ANT011 - Returning home & journeys of belonging
Meditations on leaving, remembering, finding, rediscovering or being forced from the places that made us.
There is something bittersweet and undefinable about returning to a place you once called home. The roads are unsettlingly familiar yet inexplicably new. The familiarities shine a light on the changes in you while the differences flaunt how it has moved on without you, making it easy to feel like an outsider in a place you never thought you would. The character of a town is magnified through fresh eyes, for good and bad. There is a hungering for the past, an ache of un-belonging, a pride both in having been there and having left. You wonder if it was you that chose to move on or the place that spat you out.
I recently came across a poem in a weathered old notebook, something I scrawled standing on the platform of a train station in Watford. The place where I grew up, I left it many times and still do to this day. There was nothing different about this moment, but I remember that for some reason it felt like the last time. It’s barely twenty miles from where I sit writing to you now - twenty miles that can feel like a lifetime away.
I smiled above the train tracks’ rumbling thunders.
Laughed to the air, taste bittersweet.
I’ll leave a little piece of me here, I thought,
Waiting patiently behind the yellow line.
Forever in the birthplace of my smile,
Roads that weave amidst the lines of my palm.
Only this town can tell you who I am.
Only this platform knows who I might become.
The idea of ‘home’ is a fuzzy one, meaning different things to different people. Even definitions leave room for this ambiguity (ie: where one lives, comes from or feels they belong to). In this increasingly transient world, it seems only natural to have many homes. Home might be a place you spent decades or merely eight months. A place you have never been to at all, but feel a belonging to through heritage or culture. One that is more general - wilderness or ocean for example - or exists only in cyberspace. It might be a group of people or even a time. Maybe home can be in the absence of these things.
These books are about all of these homes - the places and people and feelings. The journeys from home, back to it, to find it for the first time. All of them inseparable from that feeling we crave - belonging.
“I regarded home as a place I left behind in order to come back to it afterward.”
Ernest Hemingway
In Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, home exists as a spectral, distant shimmer. As the narrator meets her mother for a holiday in Tokyo, home is in the comparatively soul-less sunshine of Australia where she lives, in the similarities to her mother’s native Hong Kong, just out of reach in her mother’s solitary distance. The drizzle that characterises their trip creates a thoughtful mood where her contemplation acts as a vignette to their past. Writing in a quietly haunting style, Au has talked in interviews about her fascination with “open endings, scenes in which nothing happens yet everything happens”. In Cold Enough for Snow, she has achieved this with an incredibly deft touch.
I thought about how vaguely familiar this scene was to me, especially with the smells of the restaurant around me, but strangely so, because it was not my childhood, but my mother’s childhood that I was thinking of, and from another country at that. And yet there was something about the subtropical feel, the smell of the steam and the tea and the rain. It reminded me of her photographs, or the television dramas we had watched together when I was still young. Or it was like the sweets she used to buy for me, which no doubt were the sweets her mother used to buy for her.
Jessica Au - Cold Enough for Snow
Iain Banks was an unbelievably prolific writer. As if fourteen novels wasn’t enough, he wrote a further thirteen science fiction titles under a moniker - simply adding the ‘M’ of his adopted middle name Menzies to make Iain M Banks. He turned his safe hands and dry Scottish wit to a wide range of subjects, many of which contemplate identity and self-discovery, but The Steep Approach to Garbadale is his most clear tale of homecoming. A sprawling family saga that follows an exiled heir to a board game empire, summoned back to his family’s highland estate where he revisits, and discovers anew, the dark pasts of his family. It sticks in the mind for its messy relationships and effortless snapshot of the unsettling, familiar and the fine line between them.
What do I really want? he thinks. This is, of course, an extremely good question. It was just such a pity that, life being as it tended to be, it so rarely came as part of a matched pair, with an extremely good answer.
Iain Banks - The Steep Approach to Garbadale
Victoria Hislop’s The Island boasts an Observer quote on the cover that states, “At last - a beach book with a heart.” They’re not wrong. A woman on a journey to find out about her mother’s past visits the Cretan village she grew up in and discovers that it is moments from Spinalonga, a deserted island that was once Greece’s leper colony. As the past unravels, it’s clear that the island is a part of her family’s history in many more ways than proximity. The light style belies a meticulously researched historical thread and affecting journey.
