not to fall apart due to the distance between the couple in it. A good example of a bond of marriage and love is the marriage between Obierika and Nwamgba. One will notice that despite the fact that he was a wealthy man and that he could have had any woman of his choice, Obierika remained faithfully beside his first and only wife, Nwamgba, despite her history of having miscarriages. His bond of love and marriage to his wife was finally rewarded when they eventually had a son (Adiche 202). The patience, which Obierika showed to his wife despite the pressure from the community and his own wife to take another wife, is a display of a true bond of marriage and love. It is the kind of example which can be emulated by married couples today who seem to have very little patience and understanding for each other and instead tend to look towards divorce as a solution to their marital problems. Religion was for thousands of years a necessary part of man’s existence and it remains so today. Therefore, the bonds of religion and belief are very important for human beings because it brings them together due to their shared feeling of having a supreme being determining their destiny. However, these bonds can easily be broken due to the influence of new and more appealing religions and beliefs. This can be said to be true of many Africans who chose to abandon their own traditional religions in favor of joining in the various Christian denominations. This not only broke the bonds of religion and belief in African societies, it tore the fabric of these societies up. The normal relationships within families were destroyed because some members practiced Christianity while others continued to follow the traditional ways. An example of this was the distant relationship Anikwenwa developed towards his mother after his conversion to Christianity and his adoption of the prejudices, which the missionaries showed towards people who followed the old ways (Adiche 212). The decision of whether to sever old bonds or not to is entirely personal because for some people it provides them with freedom, while for others, it brings about a sense of loss. It really depends on how the individual feels about these bonds and how they affect his life. For some, it would be great to gain the freedom of movement unrestrained by old bonds because then, they would be able to imbibe in the cultures of other people without being attached to them. Others prefer to remain within their own zones of comfort, not bothering to experience life outside of it all these are part of the human nature. Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda N. The Headstrong Historian. 2008. Print Flusser, Vilem. The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism. Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. (2003). Print. Read More