ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter starts with leaving home, which often initiates questions of identity: a process of discovering we you are or will be. The departure from home, as in the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, is a ritual associated with the education of a provincial figure. Home changes, however, from Richard Price’s early 1960s gang of pals in The Wanderers (1974) to the Mad Max films (1979–2015), to science fiction galaxies far, far away. The ambiguities implicit in fictional homes and identities raise questions about wandering. Homeless children in the US typically live with an African-American mother who is under the age of 27. Americans average 11.4 lifetime moves; Europeans average four. Leaving home likely entails very different experiences across continents. Migrant children travel with their parents toward the US border only to wait in endless queues. Such wanderings do not necessarily lead to clarifications about personal identity, especially as identity tends to imply something singular and coherent, fixed rather than mixed and in flux. The campfire circle of elderly wandering van-dwellers often breaks up with the departing euphemism, “See you down the road.” Maybe so. Probably not.
