by liberal japonicus
I was going to make the title ‘This is not an I/P post’, but I’m probably a bit safer using a call out to the Monty Python Bruces sketch, which is here (WordPress makes it very easy to add youtube videos)
But on to the grist. From the Grauniad about the new Palestine embassy opening in London.
Joudie Kalla, 47, a Palestinian-British chef, and author of the prize-winning cookbook, Palestine on a Plate: Memories from My Mother’s Kitchen, was watching on. She said: “We came to London in 1981 and we’ve just been fighting for our rights, for freedom and dignity and to be able to go back home. I currently am not able to visit my country, neither are my family ever allowed back in. My parents are in their 80s. They’re gonna die without seeing home again.”
While this is obviously a key point in the I/P mess (and folks are welcome to talk about that in the comments), this idea of being able to (or not) go home is one of those tensions that has grown as the world changes and it makes me wonder if change will eventually get to be so fast that there will be no ‘home’. Obviously, the Israel campaign against Palestinians, which seems a lot like the Roman campaign against Carthage, has played out similar to Hemingway’s line in the Sun Also Rises when a character asked how he went bankrupt and he replies “Two ways. “Gradually and then suddenly,”
(sidenote: apparently, the idea that Rome “salted the earth’ is an invention, but Roman soldiers did go house to house according to Polybius and Appian. The Romans also made Carthage a territory, so making Gaza into a Mar-a-lago by the sea, a name which be perfectly appropriate for Trump because it would roughly mean “Sea to lake by the sea”, is in the cards)
The idea of not being able to go home is deeply embedded in our culture, and I suppose that it is inherent in our conceptions of life and death. But I’m wondering if the pace of our change, because it is getting faster and faster, is taking us to a critical point. Certainly the conservative movement is built on it, even though the ‘home’ they imagine is a fiction. We could look at the proliferation of AI as a ‘can’t go home’ experience. And climate change refugees are going to constantly be looking to a home that is no longer there.
Don’t know what direction this thread will take, but have at it.
I can relate to the “can’t go home again” simply because California has grown so dramatically since I was young. I grew up on a ranch 5 miles out of town. Now, that ranch, and everything for an additional 5 miles, is all houses.
It’s not that I physically can’t go there. I can. It’s not just that the specific house we live in is no longer there, although it’s not. It’s that the open space that was all around is no longer anything like open.
I expect that the situation for people who can’t even get back to the physical location, and the culture that was there, is far worse. But I at least have a glimmer.
I wonder if I’m a born nomad, because I have no sense of an ancestral “home.” I’ve lived in different parts of the country and liked or disliked them for what I found there, not for any larger ethnic or familial attachments.
The yearning for a “true homeland” has been at the foundation of many wars, pogroms, dispossessions, and conquests – either by an entity out to capture the homeland, or the former inhabitants thereof trying to reclaim it.
In dramas where conflict is central to the plot, there is often a scene where the main character loses a loved one – a sibling, usually – to that conflict. And thereafter the main character burns with a special rage for vengeance. I’ve always considered this either bad plotting, a form of “fridging” or – if it does happen in real life – sheer lunacy. It’s a WAR, you nitwit; one that you and your loved one willingly signed up to fight, or even instigated yourselves. People die in wars. Maybe if you didn’t want to risk your loved one, you shouldn’t have pushed for this battle, eh?
I kind of feel the same way about that yearning for an ancestral homeland. Maybe the way you lost it was horrific and unjust, but inflicting similar or worse damage on the people currently occupying it (who may not even be the same ones who drove your ancestors off) will only set up another cycle of dispossession-revenge-war. If it were as clearcut as getting rid of the usurpers and replacing them, that would be one thing. But it is seldom that clearcut.
The I/P horror is non clearcut beyond description, with claim to the same bit of land going back generations on one side, centuries on the other, possibly millenia on both sides. At what point do ancestral claims cease to be arguable? One generation? Ten? A thousand? At what point do past atrocities justify, or cease to justify, current and future ones?
Someone once said, “‘Home’ is where you bury your bone.” I’ve always liked that.
Home is where you make it. Wherever you find yourself, you can bury your bone there.
Someone once said, “‘Home’ is where you bury your bone.”
