They say you carry your home with you wherever you go. If that’s truly the case, then it should come as no surprise to the world that I hold within me a tempest: fire engulfing water trying to drench the flames fanned by winds trying to pull the elements every which way, and how beautiful that scene?
Home was never meant to be confined to brick and mortal. Home can be as grandiose as Versailles and as meagre as cardboard propped up by cans of refried beans. Home knows not the constraints of construction, although home is itself a construct. Home is not bound within the realm of conceptualization, though home is itself a concept. To strip home to its bare, naked self shows that at its very core it is a feeling evoked, or a series of feelings evoked, as fickle as September weather. To carry home within you is not to carry concepts or constructs, but to carry raw sentiment. Doesn’t it make sense then why people get so territorial, why nations go to war over arbitrary lines, why the diaspora, any diaspora, is such a powerful nucleus?
If trauma can be transferred over generations, then surely a sense of home can be transferred over generations as well – for isn’t home the most traumatic realization of all? It sticks with you, digs deep into your flesh, reverse lobotomizes itself into your brain – except that it can possess and inspire extraordinary love as well as extraordinary pain.
The diaspora shows that home can be found in people as well. But what words would do justice, could possibly do justice to that manifestation of home? To be so lucky as to experience home in all its vagaries – and yet, to be rent apart by it all at the same time.
Home is in many ways as much a curse as it is a blessing.
Neiha Lasharie 