Opinion: At home, nowhere

When the home is under siege, the sense of being ‘at home’ is irreparably lost, often forever.

By Pramod K Nayar 

In his iconic opening lines to a famous poem, AK Ramanujan writes about a house:

Sometimes I think that nothing 
that ever comes into this house
goes out.

Ramanujan defines the qualities — inclusive, diverse, compassionate, multi-layered — of this ‘great house’, and in the process defines India itself. But how does a poet write of homes that exist in myth and memory alone, everything else being destroyed, its inhabitants scattered and possessions left behind?

Homes left behind

Robin Ngangom in ‘Poem for Joseph’ speaks of homes that

ethnic cleansers had palmed
your newly-built home off on a people
well on their trail back to pure blood

Consequently, the residents fled:

leaving behind
objects of desire
… collected over twenty-five years        

Such objects have a way of travelling with the displaced. We turn to a poet of the refugee/displaced populations, the Kurdish Choman Hardi, for an understanding of the situation in ‘My Mother’s Kitchen’. Her mother thrives on displacement:

At 69 she is excited about starting from a scratch. 
It is her ninth time.

Unregretful,

She never talks about her lost furniture 
when she kept leaving her homes behind.

If Ngangom’s speaker observes that the displaced only mourns of the loss of family photographs, Hardi’s mother only regrets the loss of the

vine in the front garden 
which spread over the trellis on the porch. 

Hardi’s own regret is that while she may inherit the mother’s crockery (as the old woman assures her), she ‘will never inherit my mother’s trees’. Elsewhere Hardi speaks of her father’s books that remain, are rearranged, and some abandoned:

Packed themselves into a luggage bag
         Buried themselves in the back garden,
         To be recovered many years later,
         Crumpled, eaten by the damp.

The books, like her mother’s glasses, are material witnesses that can be made to tell their stories of displacement, the loss of home and the anguish of memories. But this telling requires an appropriate audience, as Hardi notes:

           The rest chose more suitable homes
          Where they wouldn’t be abandoned again.
          They shone on other people’s shelves
          Keeping their secrets to themselves.

The secrets would remain, until the sympathetic reader unravelled the mysteries of the books’ original owners, their trauma and their loss.

The Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish also inventories his home in ‘I Belong There’:

I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell

Objects in the home constitute the identity of the residents: things in the home converge upon the life-narratives of their owners and users. For the residents, their life narratives include the narrative elaborations of the objects they desire, possess, show-off, use. Thus, when the objects are separated from their owners, thrown out or abandoned, it is not just that they lose their value: their owners lose a bit of themselves too.

Homes under siege

Choman Hardi can only imagine homes under siege, as in ‘Invasion’

we will hear 
the sound of their …
In their death-bringing uniforms
they will march towards our homes

The only thing to do, for it is a lost battle, says Hardi, is to ‘keep your head down and stay indoors’. But would that make the residents feel at home? Mahmoud Darwish speaks of the cruelty of the invaders:

          We saw the faces of those who will throw
our children out of the window of this last space

As Nissim Ezekiel would say in ‘Background, Casually’, ‘how to feel at home, is the point’. When the home is under siege, the sense of being ‘at home’ is irreparably lost, often forever.  In situations of siege, the poet’s vocation is under threat and so Darwish’s speaker ‘learned all the words needed for a trial by blood’. Darwish would say elsewhere

No land on earth bears me. Only my words bear me…

When the poem ends, he can only disaggregate the words left:

I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.

Never At home

Displaced people cannot feel at home.  They cannot settle down, nor are they allowed to. Kicked out from any home they settle into, the Kurds, writes Hardi in ‘Birds’:

turn to the illusion of travelling 
between the warm and the cold climes
of their homeland

They ‘build no nests’ and endlessly

go from country to country 
and still never realise their dreams of settling

Mahmoud Darwish anticipates Hardi when he writes of the lands his people are forced to flee to in ‘We Journey Towards a Home’:

We journey towards a home not of our flesh. Its chestnut trees are not of our bones. 
Its rocks are not like goats in the mountain hymn

The land they are forced to occupy, ordered to make-do with, is foreign, just as they are foreign to it. They come to it like the pioneers in Canada, brilliantly captured by Margaret Atwood in ‘Disembarking at Quebec’:

The moving water will not show me

          my reflection.
         The rocks ignore.
         I am a word in a foreign language. 

In another poem Darwish speaks of the earth as ‘squeezing’ the displaced, implying how they are squeezed out from any place. This results in myths and memories of homes lost and homes not yet gained. Darwish writes:

Of our home we see only the unseen: our mystery. 

Perhaps a ‘man’s destination is not his destiny’, as the poet Eliot says, because in the poetry of displacement, destinations turn out to be yet another stopping points on an interminable journey. They reside in temporary shelters and camps, the latter made famous by Primo Levi’s poem ‘The Survivor’ whose speaker has nightmares about his former fellow-inmates.

Camps, like the inns in Marianne Moore’s ‘Silence’, ‘are not residences’, even as they constitute the stuff of life-time nightmares and the never-ending anxiety of home. Elie Wiesel summarises his camp experiences where, in place of the hearth that marks the home, there are the ‘fires of hell’ (‘holocaust’):

Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw
transformed into smoke under a silent sky

From these camps, the displaced never reach the status and stability of home. As a result, there is the longing for stability, homelands first and then homes therein.  The last word on the impossibility of home is surely Darwish’s:

Where should we go after the last frontiers?
Where should the birds fly after the last sky?

(The author is Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society)