Roger Waters wrote and sang a variation on that, the only one I was previously familiar with:
My childhood home is still “home”, as I still have many friends in the area and zoning laws as well as environmental preserves have kept development from completely overwhelming the place. Still a lot more McMansions than we had growing up, but the basic complexion is recognizable.
I’ve lived in other places, but the Northeast is my preferred world. Dunno if it’s the weather or the landscape or the culture or what. Lived on the Pacific coast for a bit – which was beautiful. But it wasn’t *my* ocean. I can’t explain it.
On the other hand, I know more than a few George “I’m shakin’ the dust of this crummy little town off my feet” Baileys who never looked back and for whom home is where they chose to make it.
So, I dunno. I think “home” is an idea – a place of comfort and familiarity – much more than a point on a map. But I can see how people might be attached to a specific patch of ground, especially if it’s been in the same hands for generations. I’ve always wondered how the perceptions on that differ in, say, Western Europe.
I vaguely recall a conversation a while back about relocating Israel to a carve-out in Baja California. Would it still be “Israel”? Ship of Theseus and all that. I’m pretty sure substances were involved and are at least partially responsible for my lack of recollection.
Since we’re on the subject of homes, I’m glad ObWi has found a new one!
I kind of feel the same way about that yearning for an ancestral homeland.
This is in the same category as “who are your people?” questions.
At a party once, standing on the outskirts of a conversation and not really paying attention, someone asked, “And what about you, Mike? Who are your people?” I think the answer was supposed to be something like the English, or the Baptists, but what popped out of my mouth before I had even thought about it was, “The applied mathematicians.”
As I have mentioned before, we’ve been thinking a lot about (early) retirement due to the combination of burnout, security concerns, and the right’s ongoing attempts to decimate and subjugate higher education in the US. A big chunk of that conversation has to come down to affordability and sustainability, but once that is accounted for, a lot of the rest comes down to the sense of place. As we have been discussing that, I’ve found myself building a Venn diagram of the different ways that we think of home, and trying to fit potential new homes to those overlapping categories: community, environment, history.
Community wise, I think we would most feel at home in a(nother) college town. It’s not that we think of ourselves as academics (we’re non-tenured faculty, which leaves us outside of a lot of that sense of academic community), it’s that college towns are more connected to, and invested in, a sense of a collective future that can be made better through better equipping our future generations for change. It would also be nice to not be surrounded by people dead set on seeing us as the enemy. Still, I feel like this is the level of “home” furthest from our hearts in many ways.
Environment…the better word here is probably “bioregion.” I grew up in the Great Lakes region and both of us have spent nearly 20 formative years on the Colorado Front Range. These are the bioregions we most feel in harmony with. Even after 20 years in Southern California we have never quite managed to feel at one with the coastal hills and the Mediterranean climate. We are Deep Ecologists in worldview and our hearts practice dark green religion, and the trees here don’t speak to us in the same way.
But it’s not just that we don’t feel a personal connection to the biosphere here – it’s that this bioregion does not mesh as well with the folkways that connect us with our sense of family heritage, which is more Nordic. We want a bioregion that we connect with on both an ecological and on a mythic level.
My mother’s side of the family was part of the Swedish diaspora of the mid-1800s. There’s not a lot of yearning for a homeland. That whole side left the homeland because they found their communities unlivable. Their hope lay in a new place. My father’s side were all restless religious malcontents. Neither group feels any connection to an earthly place. Their homeland was always the gated community of heaven.
But when they did land on these shores, they went in search of the lands on which they knew how to live. And those places resonated with the folkways that they brought with them, even as they rejected the communities that they came from.
All this is why I have no sense of homeland in the “god-given place” way of things. It’s more a sense of having places with which my life and spirit resonate. I hope we can find on of those places when we finally get a chance to settle in for the rest of our lives.
I felt oddly at home while visiting London many years ago. I haven’t been back since. Aside from leaving a lot of people behind, my lack of UK citizenship, and the high cost of living there … eh, never mind.
Seriously, though, I immediately felt like I belonged there.
I wish you did belong here, hsh!
