The Many Homelands of the Mind

Home. Homestead. Homemade. Homegrown. Homeland. Homesick. At home. To home in on —clearly, the concept of home invades much of our thinking, and so, too, our language. Home signifies interior; to be away from it, exterior. To be without a home: homeless; to be forced out of one’s home: displaced. Home and its linguistic relatives imply unity and kinship, but its opposites scatter into unrelated forms, just as those without homeland must scatter to places unrelated to their pasts — foreign, outside, away.

For a concept that’s so integral to our thinking, how is it we’re so bad at providing its real counterpart to people? At recognizing its lack, and the effects of that absence? 

Two recently released issues of the literary journals Chicago Quarterly Review and Freeman’s contain in their 700 combined pages many lifetimes worth of perspective on home and belonging.

The range of writing here is such that many readers will find themselves stopping for breath between entries. The talent and beauty is, at times, overwhelming, as is the cruelty and suffering conveyed.

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In 1994, Syed Afzal Haider and his writing group decided to start an independent literary journal “specializing in unconventional and experimental writing,” Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen, wrote to me. “And the Chicago Quarterly Review was born.” In February, the CQR published a special issue focused on South Asian American writing.

McKenzie is now one of the CQR’s senior editors, alongside Haider; for this special issue, they enlisted Moazzam Sheikh as guest editor. Past special issues have focused on postwar writing from Japan and Okinawa; Chicago writers (this issue was named a Best Special Issue of the year by Best American Essay); and Italian writers in translation.

McKenzie wrote that the South Asian American issue “felt necessary only in that the CQR is interested in pursuing literary collections with special themes,” but that “many of the subjects that emerge in these writings are very much on our minds now.”

She’s right: Many of us are concerned with the crises magnified by the Trump Administration — immigration, racism, nationalism, nativism, sexism — and this special issue deals with the many living forms these –isms take.

Sheikh, the issue’s guest editor, was born in Lahore, Pakistan, but came to the U.S. in 1985. He studied business, film, and library sciences in America, and is now a librarian, teacher, and translator based in San Francisco.

Haider and Sheikh knew each other for many years before collaborating on this issue. Though the South Asian American issue of the CQR is compiled from writers working in English, Sheikh says he hopes to do another issue dedicated to South Asian languages.

On choosing which work to include, Sheikh said that if he could “go for the political without sacrificing quality and nuance,” he went for it. Only a few of the pieces in the issue feel apolitical. The great majority deal in hardship.

Maya Khosla’s poems show the delicacy of life in a war zone by contrasting pictures of fragility and softness with blinks of violence:

“Candlelight skids up a child who sleep-walks

with eyes wide. Outside, airwaves lower than sound

or shudder are rattling cups, smashing windows

within a miles-wide circumference. In her dream,

trees clinging to their blood-apricots swell

with the darkness of curfew nights. Touch one

and it explodes.”

From “Afghanistan, End of Eighty-Seven”.

The authors and artists in this issue grapple with many things. For Nadia Chaney, it’s the creation of self, the ownership of voice and name, and the comfort that she doesn’t have to be the first one to do these things, to discover how to belong; others have gone before. Soniah Kamal, in her story, “Jelly Beans,” which explores the changing familial roles when children marry outside their culture, shows that love and devotion are carried out in small actions and are grown over time, and that they can be found with people ostensibly unlike ourselves. Amit Majmudar analyzes “Five Famous Asian War Photographs,” with an eye for why those subjects caught Americans’ attention. Of “That nameless Afghan girl on the cover of National Geographic,” he writes: “Her eyes are green because they had to be green for the photograph to mean anything to us.” Majmudar’s words are cutting, but with that “us” he incriminates himself in this as well, and the problem becomes cultural, liberating the individual reader. He is urging us to witness our own weakness so that we might learn to see 

differently.

Much of the writing questions belonging. For the women included, this belonging often extends even to their bodies. In Swati Khurana’s arresting piece, “My Grandmother Spoke to Tigers,” the narrator wrestles with herself, her ability to love the man she’s promised to marry, her first gynecological appointments, the reality of her flesh — but these listed topics don’t do Khurana’s writing justice. She causes imagery to appear before her readers’ eyes, layer by layer: 

“See that girlchild, breathless, gasping for air, skin around her knees stretching, elongating her to girlwomanchild, a rolling pin flattens her feet, widens her hips, curves her spine, toppling her body”.

