Writer Mai Al-Nakib explores the fictions of homecoming and the potentialities of exile despite our ruinous present.
Mai Al-Nakib
Growing up, home was often elsewhere. The place where I was born was not the place of my early childhood, where I became a conscious being in the world. Perhaps this initial disjuncture imprinted upon me a sense that home was more imaginary than real. For a child, movement across geographies and languages can’t be voluntary, as it might be for parents, as indeed it was for mine. Even so, my involuntary movement didn’t feel traumatic to me because my parents didn’t carry inside them the bitter burn of displacement. They left Kuwait under happy circumstances in order to complete their higher education. For them, a return home was possible and, eventually, return they did, excited to cultivate the potential of their recently independent country. Needless to say, this isn’t always the case. Movement can be involuntary, as it was for my husband’s Palestinian parents. Their forced departures emitted a different resonance, imprinting upon their children a sense of loss, of a home gone missing.
There must be some in this world who never move, remain in their places of birth until the end. It seems rarer these days but not inconceivable. I’m fascinated by such rootedness, by what it would be like to live in the same house or, at the very least, the same village (one always imagines such rootedness occurring in bucolic villages). To wander the same streets you wandered on your way to primary school. To buy bread from the same bakery your mother did, her mother did, and her mother before her; fruits and vegetables from the same grocer; meat from the same butcher. To see the same faces day in and day out; to meet the same group of friends for a drink; to eat together in the same local restaurant owned by the same family for generations.
As I try to imagine this eternal connection to home, it seems simultaneously miraculous and like a form of entombment. The charm wears off almost instantly, and I’m left feeling suffocated. In any case, it’s a fantasy. Streets, even in the remotest villages, get renamed or rerouted; bakeries turn into mobile phone shops; the local green grocer becomes a chain supermarket; familiar faces wrinkle with age; and children move away. Even in the span of a lifetime, no home remains untouched by time. Home is always being lost.
In geography class, when writing down his address, young Stephen Dedalus, protagonist of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (15-16), produces the following expansive list:
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe
Already, as a primary school boy, Stephen is elsewhere, quickly widening out from the identic marker of his given name toward the cosmos, the restrictions of family and nation, of continent and planet, too much to take. Stephen as Icarus is preparing for flight, ready to defy his father, heading toward the sun. By the end of the novel, Stephen, young adult artist on the brink, is itching to escape Ireland. In order to create, the conventional restrictions that bind must be mercilessly severed. Goodbye to family, to religion, to country. Goodbye to childhood, to the conditions and circumstances that have made him who he is.
Joyce, like his protagonist, left Ireland in 1904 only to write about it endlessly and obsessively. For Joyce, leaving home was the condition of possibility for returning to it in writing. Home becomes an imagined place, and Joyce’s imagined Ireland has become definitive to many — sometimes more Ireland than Ireland itself.
Paradoxically, in its particularity, Joyce’s imagined returns to his fictionalized Ireland make his writing universal, if not universally appealing. His intimate stories of Dublin and its people — from the short stories of Dubliners to the vast Ulysses — could be about anyone, anywhere. In his writing, the personal expands into the general, just as young Stephen Dedalus expands into the cosmos. This is the special dispensation of good fiction. Not only opening up unfamiliar worlds, but enabling us to return circuitously to our own forgotten experiences, our own abandoned pasts. In the most far-flung places, we recognize our homes; in the most unlikely characters, we see ourselves. Joyce stated as much: “For myself, I always write about Dublin because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal” (Ricorso.net). Fiction provides the opportunity — the rare chance — to gain insight into others and ourselves, to glimpse a snippet of what life could mean, of what humanity could become. Lofty, aspirational aims, no doubt, and seldom achieved, but still worthy of our efforts as writers and readers.
Joyce died in January 1941 in Zurich, Switzerland, after surgery for a perforated ulcer. He was fifty-eight years old. Four months earlier, in September 1940, believing he would be returned to Nazi France the following day, German Jewish cultural critic Walter Benjamin killed himself at the Spanish border. He was forty-eight years old. Benjamin’s theoretical essays, like Joyce’s fiction, utilize distance to spark critical insight. Benjamin’s collection, Berlin Childhood around 1900, gathers a sequence of vignettes to evoke images of childhood in his affluent home in the West End of Berlin. These are not sentimental, nostalgic images but, rather, eccentric, specific scenes of his particular past. Contra Proust, Benjamin’s is not a remembrance of things past or a recovery of time lost for the sake of resurrecting that past in writing. It is instead remembrance for the sake of illuminating the present and excavating disregarded or discarded fragments for the sake of a yet unwritten future. Benjamin’s Berlin, the city of his childhood, which he knows he will soon be forced to abandon for good, becomes the virtual ground upon which an alternative life — a future life — unfolds.
