Home is a Place I Have Not Been

I’ve struggled with the question of homeland all my life.

All I know of “home” is the gleam in my parents’ eyes as they talk about life before the war.

All I have are stories.

Even the language escapes me most days, and well, the truth is “I don't know how to stay tender with this much blood in my mouth” (Emma Tranter).

As I make plans to enter a field that necessitates being wired in to the Canadian context and doesn’t really translate well to working abroad, I’ve slowly come to realize that the extent of my “helping those back home” will be largely limited to remittances. It’s almost enough to make me change my mind about what I am pursuing.

Almost.

I’ve been thinking about why I’m so encumbered by this wayward grief, but all it’s done is produce more questions and no real answers (are there ever any?). Is there some misplaced pride in the hurt – does is it make me feel large and tragic? Was there a tinge of a first world saviour complex in the assumption that I would even be helping significantly if I went back?

What about the very real brain drain? But mostly, how do I rid myself of this fanciful notion that the earth will rumble in welcome the day I do step foot in the city of my mother’s youth?

I’ve always been prone to dramatics.

That is all to say that there is something achingly hollow about living the entirety of one’s life in a place that (seemingly) rejects you at every turn; that is at once with you and against you. And always insidiously so.

It’s been nigh on two decades of living like this and it hasn’t gotten any easier. Truth be told, I am in a relative rage almost all the time because of it. There is only so much heartbreak one can bear, only so much anguish you can witness.

To have a political existence thrust upon you…“People do not see you, they invent you and accuse you” (Hélène Cixous). It’s absolutely maddening sometimes.

I wonder, in your allegiance to a country, is it allegiance to the physical land or to the idea of the nation (the state/government) or to the people? Can they even be divorced from one another? I ask only because Canada is a settler-colonial state — my family came here as refugees, and I dream oh so avidly of grasslands and white sand beaches that hug the sea, all some 13000 km away.

But maybe, just maybe, I’m making a mountain out of a molehill.

“Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease” – Naguib Mahfouz. May we all be so fortunate as to discover its warmth and joy, in this life and the next.

And in answer to the original question: “What is homeland?”

To hold on to your memory – that is homeland” – Mahmoud Darwish