[from the archives] home is a conversation
from April 2021. reflections on "home" from my first trip back (home) to the US since the beginning of the pandemic.
The artwork in this issue is that of Australian-American photographer Brooke Holm, whose breathtaking images of Earth from all angles I serendipitously discovered just this Earth Day.
hello friend,
That “home is not a place” seems an erudite cliché, but one I’m still puzzling over. If not place, then what? Person/people: both romantic and terrifyingly vulnerable. Within oneself, composed of its parts: a beautiful concept that feels both palpable and sometimes inaccessible. The words of Thomas Wolfe, placed on my desk by my high school English teacher—”You can’t go home again”—have haunted me even before I could understand them, and took on a new meaning this year.
I’m writing you now back in Sweden riding a 3am nocturnal jetlag high, which feels about as foreign to type as it does in my own body. An embodied memory that used to be so habitual, now strange. As it were, I spent most of this April “home” in Bend (Oregon) (with a quick drive down to San Francisco to reunite with my brother and several dearest friends). It was an uncharacteristically spontaneous trip that felt impossible until it was already happening. A decision taken a snap moment—an unexpected pause in work deadlines, a window before an uncertain waiting period for my Swedish residency permit renewal—to just go. Maybe my letters over the past months had conveyed what finally became clear to me: how much time and distance my heart could hold, and more importantly, when it couldn’t any longer.
Before I continue: I share all this with immense sensitivity for those in this community who are still far away from a home, or for any number of reasons cannot return to a home, or for those whose people they call home are no longer here. The privilege that I could “just go” is not lost on me. The pandemic has been hard on families in unspeakable ways, especially for those spread beyond borders and oceans. I know it is a special sort of pain. Beyond the pandemic, there are wars, dictatorships, and other forces that can render a home unreachable. If any of this is you, I hold you in my heart.
There are some beautiful writings on exile—Ariel Dorfman’s work (who I had the fortune of studying with at Duke), Toko-Pa Turner’s Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home (thank you Kai!) on “Initiation by Exile,” that have brought insight and comfort. “Exiles” can be as large or as small as the context of your life writes, they can take many forms, they may be imposed upon you or chosen.
My insights here are necessarily partial, as I’m still sifting through them. I could tell you about the reunion, after nearly 1.5 years away—one of the more meaningful moments of my life. I could tell you about how my nervous system felt like it took its first real exhale in over a year and a half. That I’ve developed patterns in Sweden during the pandemic that troubled me—agoraphobia, health anxiety tinged with obsessive-compulsive tendencies—and was nervous how they would be laid bare in a familiar environment with those I love. I could tell you how it took returning to my other “home” to see how I had misplaced complicated feelings about immigration and Sweden onto the pandemic itself, or rather that Sweden’s handling of the pandemic became a convenient locus to center feelings of frustration, anger, and confusion—feelings inseparable from a longing to belong.
I could tell you about how different the US felt from Sweden (currently in its third wave) with regards to the pandemic, a parallel universe in which the pandemic was still “there” but related to with a vaccine-enabled sense of optimism, the words “I’m vaccinated” as a sort of Sneetches-like proclamation, stars upon thars. (as thrilled as I am that so many loved ones are protected, I also want to mark that we are seeing globally the very real effects of rich countries’ vaccine nationalism, which in addition to reinstantiating medical imperialism also leaves all of us at greater risk—if this is news to you, I’ve found this study by Duke Global Health both informative and incensing).
I could write about how I benefitted personally from these differences, the embrace of my (fully vaccinated) parents in the airport—a hug no longer tinged with potential fatality—and how going straight from the plane to the dinner table felt a bit like a science fiction novel excerpt. Much of my time in the US felt like this: outside space and time. The sense of surreality lingered longer than usual—it wasn’t until the final week things felt as if they sedimented into some semblance of familiarity—but I relished the dreamstate. I could indulge at length about all the beautiful, heart-nourishing moments—workshopping my dad’s novel with him side by side on the couch, walks and talks with my mom, snuggles with my 13-year-old dog, the familiar taste of high desert juniper stepping off the plane, the incisive sober awareness (and awakeness) of not taking any single morsel of this for granted. The overwhelming gratitude. Or how hard it was, this time especially, to leave.
Many of my meanderings, though, lead me back to—and bear with me, here—the liminality of “home” itself, an unstable category I’ve been grappling with since moving away from my nuclear home, across the country, at 17. “Home” has become associated, especially in the last year+, with as much a sense of longing and confusion as a sense of hope and groundedness. Giving myself permission to destabilize and redefine it, continuously, has been a coping strategy as much as a creative process.
At some point near the end of my time in Oregon, I noticed something that surprised me: in conversation, I refer to “home” as the “other place” (not where I physically am in that moment). In Sweden, “home” is the US. In the US, “home” is Sweden. I’m “going home” in both directions. Solnit might call it a blue distance of (be)longing, merely extended to the next horizon. Home continually challenges my presence.
This time, somewhere on the road stretched between Bend and San Francisco (where I spent the first 12 years of my life) came a whisper, the sort conjured by the reverie of a long roadtrip. I recognized it from another road, the one my father and I drove together across the US as I made (yet another) move in 2015, this time to Princeton to start my PhD. On it, we traced the contours of his life across the country, the many places he once called home—birth in South Dakota; young childhood in rural Montana; adolescence in urban Chicago; college (and evading the Vietnam draft) in Iowa (a lapse in England for grad school and later teaching English in Jamaica, where he met my mother); doctorate in Michigan; my own birthplace in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. A sense that (his) home was not any one of these places, but the product of all of them, sitting next to me in the driver’s seat.
