ABSTRACT
For migrants, even more than for those who do not move far from their place of origin, home is a contested metaphor; a carpet bag of memories, emotions and experiences. It is now but it is then. It is over here yet over there. It is days filled with laughter, love and sunshine but it can also be darkness and threat. Real and tangible yet imagined and mythologised, home is deconstructed on departure and then constantly reconstructed as the migrant experience and lifecycle evolve. Home is all about belonging. It is about being rooted, having a focal point at which to direct hopes, fears, ambitions and the myth of return. But is it? There is also the concept of home at its most powerful in ‘absence or negation’. 1 However, if we follow Eric Hobsbawm's contrary precept, we must then ask whether is it only in the diaspora, when distance softens the harshness of reality, that the construction process can begin?
