When do you feel at home? Having spent the last ten years moving across several countries, I know it is difficult to answer this question. Or, rather, it is difficult precisely because I have moved and have been on the move. Moving changes you. It is one of those things that you cannot undo once it is done. Like something you have seen and cannot ‘unsee’ or go back to the proverbial ‘normal’. The norm has changed. The paradise, if there ever was one, is lost.
The more time I spend living abroad, the more the lines around once clear and fixed ideas about home become blurred. Sometimes, I wonder if they ever were clear and fixed. But that is the thing with experience – even if you could go back in time, you would not, could not, relive the same experience. Even if every other thing was the same down to the tiniest detail, one significant ‘factor’ has changed. You. The experiencer.
Whenever I visit my family back ‘home’ (the ‘home’ where I haven’t lived for the last ten years), it feels strange. On the one hand, everything is so familiar – the places, the smells, the sounds of trams and trains passing, the languages the passersby speak, the daily rhythms of people I know, thousands of small fragments that make up the experiences – that I notice myself almost turning back into that ‘me’ who lived there before venturing abroad.
It comes over me like a warm, comfortable blanket you want to wrap yourself in and never leave its kingdom of cosiness. As if the last ten years did not exist. It was all just a very intense and life-like dream. Now I am awake again.
On the other hand, as soon as this blanket approaches, there is another ‘me’ that pushes against it and insists that it – this kingdom of cosiness – is a dream or, rather, an illusion. I only feel that way because I know I will soon leave again. Because I know I am a guest, a visitor – a very experienced guest, one who knows the place very well, no doubt, but a guest nonetheless.
Because I know I will leave again, I experience my visit as a return to the place I left, not the place that is actually there, the way it is right now, today. If I returned for good, I am sure I would have different experiences. Although the place might seem the same, my relation to it changes. How I relate to a place makes all the difference in how I experience it.
During one of such visits ‘home’, I remember how someone I know (and who knows that I lived there my entire life before moving abroad ten years ago) told me, utterly casually, “Oh, I forgot, you’re not local”. I was shocked! Of course I am local, I just don’t live here. That was my response, and the look on that person’s face manifested innocent confusion.
How long must you not live somewhere to stop being local there? There is no answer, of course not. But my shock and response show that being a local, a guest or a stranger are not ‘things’ or attributes or anything fixed. They are ways of relating. Crucially – mutual relating. While I related to the place as a local, that person who shocked me related to me in that place as not-local. Not exactly a stranger, not a tourist, maybe a guest, not entirely clear what exactly – just not local.
So what does that make me? Perhaps I am a local guest or a strange local. That’s the thing about these in-between states of being, unclear ways of relating, they do not neatly fit into sharply outlined concepts and simple categories. And yet, they are what many of us feel about ourselves without being able to express quite what it is that we feel. That makes these experiences partly invisible. One of the things they do reveal, though, is how quickly one ‘travels’ from thinking about home to wondering about who I am.
“Being grounded is not necessarily about being fixed; being mobile is not necessarily about being detached.”
Sara Ahmed et al.*
keep exploring!
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*Ahmed, S., Castañeda, C., Fortier, A.-M., Sheller, M. (eds). (2003). Uprootings/Regroundings : Questions of Home and Migration. Bloomsbury Academic.
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