Benjamin points out in the opening pages of Berlin Childhood that the past is socially irretrievable (37). You can no more resurrect the social milieu of your past home than you can the younger self you once were in that home (a biological impossibility). The futility of this effort is no cause for despair, however, because what the irretrievable past does offer us is an unconsidered future. Childhood homes — impossible to return to in fact — can be mined for masked possibilities in the present and, especially, the future. “In such places,” Benjamin writes, “it seems as if all that lies in store for us has become the past” (79). In the ruinous present, that past shines a light of potential upon a darkening future, if only we would make the effort to glance back.
We continue to experience the aftermath of Benjamin’s ruinous present — the one that pushed him to suicide. As a direct result, like Benjamin, my husband’s parents were forced from their homeland into exile. We are bearing witness to the intolerable and ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide of a people that had nothing to do with Benjamin’s present, but who are forced to shoulder misdirected blame nonetheless. Benjamin’s ethical historical materialism would have made it impossible for him to support the catastrophe unleashed against the Palestinians in his name. His methodology demands an excavation of the concrete, material past (the genocide of Jews in Germany by Nazis), to critique the present (the genocide of Palestinians in Palestine by Israelis), toward a future in which an alternative reality is possible. There is always some utopian potential tucked in any violence unleashed — whether Nazi or Israeli — waiting to be expanded. One possibility might have been Palestine, a democratic, egalitarian home for Jewish European refugees alongside indigenous Palestinians. It could have gone that way, and despite its seeming impossibility at this bleak juncture, it still could if the right people wanted it to.
It should go without saying that the right of return for those forced out of their homelands as a result of colonial occupation, war, or political persecution is a given. But since it is not a given in our catastrophic present, it bears stating explicitly: the right of return is non-negotiable. In the interim, for many of those involuntarily exiled, home can become a kind of promised land, and as time passes, this promised land becomes more imaginary than real.
Odysseus longs for Ithaca, but when he arrives there finally, after two decades away, he does not recognize the place. Athena the goddess has disguised it with mist, it’s true, but Odysseus’s bewilderment and unease upon arrival is emblematic of most delayed returns home. To returnees, such returns may reveal communities transformed; loved ones gone; a once familiar geography altered; and, perhaps for the first time, just how different they themselves have become. When Athena, disguised as a young man, informs Odysseus that he is in fact in Ithaca, Odysseus remains cautious, making up a story about being from Crete and about how he came upon his treasure. Athena, revealing herself, declares: “‘To outwit you in all your tricks, a person or a god would need to be an expert at deceit. You clever rascal! So duplicitous, so talented at lying! You love fiction and tricks so deeply, you refuse to stop even in your own land’” (Homer 326). Odysseus, as Athena recognizes, is a quick-witted storyteller. Stories have kept him alive for two decades, and stories have kept listeners and readers — including Joyce — captivated by The Odyssey for almost three millennia. In fact, Odysseus’s return to Ithaca in Book 13 is a bit of a letdown, though his storytelling impulse continues. The thrilling adventures comprising the journey homeward are replaced with plans for revenge against his wife Penelope’s suitors. The gritty reality of homecoming — involving the murder and bloodshed of his fellow Ithacans — fails to equal the longing that propelled him.
About The Odyssey as the ultimate story of homecoming, my Greek friend Dimitris says, “Everyone carries an Ithaca in their hearts.” Ithaca is not the lost island. Ithaca is the longing in the heart for that lost island, which, in reality, can never measure up. Longing is imaginative, the stuff of fiction. Odysseus relays stories that beguile. His own story — of Athena’s making, of Homer’s — is one of enchantment and capture. An unwavering longing for home produces tales of magic and monsters. Longing for the irretrievable past is Benjamin’s way toward a potentially better future, and the stories we imagine — whether in images of childhood or adventures at sea — make that future slightly more feasible. Longing is the creative impulse, and the fictions it produces become as much a home as any actual return. In the cases where return proves impossible — sadly more often than not — the longing itself becomes home.
