Home is wonderfully amorphous, yet, often, physically concrete. It informs our perceptions of ourselves and others, serving as an important facet of our place-based identities. On page 93 of Tim Cresswell’s introductory geography book, he states that home, “as a form of place, lies right at the heart of human geography.” Place is the primary consideration in the social construction of “home.” However, our understanding of the concept would be incomplete without examination of the personal connotations that accompany perceptions of home.
One of my favorite books is By the Iowa Sea. It explores the “ordinary,” love, ability and community resilience, all through a narrator who is acutely aware of the places he occupies. Joe Blair lives in Iowa. He has for the past fifteen years. His house is in Iowa. So are his family and his car and his job. So, based on all of these factors, readers might assume that Blair’s home is in Iowa too. But through his conflicting attitudes, Blair disputes this idea. He embraces some aspects of claiming Iowa as his home-- carefully tending to his yellow house and engaging with his community not only in times of hardship, but also in instances of joy. However, Blair is not able to say that Iowa is his home and mean it. Maybe he doesn’t want it to be his home. Blair seeks respite in escapist fantasies of moving back to New England, where he grew up and intended on making home. He explores romantic fulfilment with a woman who is not his wife, in places that are not his house. Blair presents Iowa as a quasi-“home” for him.
By the Iowa Sea also examines how home, or at least housing, is constructed (and deconstructed) in space. When the Iowa River flooded, destroying the houses of his neighbors, Blair and other community members tried to tame the physical river and maintain the person-centered attitude that made Iowa City home for many. After the flooding and damage to their neighborhoods, some families moved away, seeking home elsewhere. Others remained, determined to rebuild their houses to embody their ideals of home once again.
What do you all consider to be your home? Is it one place or many? What makes a place “home” to you? Have you ever lived in a place that has not felt like home? Why?
Citations:
Blair, Joe. By the Iowa Sea. Scribner, March 2013.
Cresswell, Tim. Place: an introduction. John Wiley & Sons, 2014.
My home is Appalachia. My ancestors' names are written in the Southeast Ohio History Center as one of the first pioneering families in Athens. I don't claim Athens specifically as my home because it is gentrified from the rest of the County, but I should probably admit that I am one of the gentrifiers. What makes Appalachia home is the hills, the history, the people that came before me. It's looking so bodily out of space outside of down- and uptown Athens but knowing I was born to be here. To come back to the forests, to the foothills, to my family. It's funny, because I couldn't tell you really anything specific other than my ancestors that makes it "home". It's more of a gut feeling. If I were to believe in destiny, it would be due to the fact that I'm somewhere where my lineage began, purely out of coincidence, and that the hills here call me by my name sweeter than any lover.
ReplyDeleteHave I ever lived in a place that has not felt like home? We learned that the body is a home, and I felt so bad reading that. My body is not a home. My body is a war I fight with every day. And I feel guilty saying that. Because I don't physically hurt, not consistently. But jeez, I can't tell you the last time my body has felt like home. I have all these modifications to reclaim my body, to adorn it, to decorate it to make it feel somewhat more like me...but I couldn't tell you who the person in the mirror staring back at me is. I don't know them. Sometimes, when I graze my own skin, I'm convinced someone else is touching me. Maybe the ghost of my past. Do you ever look at the past etched into your body, like a curse promising to somehow end your life?
I really enjoyed reading your description of a book that has to do with some of the topics for our class. I can relate to Joe Blair. I didn't grow up somewhere as far away as New England, but I had to leave the place I grew up in and was most familiar with when I was about eleven years old. The new place didn't feel like home at any point I lived there because everything was different. The people were different, the landscape was different, and I felt different and isolated from it all. I never allowed myself to get comfortable. I never even fully unpacked all of the boxes that were in my room. Less then two years later, I moved again. I used to long to go back to where I grew up because it was the only place I had ever felt safe and comfortable. Now I am living in Athens and I have been for almost a year. At first, it didn't feel like a home either. It had been so many years since I moved away from the place I grew up, and I had long since forgotten what the comfort of home felt like. It wasn't until my twin brother moved in with me that I realized my home isn't a place. I was so happy when he moved in. No matter how long we go without seeing each other, he is always someone I can count on and go to for advice. And I have since realized that "home" is where I feel like I can be myself. I have to make my own home by surrounding myself with good people who make me feel loved. I realized that since I feel this way, my home is going to be moving around all the time because my loved ones don't stay in one place forever. They are all scattered throughout the world. But that doesn't make my home any less real and any less special than a home that is made out of material things, or a home that stays in place. I love my definition of home, and I am glad I realized this.
ReplyDeleteEvery time I read Isabel's writing, it feels like a novel. Since you referenced a book, I think I am going to mention a book also. It's called "things we lost to the water". It is about a family of Vietnamese refugees fleeing the war in Vietnam and migrating to Louisiana, US. For the elderly, home means safety away from threat and danger. To the kids, as they grow up, a home means a space to express who they are, their identity and real self, not constrained by norms or rules associated with their previous space. Home also means people you leave behind. In the book, they came to America without their dad who was a college professor in Vietnam, constantly interrogated and watched by the new regime as he's a scholar, seen as a potential threat to the regime. To them, their dad was a home, a rule and a figure that dictates how place is governed, and it is not a home without dad. To their mom, she adapted to the US by connecting with the refugee community. As Kellett reiterates in the reading, despite the lack of the physical comforts, many make sense out of their situation through pride in their lone survival while valuing their social contact and social care that they gain through contact with those in 'similar predicaments', who are also the refugees. As social connectedness is fostered, the mental baggage of the previous home feels lighter. I think technological advancement also shrinks the distance of space and make us feel closer to home. I can call my parents in a matter of fingertip on a snowy day from the Donkey coffee in Athens and still feel home. Therefore, a sense of home can be instantly dualist and geographically transgressing. From my experience, every time I travelled to other places and came back to Athens, the moment I got to Athens, I always said this to myself "I'm home" away from those chaos. I said that as I felt this mental ease and peace. My impression of Athens is the serenity, quietness and the woods, most notably when I drove. And, to answer Isabel's questions, home can be more than one places, and yes I have lived in a place that has not felt like home before because of the temporal nature of my stay (as I was looking for a new place to stay permanently, and it felt like a flight layover, transit), how welcoming the new place and people in the new place was to me, and what made me move to that place in the first place.
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