Ideas of Home

It seems best to begin here with a brief survey of what the idea of home can mean. The Oxford English Dictionary defines home as “a place, region or state to which one properly belongs, on which one's affections centre, or where one finds refuge, rest or satisfaction”. Angelika Bammer suggests that we might usefully think of home by analogy with Benedict Anderson's performative concept of the nation as an imagined community, as an “enacted space within which we try on roles and relationships of … belonging and foreignness”. Thus Bammer ¹ argues that both nation and home are in this sense fictional constructs, “mythic narratives, stories the telling of which has the power to create the ‘we’ who are engaged in telling them” and to also create “the discursive right to a space (a country, a neighbourhood, a place to live) that is due us … in the name of the ‘we-ness’ we have just constructed”. ² In something of the same vein, Dietmar Dath argues that “homes are ‘origin stories’ constructed as retrospective signposts … they are made for coming from”. ³ It is this which gives such poignancy to the reply given to Marina Warner by a taxi driver in San Francisco who, when she asked him where he was from, replied that he was “an illegal”, as if that in itself were a well-established “place” or nationality. ⁴ Home is always a heavily value-laden term, and Agnes Heller perhaps inadvertently brings out some of the implicitly ethical aspects of the concept of home when she identifies place and “rootedness” with what she calls “geographical monogamy” and travel (or mobility) with “geographical promiscuity”. ⁵