Like any collection of family photographs, it was a random selection that told only fragments of a story. The real tale would be revealed by the pictures that were missing or never even taken at all, not the ones that had been so carefully framed or packed away neatly in an envelope.
Victoria Hislop - The Island
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go has been steeped in praise since its 2005 release and it is easy to see why. Extraordinary in its imagination, it carries hallmarks of science fiction but what makes it special - the yearning, heartbreak and fragility of existence running through it - will appeal to all. As thirty-one year old Kathy looks back on her childhood at Hailsham school, home is the close friends she made and their desperation to hold onto each other in a life otherwise steeped in un-belonging.
And so we stood together like that, at the top of that field for what seemed like ages, not saying anything, just holding each other, while the wind kept blowing and blowing at us, tugging our clothes, and for a moment, it seemed like we were holding onto each other because that was the only way to stop us from being swept away into the night.
Kazuo Ishiguru - Never Let Me Go
David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon is a book about a boy’s home-coming to an entire culture, race and way of life, discovering that maybe it is longer home at all. Influenced by the true story of James Morril, who lived with aboriginal people in North Queensland for seventeen years after surviving a nineteenth century shipwreck, the book starts with a character based on him, Gemmy, approaching three white colonial children, some of the first European settlers in Australia.
The creature or spirit in him had spoken up, having all along had the words in there that would betray him and which, when they came hooting out of his mouth, so astonished him: ‘Do not shoot. I am a B-b-British object.’
Symbolism personified, Gemmy has been raised by aboriginals for much of his life and has become neither here nor there, a boy with many homes and none. A child of the bush, he has developed aboriginal mannerisms and knowledge. Even facial structure, as the more wary of the settlers notice, prompting them to wonder if it is the food he eats and way of living that has morphed his face or something more unsettling. Only strange dreams and fragments of language survive from the western culture he was born into, driving an intense curiosity and longing. It is this, alongside a pure innocence, an innocence clearly in contrast to that of even the children among the settlers, that has bought him out of the dark, hostile bushland that the settlers barely dare venture into.
What you fix your gaze on is the little hard-backed flies that are crawling about in the corner of its bloodshot eyes and hopping down at intervals to drink the sweat of its lip. And the horror it carries to you is not just the smell, in your own sweat, of a half-forgotten swamp-world going back deep in both of you, but that for him, as you meet here face to face in the sun, you and all you stand for have not yet appeared over the horizon of the world, so that after a moment all the wealth of it goes dim in you, then is canceled altogether, and you meet at last in a terrifying equality that strips the last rags from your soul and leaves you so far out on the edge of yourself that your fear now is that you may never go back. It was the mixture of monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness that made Gemmy Fairley so disturbing to them, since at any moment he could show either one face or the other; as if he were always standing there at one of those meetings, but in his case willingly and the encounter was an embrace.
The colonial settlers harbour a universal terror of the aboriginal tribes they have only glimpsed. A terror of their skin tone, but also of their ease in living off a land that has proved surprisingly harsh, the strange magic they seem to harbour, their connection with the earth and plants. Most of all their spiritual claim to a land the settlers considered Terra Nullius - territory without a master. Gemmy is a direct test to this fear of the unknown, striking fear in them (for he may be secretly spying for the aboriginals to help their supposedly murderous motives) but also pity (it is impossible not to look at him and see that he was once a child barely distinguishable from their own).
If it was easy here to lose yourself in the immensities of the land, under a sky that opened too far in the direction of infinity, you could also do it (every woman knew this) in a space no longer than five paces from wall to wall; to find yourself barging about the hut like a trapped bird, clutching at whatever came to hand, a warm teapot, a startled child, a shirt with the smell of sweat on it, to steady yourself against the cyclone that had blown up in the gap between you and the nearest bedpost, and threatened to sweep you out the door where nothing, not a flat iron, not the names of children on your lips, could hold you down against the vast upward expanse of your breath.