I was dragged around a lot as a child (4 countries), homes changed and parents said “but darling, surely home is wherever we are?” (for clever and worldly people they were remarkably clueless about children’s psychology), so I have now lived in the same apartment in London for 47 years – longer than almost anybody I know has lived anywhere. I lived in LA for a year in the 90s, but kept my apartment and it was always “home”. Even when I married, I split my time fairly equally between the North Country and my London pad, and since my husband died eight years ago I have been permanently in London. The idea of moving is fairly horrifying to me. I wish I were more flexible, but I have just turned 70, so maybe that’s that.
I felt oddly at home while visiting London many years ago.
While London can feel like you are permanently swimming upriver, oddly enough it also feels like home to so many different people because of its diversity. That word has been thrown around unthinkingly a lot in recent years (along with “vibrant”, real estate agent speak for “deprived”, argh) but I don’t think there are that many cities that are actually as truly diverse as London. Among other factors 40%+ of the people are foreign born so there is no one group dominating the city in any significant way and despite the crazy prices there are still council flats in Hampstead. And Londoners are by and large a nice bunch. I have different “homes” in my head as well, but feel this is it for now.
GftNC – Home is not “wherever we are,” though being able to feel at home wherever you are is a gift.
I have lived in Seattle since the mid-1970s (aside from a few years interregnum when I had to go back to Florida), and have been in my current house for nearly 30 years. I agree with you whole-heartedly that the thought of moving is fairly horrifying.
OTOH, if I ever do have to relocate, I hope I have the grit and spirit to make an adventure out of it.
Bruce (Pete): “I vaguely recall a conversation a while back about relocating Israel to a carve-out in Baja California.”
You would probably have a better (nothing like good, but better) chance selling it as a relocated Palestine.
CaseyL: it’s hard to convey intonation in text! They said “home is wherever WE are”, i.e. surely as long as your parents are here, it’s home. And that’s not right, as my sibs and I know all too well. My upbringing had many privileges, and wonderful, character-forming experiences, but it did not give a certain kind of security and stability which I see in friends who never changed country, and often lived in the same house their entire childhood. My parents, apart from (I suppose) being people of their generation, were both born and brought up in the same country until well into adulthood, so I guess they had no concept of the kind of deracination which can result from the loss of e.g. a culture, pets, etc etc.
Interesting stuff, thanks everyone. I’ve never had a ‘home’, but have always felt that there should be some place that should function as that. This may be because we are soaked in the idea (writing the post, I started a list of works that had that idea in them, but after jotting down 10 or 15, I thought it might be a bit much).
In college, we had a lot of fun with ‘my people’ and ‘your people’. Sarcastic and full of ourselves, you can imagine when we might use it.
I was trying to find a line in a Pico Ayer essay about asking someone, a person who was basically a cosmopolitan, where he was from and him being totally baffled by the question. Couldn’t find it, but did find this Tedtalk that might be of interest.
I used to make pilgrimages to Glacier National Park but no more: climate change and crowds. I used to go to Yukon Territory but no more: climate change. I got married in front of the Tree of Life on the coast out at Kalaloch and my husband and I have gone there annually for over 20 years. This winter will be our last trip. The Tree of Life has fallen over–victim of climate change. Most of the bluff cabins have been torn down because of bluff failure, also climate change. I am planning a pilgrimage to Escalante in Utah. I’ve been going there for the hiking since the 1970s but this will be my last trip. Too crowded. Zion and Bryce get over a million visitors each summer and the spill over is reaching the Boulder area. When I first went there, the trails were barely developed, the roads were gravel and there was barely anything in the way of tourism. Now the area is being promoted by the state and the wonder and adventure is gone.
“I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.”
“Home is where you hang your clothes.”
Or, if you’re an engineer, “Home is where your toolbox is.”
Am I really going to be the first to mention that love makes a house a home? I’ve read that in more than one kitchen. Come to think of it, I’ve also read that home is where the heart is on a few house walls. I guess that logically means that love puts the heart in a house, though I’ve never seen it put that way in a cutely decorated kitchen.
The link reiterates some of the ideas about home touched on here.
“The sense of home varies significantly between individuals and cultures, shaped by personal experiences, values, and societal norms.”
Home: Personal and Cultural Perspectives