Home is a conversation, the whisper said.
Vol. 2, Issue 4 of T H E | L I M I N A L meditates on this concept of home as a conversation—between what comes into view as we revisit, between selves we have been and have yet to be and have left behind. I both am and am not writing about home in a narrow or vernacular sense—we may just as easily substitute “body,” or “love,” or any other energetically and affectively charged vessel where we sometimes struggle to place ourselves, in relation to environments and others, and crucially—the parts of ourselves that we keep, and the parts that we leave behind.
xx, A
VOICE
“When the piece of a body is left (or a home is left) then the body begins being a constellation: one piece is there! one piece is there! If I leave my hair in the comb in my mother's house & walk out the door to go to the airport, then all of a sudden the body is everything between me & that lost piece. The body is made up, then, of roads & crickets & azucena & mud. How large we are. How ramshackle, how brilliant, how haphazardly & strangely rendered we are. Gloriously, fantastically mixed & monstered. I have been asking myself to be more attentive & porous--to pay attention to the way every inch of me is animal, every inch of me is earth. I am trying to remember this. Where is my cloud? Where is my sea? What do the lungs hunt? What does the eye have in common with the teeth?”
— Aracelis Girmay, in an interview with the Poetry Society of America
Sea Lake by Brooke Holm.
SPILLED WORDS
home is a conversation
“one thing in conversation with another.” my photography professor in college told me this is the ingredient for the most arresting, captivating visual images. the red wheelbarrow in the background and the robin taking flight. the over-shoulder glance in the foreground; the unknowing passerby in the upper right corner. as if it were that simple.
if home, too, is a conversation, what is refracted, what comes into focus (or blurs) when one thing (place, person, version of you) comes in relation to another?
words enter and leave. swerves are taken. you fall in love. you end up somewhere different than you started. sometimes the earth falls out from underneath you. literally, or figuratively, one and the same. sometimes the fire erases every trace. sometimes how you are heard is not the same as what you said. questions are left provocatively unanswered. some things remain unspoken, many exist beyond language. you trail off…
home is where you meet yourself and welcome you back, giving grace for having had to have wandered so far, whether or not it felt like a choice at the time. it can exist in places, but only temporarily, and not only there; in people and in scents, too, and in color palettes of landscapes, and in the way the light falls just so.
it’s funny that the difference between longing and belonging is “be”, the very presence I find so challenging to commit to, to land in, with regards to claiming home, to taking up residence.
i’ve asked this conversation called home a lot of questions, recently. how to let it be multiple. how to let me be multiple. how to forgive. how to celebrate. how to be here and there and here at once. how to be awake in gratitude. how to trust.
i am listening more than i am speaking. i am trusting the pauses and the silence, like rests in a piece of music, not as indications of nonspace, nonsense, absence, but as indications of a relationship. a give, a take. a conversation. imperfect and human. unfinished.
WRITING PROMPT
Write a conversation/dialogue/script among all (or at least several of) the places, people, and parts of you that you have called “home”. What would they have to say? To you? To each other? Imagine these “homes” as characters themselves. What are the textures of their voices? How do they hold themselves physically, aesthetically? Trace the tensions in the conversation, the arc, the points of friction, the resolution (if any).
Salt Sky by Brooke Holm
PORTRAITS
This month, the tables are turned, and I’m the one being interviewed, by Alexandra Lembke—Australian writer living in Sweden, friend and human of WITHIN. Alexandra just launched a new podcast, “Like a Prayer,” which explores creativity and spiritual practices in Sweden, one of the most secular countries in the world.
We speak, among many things, about making home in Sweden, the Swedish winter and creativity, (embodied) writing, yoga, and the story behind WITHIN.
Join us in conversation via the link below, or listen directly here! If you listen, let us know here.
Podcast Interview : 'Going WITHIN'
One of my favourite things in the whole world is to get to witness people claiming big dreams and stepping boldly into them, particularly when they involve creative work.
I met Alexandra Lembke, a
PORTRAITS in its usual form returns next month with a guest I can’t wait to share with you, but in the meantime you can catch up on our conversations with Hunter Noack, on classical music in the wild, and Meghan McDonough, on quarantine dreams and new openings for storytelling.
RESOURCES
READING:
Related intimately to this issue, I am cracking open Toko-Pa Turner’s Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, on suggestion from dear friend and member of this community, Kai. The section on “Initiations by Exile” is incredibly insightful to me.
Ada Limón on Preparing the Body for a Reopened World: The Challenges of Emerging from Lockdown
LISTENING:
Zora’s Daughters Podcast — two anthropology PhDs discuss race, politics and pop culture read through a critical anthropological lens
DOING:
Bryonie Wise’s Human is What We Are: Awe and Wonder, a “virtual writing adventure” with daily prompts sent to your inbox every day in May. I did HIWWA in February and it was such a supportive adjunct to my morning pages—highly recommend!
GIVING:
The COVID-19 situation in India is a humanitarian crisis. Please consider giving to an aid/mutual aid organization—this list is locally sourced from Indians both in India and in the diaspora. The most acute need, in addition to restoring vaccine access to the globe’s largest vaccine exporter, is oxygen. American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin is facilitating donation of medical oxygen to India —please consider donating.
Iceland, by Brooke Holm.
PLAYLIST OF THE MONTH
For the first time in awhile, I found myself with no cell service, at the mercy of my Spotify downloads (from years ago). Enjoy a collection of past favorites from Allie ca. 2018 (hard to be sure but I think my music literacy peaked back then).