Home, a state of mind?

If what one calls home is based on the pretext of where one has spent a good part of their childhood or if home is another word for one’s parents or family, then why do some people who have had both claim to not have a home? Why are there ‘wanderers’, nomads of sorts who feel the need to pack up and move to other places and make new homes?

Mohsin Hamid discloses his nostalgia in ‘The Pathos of Exile’,

“…somehow we became voluntary exiles. But at least in my case, the homesickness that resulted from exile, although not fatal, has remained uncured.”

And yet he ends his writing on a curious note, “I am a wanderer…This is the gift my city has always given me, a sense of home to sustain me on my travels.”

The last phrase when split into two (“a sense of home” and “to sustain me on my travels.”) gives a relatively clearer picture of a wanderer’s thinking. It is clear that wanderers only feel a ‘sense of home’ because no one place is their home and yet they need to feel a belonging to places whenever they come back to them as ‘sustenance for their traveling’. So it’s something like stocking up food for an oncoming drought, the difference being that the wanderer’s ‘food’ is ‘food for thought’; absorbing the feelings the home atmosphere offers them before they are to leave again.

Home offers to wanderers, and non-wanderers alike, feelings of acceptance which in turn provide a sense of security. One could then say safely that a sense of security is what ‘feeling at home’ is about.

Different people have different insecurities. Some people feel insecure financially. So, for some people home could be financial stability and affording luxuries which would be constant reminders of that security. Others feel insecure emotionally. For them home could be the person who they love and who can put their emotional insecurities at rest .Many are insecure about themselves, about where they belong and why they belong there. Home for them could simply be wandering, traveling from place to place in an endeavor to discover a different part of them in every new place. They could find home in doing this for the simple reason that staying in one place for too long might cause them to ascertain the extent of their acceptance in that place. The extent of one’s acceptance in a place is directly proportional to the degree of how secure one feels in that place. And diminishing security may be a signal to the wanderer to move along to another place.

In ‘Imaginary Homes’ Salman Rushdie relates to this sense of uneasiness when finding his family’s name still present in the Bombay telephone directory,

“I felt as if I were being claimed, or informed that the facts of my faraway life were illusions, and that this continuity (in Bombay) was the reality”.

Perhaps he felt that his moving away to London, which was perhaps the most major change in his life, had not been accepted by the telephone directory of the city of Bombay. The use of the words “claimed” and “informed” indicate a negative sentiment.

It is clear now that home is not necessarily a four-walled structure that has traces of one’s childhood days and it certainly does not represent the country or city one lives in for whatever amount of time.

Edward Said, who felt like a misfit in his homeland Jerusalem and traveled a lot, writes in his memoir ‘Out of place’:

I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance…[These currents are] A form of freedom, I’d like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism, too, is something I particularly want to hold onto. With so many dissonances in my life I have learnt to prefer being not quite right, out of place.”

Edward Said had found acceptance in himself and thus was at home by not feeling a belonging to any place. In fact he had “learnt to prefer being…out of place”. The last stanza does suggest the possibility to have had found, and the choice to have not chosen a “solid self”, a solid (conventional) home.

Mohsin Hamid too implies a choice in the matter in ‘The Pathos of Exile’:

I think about why so many of my friends left Lahore and why so few of us returned. None of us seemed to think, at the time, that we were going away for good…we went abroad for a better education. But as the economy stagnated and as law and order declined, we delayed our homecomings. We began to work.

And yet again after realizing that the offer of the choice taken is still open to change, he prefers to leave Lahore again:

I smile, happy for him and for his wife, a life much like the one I could, perhaps, have led. A wave of nostalgia rises up in me but…I am a wanderer. Soon I will again have left Lahore.

So Home can be defined as a state of mind which one can choose to have.

Emily Hahn found a home for some years in addiction to opium in China. When she resolved one day to test herself to see if she could do without it and accepted an invitation to spend the weekend away with no access to the drug. Emily Hahn writes in ‘The Big Smoke’,

“I couldn’t stay away from my opium tray, or Heh-ven’s, without beginning to feel homesick. I would think of the lamp in the shaded room, the coziness, the peace and the comfort with great longing”.

Emily Hahn’s original (or conventional) home was America.

Home can now be defined as a mental and emotional state of when one chooses to feel accepted and secure in one’s surroundings, be it with one’s family or as an opium addict.

Any insecurity which suspends this feeling may cause the mind to initiate an ‘inertia’ mode which causes ‘homesickness’, the failure of the mind in its attempts to resume the lost feeling. For people who choose to be wanderers, the ‘inertia’ mode may play as an indicator to move yet again to another place.




References:

Hamid, Mohsin. “The Pathos of Exile” Time Magazine 10 August 2003
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands
Said, Edward W. The Edward Said Reader: Out of Place. Great Britain: Granta Books 2001
Hahn, Emily. The Norton Book of Women’s Lives: The Big Smoke