In “#Aylan, or How to Treat Refugees,” Madhushree Ghosh contemplates another body — that of the little Syrian boy, Alan, whose death captivated the internet. Not only was the little boy misnamed by the media, Ghosh notes, but he was reified for the “migrant crisis” — made its representative. “The humans,” writes Ghosh, “are dehumanized when labeled as a crisis” (196). Ghosh, too, is a child of refugees. Her parents’ stories detailed the religious partition of India after Britain’s exit in 1947. Then, Ghosh writes, “refugees in Pakistan and India escaped religious persecution,” but some refused to leave, “saying this was their homeland. Decisions of love for one’s motherland haunt later generations. But when refugees flee to different countries, they still carry their decisions with them…Life was always better in the country they left behind”. 

Writing can be healing work, a space to spread one’s life out and see it clearly. “poetry is my most affordable therapist,” says the speaker in Shivani Narang’s intensely personal poem, “Untitled”. She goes on:

“i am too white in india, too brown in this country,

too queer for brown, too brown for queer,

too soft to be powerful, too powerful to be soft,

i am tired of this white man’s myth that i am model for a minority

that i am capable for a person of color” 

from “Untitled”.

The poem’s lack of capitalization, of a title, make it an intimate confession of frustration, but also signal a kind of ownership. She does not fit what others need or expect her to, her hair short, her voice loud, but by the end of the poem she has figured out enough that next time, she’s going to “try to write a poem for myself, finally.” Art, she implies, has to be for oneself first.

Tara Dorabji’s speaker in “The Other Side” has written the poem “on being brown in America” “a hundred times”. Dorabji’s second poem in CQR is a letter to the titular “Other Mothers” in the speaker’s life. “My children are born from blood, unborn, and born from another. Two are blood. One I raised and two more I claimed. There are those unborn. And there is still another,” she says, laying out the complexity of her role. But further in the poem, her body becomes the homeland, the cold, awed universe. One other mother is “a quiet fire”. But the speaker is “a fire keeper” and “volcanic”. “I explode,” she says. “I erupt. I am the star and the sun.”

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Freeman’s, a newer literary journal conceived of and edited by literary critic and poet, John Freeman, came out with its third issue, Home, in early April.

Freeman told me last summer, in an interview for Necessary Fiction, that “The obstacles that are faced in life by writers of color and by women are so big they require massive movements of social change.” But, he said, “we can do a lot of good with very little effort as editors and writers, just by asking questions. If you have a friend who lives somewhere else, ask, ‘Who should I be reading?’”

The inaugural theme for Freeman’s was “arrival,” and its second issue was formed around “family.” Freeman’s: Home addresses the many homes its writers have found, or left, or made.

Each issue of Freeman’s starts off with six or seven “shorts”. In hers, Kay Ryan writes about how we “ideally” feel at home: “We feel released not to pay any attention to where we are because we are suspended and weightless in a beautiful web made out of the sweet intersections of the familiar and thoroughly prevetted”.

In the issue’s first longer piece, “Vacationland,” Kerri Arsenault writes about Mexico, Maine, her hometown. In it, she links the metal of the body, the mind, with that of the land. Nostalgia, it seems, is physical, the pull of home a physical reality as much as a mental one. As an adult, Arsenault, walking home with her mother, runs her hand along the “cool green iron railing that parallels the sidewalk,” and is reminded that, younger, she would “run home, as if my head was made of that same iron rail and my house was magnetic north”. Arsenault’s relationship to Mexico is complicated, as home is for most of us. She sees the ways in which Mexico is a backward place — it’s a paper mill town that refuses to acknowledge that the industry that brought wealth to the region is also the industry that’s poisoning its citizens, Arsenault’s father, included — and that her own sense of belonging there includes “an inexplicable love for Maine and what it represents, even if some of those things” — tribe mentalities, refusal to see the truth — “are false.”Arsenault is wrestling what most of us who move away, get educated, and make new homes experience upon returning to that earliest dwelling: “we leave behind our past and encounter a version of home when we return, built of legends true and false”. By leaving, we complicate our ignorance.

