More than one person I know has, in the last year or so, decided to go back home.
And at least one other person I've heard of is making plans to return.
I don't have to answer that question just this very minute, but I wonder about my identity and what home might be. When I think I want to go home these days, I'm thinking apartment in Arkansas. But with the same certainity, I know that this will change. Things always do.
The other thing that has been making me think of the idea of "home" is the Arab Spring.
I'm amazed by the passion and pride with which I've heard colleagues and friends talk about home and the revolution. I'm moved by their courage and force, by their unrelenting struggle (often even with themselves) to take a stand about the way things have been moving in Tunis and Egypt and the effect that these movements are having on Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen. And I'm most affected, I think, by the kind of conviction about home - and the comfortable identity and belonging which comes with it - that propel and support these stances.
Strangely enough, I'm not uncomfortable about my own ambiguity (about what home is or what i am). I'm quite enjoying the floating around in the ether for the moment. And that's why Gustavo Perez Firmat's verse from in "Dedication" (although it is only tangentially related to the rest of my post) hangs on my wall:
"The fact that I
am writing to you
in English already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you
that I
don't belong to English
though I belong nowhere else,
if not here
in English (102)"
(I pulled this text off another article which references it). But I really have Aniket to thank for it.
And at least one other person I've heard of is making plans to return.
I don't have to answer that question just this very minute, but I wonder about my identity and what home might be. When I think I want to go home these days, I'm thinking apartment in Arkansas. But with the same certainity, I know that this will change. Things always do.
The other thing that has been making me think of the idea of "home" is the Arab Spring.
I'm amazed by the passion and pride with which I've heard colleagues and friends talk about home and the revolution. I'm moved by their courage and force, by their unrelenting struggle (often even with themselves) to take a stand about the way things have been moving in Tunis and Egypt and the effect that these movements are having on Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen. And I'm most affected, I think, by the kind of conviction about home - and the comfortable identity and belonging which comes with it - that propel and support these stances.
Strangely enough, I'm not uncomfortable about my own ambiguity (about what home is or what i am). I'm quite enjoying the floating around in the ether for the moment. And that's why Gustavo Perez Firmat's verse from in "Dedication" (although it is only tangentially related to the rest of my post) hangs on my wall:
"The fact that I
am writing to you
in English already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you
that I
don't belong to English
though I belong nowhere else,
if not here
in English (102)"
No comments:
Post a Comment