One of the greatest novels of an imagined homeland is Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. In his essay on the process of writing it, titled “Imaginary Homelands,” Rushdie makes clear that for him a Proustian endeavor — retrieving the past, recreating it whole in art — was out of the question (10). For the exiled writer “haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim,” the only possible reclamation occurs in fiction (10). “[W]e will […] create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind” (10). Memory is fallible, but this very fallibility, Rushdie suggests, becomes a vital source of creative invention. From between the interstices of loss, across the broken shards of memory emerge images both evocative and true, in language inventive and new. Rushdie did it. So, too, did Assia Djebar, Ihab Hassan, Ghassan Kanafani, Edward W. Said, and Fawaz Turki, among so many other writers in exile.
Physically removed — that is to say, already “‘elsewhere’” (Rushdie 12) — the exiled writer has a singular capacity to express the ways in which we are, all of us, elsewhere, removed from our pasts, a “loss [that] is part of our common humanity” (12). From Dublin to the cosmos; from a childhood in Berlin toward the future; from an imaginary India to our common humanity — what Joyce, Benjamin, and Rushdie all share is a sense of the extent to which the intimate and close are overlaid with the general and universal. The writer writing alone connects with readers far removed geographically and temporally, sometimes, despite the odds, even intellectually and ideologically. Through such connections, an unanticipated recognition of commonality may emerge. We are all born to a mother. We all die. Meanwhile, our pasts are irretrievable and our futures are forged in the calamitous present. How we put these human commonalities to work for ourselves and for each other is the story of our lives. In the home of the book, we may find some clues on how best to proceed, keeping in mind that there are as many ways to proceed as there are books to read.
When the State, with absolute impunity, has the power to decimate populations with fire from above, home becomes the stuff of nightmares. When the State has the power to unmake its citizens with a weekly publication of names on a list, home becomes a house of horrors. We’ve descended down a fascist hole from which it feels as if there can be no safe passage back. Home isn’t what you thought it was; the familiar has become unfamiliar. We’ve been here before, in fiction and in life. If home is our common humanity, we don’t seem eager to uphold it. If home is our planet, we don’t seem eager to save it. If home is our shared history, we don’t seem eager to learn from it in order not to repeat it.
Some of us — I want to believe most of us — gaze in shock and horror at the debris piling up before our eyes. Some of us fight against it. Some of us are afraid to. Too many of us escape into a media landscape comparable to the land of the lotus eaters that held Odysseus’s men in thrall. Some of us write in the hopes that our words may resonate, knowing they likely won’t. All are paying the price, too many with their lives and the lives of their precious children, others with their livelihoods, still others with their health and wellbeing. Those who believe they remain untouched by the atrocities will awake soon enough to find themselves in the midst of war or pestilence or penury, no longer human, too late to do anything about it. Too late to find their way home.
Home is where I want to lay my bones, on the land where my mother’s bones are buried (I write these words knowing that so many will never know where their mother’s bones are located, an inconsolable grief). We can never return to our first home, our mother’s womb; the best homecoming we can expect is to share the same dirt on the same land as her. Home is the land, not the State — which does everything it can to obscure this ineluctable fact. Home is ancestral, often bloody, but it cannot be stolen, no matter how many bombs are dropped, olive trees uprooted, lies told. But home is also imaginative terrain, slippery, ephemeral, a certain light just out of reach. Our homes are castles in the air, our returns, difficult to trace.
If home is lost to occupation, fire, war, theft, disease, or death, your place in the world feels precarious forever after. Even if some form of home is restored to you — as mine was to me — you continue to live with a squirrely sense that catastrophe is just around the corner. If you don’t happen to lose your home in any of these violent ways and are lucky enough to age, then at that point you too will begin to lose your reassuring sense of home — and part of yourself — to time. The world around you shifts, becomes uncanny, and your position in it feels more uncertain. Your body betrays you, loses its grip. Either way, whether as a result of violence or the ordinary passage of time, homes inevitably dissipate, leaving us unmoored. To combat the resulting fear and insecurity in the face of our own mortality, the evisceration of human rights, the retreat of law and democracy, the demise of our planet, we can turn against each other — as we seem to be doing — or we can learn to trust and care for one another. The latter demands an imaginative leap, a fictionalized construction of home as a place we share with everyone and everything on earth, and to which we can return anew. With scant time left, this potential homecoming — redemptive, wildly fantastic — awaits our resolve.