Xiaolu Guo acknowledges this former simplicity in her piece, “Fishermen Always Eat Fish Eyes First,” when she writes: “I couldn’t say whether I loved or hated that house. I simply treated the house as our house, the village as our village”. This child-sight extends to the whole of Guo’s early memory — her grandfather’s abuse (and that of the men throughout their village on their families); her grandmother’s broken body, but also, her kindness; her parents’ absence — “It was normal,” she writes. We are each “numb” to the mental landscape of our childhoods until a new space is opened inside us, usually, by leaving.

Contested spaces, too, often come up in this issue of Freeman’s. In “Hope and Home,” Rabih Alameddine considers his own “nesting” in San Francisco — home is the place in which there are many significant, small details “no one notices” but the inhabitant — alongside that of refugees in camps he visits throughout Lebanon. Alameddine, one feels while reading him, notices everything, and is “at home” with everyone. He listens to refugees’ tales of “losing everything, losing history,” but he is careful to never present “the refugees” — that group of amorphous, faceless, beleaguered people. Instead, he gives us individuals, making home wherever they are. Families decorate their dwellings with “colorful mats of woven palm leaves,” and “intricately patterned textiles”. One woman “studded her entire pantry with sequins, with results Liberace would have envied”. The interviewees speak of the bombs they feared, that took so much from them, but then bring out a baby boy, explaining: “‘We have to replenish what they took from us’”. The details Alameddine includes save his subjects from generalization, and it’s not an accident that the last few pages of his essay focus on American experience, as though to remind readers that it’s not just refugees who are making homes in contested spaces. He relays a memory of a homeless woman: “Even though I was in a bus and she was a few feet away, the human aromas emanating from her were stupefying…Glasses on the tip of her nose, she was reading a hardcover of Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman”. He is certainly different from this woman, but also, united: they claim the same city, San Francisco, and perhaps share another “home” — literature. 

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Our existence is partially product of where and from what we came. Though we might split idealistically from those places, we are party to ugly histories. These writers suggest that part of moving forward is to deal honestly with the present. 

Home dictates one’s sense of what’s normal. It is a place of old presences and selves, the place we left, the place of roots. Having a home means that that home and what it ostensibly protects can be violated. In Freeman’s: Home, Edwidge Danticat turns to Flannery O’Conner’s version of home, quoting from Wise Blood: “Nothing outside you can give you any place…You needn’t to look at the sky because it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it…You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got”. Danticat says she imagines O’Conner meant that “in yourself right now is all the home you’ve got.” This feels very right, considering displacement, refugees — that one’s true home is inside oneself and isn’t permanently linked to only one place — but can one’s mind be one’s home if severely and repeatedly traumatized?

There is a kind of home to be found in literature — a power to seeing yourself, of relating through language — but this has limits. And there’s another home to be found in one’s craft. But any one home is not enough. Each of us needs many homes. We need to be “at home” in our environments — work, play, rest. We need to be at home with others, at home in our own bodies, at home in our communities. 

There seems to be a universal need for comprehensibility and control, so we categorize and simplify others’ experience. But labeling someone, as “refugee,” for example, erases all the life that continues to happen once a person is forced to flee their home: medical issues, hunger, the need for beauty. When we label each other, we reduce. 

Moazzam Sheikh spoke about the opposite of this. Rather than circling inward, moving away from one’s homeland can mean a spiraling out of one’s understanding: “Most of us grow up trapped inside our nationalist ideologies without being aware of it,” he said. “For example, when I came to the states, I saw myself as Pakistani, not Punjabi, or Kashmiri-Punjabi or Muslim or South Asian, or feminist, not as someone from Lahore.” But, he said, a shift happens, with distance. “You realise that your own primary identity is not the primary lens through which others would see you. So, once you are away from your physical or psychological comfort zone, the possibility of accepting multiple identities increases.”