It is not just Gemmy who is grappling with the idea of home. Switching perspectives at will, often within scenes in a way that forces you to pay attention, Malouf brings to life a range of characters amongst the settlers. Mostly from Scotland, they long for home, battling with the harsh Australian climate that strains their patience, mental states and relationships. They struggle to create a sense of belonging in a place so unfamiliar, with even children who have never seen Scotland longing for it through the stories they are told. Gemmy’s presence exposes the cracks in the fragile existence they have created, a thinly held sense of belonging that lacks any real connection to a place around them they still have comparatively little understanding of.
It was the fearful loneliness of the place that most affected her—the absence of ghosts.
Till they arrived no other lives had been lived here. It made the air that much thinner, harder to breathe. She had not understood, till she came to a place where it was lacking, the extent to which her sense of the world had to do with the presence of those who had been there before, leaving signs of their passing and spaces still warm with breath—a threshold worn with the coming and going of feet, hedges between fields that went back a thousand years, and the names even further; most of all, the names on headstones, which were their names, under which lay the bones that had made their bones and given them breath.
They would be the first dead here. It made death that much lonelier, and life lonelier too.
Told in rich, poetic prose that shines a light on carefully balanced perspectives, the sense of culture shock and exile, whether forced or unforced, shows the dissonance in the way people look at the world but also what is universally shared. It’s a powerful meditation not only on belonging but on language, fear and acceptance.
“When she got up and walked out into the paddock, and all the velvety grass heads blazed up, haloed with gold, she felt under the influence of her secret skin, suddenly floaty, as if she had been relieved of the weight of her own life, and the brighter being in her was very gently stirring and shifting its wings.”
David Malouf - Remembering Babylon
A slow, beautifully shot film, The Eight Mountains has a meditative quality that draws you in gradually. After the death of his father, a man returns to the Italian Alpine valley of Aosta where the spent their summers to build a house with his childhood best friend. A bittersweet tale of friendship that leaves you longing for fresh mountain air, it’s subtle and enchanting, a film with the quality of a novel. Stream through a free 14 day BFI trial or on Amazon Prime.
A place you loved as a kid can also look completely different to you as an adult and turn out to be a disappointment; or it can remind you of what you are no longer and make you feel very sad.
Max Porter’s timely, powerful soliloquy on the weapons industry from the Palestine Festival of Literature, entitled Wild West, should be required watching in our current age. An age in which homes are being razed to the ground.
I run a support group for people in this industry who feel judged by their friends and family. It's called I don't give a Sh*t. It's called Get over it. It's called This is the world. This is the product. At no point in the production of this lollipop do I need to know who ends up sucking it.
Author and bookshop worker Jess Pan with a pithy, pleasantly meandering piece on yearning.
“The opposite of yearning is savouring the exquisite now,” writes psychologist Mary Pipher in her book, Letters to a Young Therapist: Stories of Hope and Healing.
I am out of isolation, and I vow to savour the exquisite now.
Poet and author Yanyi, of newsletter The Reading, on returning to writing and beginning again.
I had forgotten about this: that there’s a lag between when one is physically present and when one becomes spiritually present in a new life. It could be a physical city, but it could also be a spiritual city—the city in which you learned to touch grass again, the city in which you do not love that person, the city in which you become a mother, or the city in which you no longer have one.
In New York, it took ten years, just like they told me. Although I’ve left, it still feels like home whenever I go back. Like Borges tracing the alleys of a city that he discovers are the folds of his own face.
Memories of home to me are of dancing around the kitchen with my mum to The Archers theme-tune, classical symphonies or mellow jazz albums played discreetly in the background of family dinners, the memorable era of rowdy Indie that soundtracked my school years, UK Hip Hop albums bumping from a boombox at the skatepark, the D&B and Jungle records that have stood pride of place in the corner of my eye for the last fifteen years. A place I always return to though is The Streets Original Pirate Material, an album so unique and distinctly of early naughties London that it plays as a time capsule yet remains musically relevant to this day.
My Underground train runs from Mile End to Ealing
From Brixton to Boundsgreen
My spitting's dirty, my beats are clean, so smoke weed and be lean
I step out my yard through the streets
In the dead heat, all I got's my spirit and my beats
I play fair, don't cheat and keep the gangsters sweetThe Streets - Has it Come to This?
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Until next time,
MQ.