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Article Excerpt
I begin this paper with some personal childhood narratives about the ambivalence I associate with the concept of home. I use a visit "back home" to Lebanon as an opportunity for re-imagining home and for understanding what is at stake when we think of home uncritically as a place of safety and belonging. I argue that the tensions and ambiguities I experience in thinking about Lebanon form productive and useful sites for critical analysis. Through such reflections, I have come to understand that the meanings given to place or memory are rarely contested, and this understanding has become my starting place for critical analysis. I then attempt to unearth in greater detail the processes involved in the creation/contestation of the concept of home, as well as the place of emotion and memory in such processes.
Cet article s'ouvre sur quelques recits personnels d'enfance concernant l'ambivalence que j'associe au concept du >. Je me sers d'une visite au Liban ( >) pour repenser > et afin de comprendre ce qui est en jeu lorsque nous pensons > sans dispositif critique comme un lieu de securite et d'appartenance. J'avance l'argument que les tensions et ambigui'tes que j'eprouve en pensant au Liban forment des sites productifs et pratiques pour l'analyse critique. A travers de relies reflexions, j'en suis arrivee a comprendre que lessens accordes au rieu ou a la memoire sont peu souvent contestes, et cette comprehension s'offre comme lieu de depart pour mon analyse critique. J'essaie ensuite de degager en plus grand detail les procedes impliques dans la creation/la contestation du concept de >, ainsi que la situation de l'emotion et de la memoire dans de tels procedes.
Introduction: Searching for Home and Belonging, or Where I Begin
Last December I went to Lebanon for my cousin's wedding. This was not my first trip "back home," but it was the first time in 15 years that I visited the neighbourhood and apartment where I had lived for the first nine years of my life. As I looked around, I was struck most by how small it seemed compared to the place I had envisioned in my mind. I'd had a similar experience three years earlier, on my first trip to Lebanon since leaving with my parents and brother in October of 1988. On that first trip, I was similarly amazed at the smallness of my maternal grandparents' home in the Bourge-al-Baragenie Palestinian refugee camp. Until those two moments of recognition, these places had loomed large in my memory, along with an overwhelming and emotional plethora of images, conversations, people, games, and meals I associated with them.
As I stood in my old bedroom, I struggled to recall a time in my recent memory when I had thought of this as "home."
In telling people of my trips, I had lacked any other linguistic expression than that of "going back home" for a visit. Yet, I knew that it had been years since I thought of Lebanon as home. I had been living in Canada since the age of ten, and looking around my childhood home in Lebanon, I had vivid recollections of yelling at my paternal uncles when they referred to Lebanon as my home: "It might be home to you, but this [Toronto] is my home!" I would scream at them amid a flurry of emotion that they dismissed as teenage melodrama, constructed as female hypersensitivity, or (mis)understood as a "loss" of my national roots. I would storm out of the room as they entered into loud and laborious discussions about my being overly sensitive or about "our" kids being "lost" in North America. As I look back at these emotionally laden and intensely personal moments, I now understand them as political, as moments ripe for analysis.
My screams were born of sheer frustration. I did not know how to make them understand that the place they thought of as "our" collective familial/ national home did not have the same meaning for me. I did not share their sense of nostalgic longing for the place, its land, and (imagined collectivity of) people. (1) What seemed even more difficult for me, however, was trying to make them understand that I had never experienced Lebanon as a "Lebanese" child, whatever that may be. My official nationality/citizenship was Lebanese, but the same laws that had given me a Lebanese "right" of citizenship ignored my mother's influence/role entirely: I was Lebanese because my father was Lebanese. My mother, however, was Palestinian by birth/ descent (2) and would become Lebanese after being married to my father for ten years. Her potential relationship to Lebanon as a nation-state could only be inscribed in law through a sanctioned marriage to a Lebanese man (which re-inscribes the nation as a heteronormatively gendered space, and women as secondarily related to the nation through their relations to men).
I grew up being very confused about all of this. Despite the numerous questions I asked, I could not grasp the reasoning behind these categories. I could not understand why my father, brother, and I were Lebanese, while my mom was Palestinian. In other words, I could not comprehend the citizenship laws and international political relations which supposedly made Lebanon my home, while constructing my mother's family as transitory residents, visitors who were perceived as threatening this same home. Inside the Palestinian refugee camp where my maternal grandparents resided, people seemed to think it was cute when I proclaimed the importance of my maternal familial roots. Outside of the camp, however, this was decidedly not the case, and I learned at an early age that publicly, at least, I was not to acknowledge my mother's family as part of my "roots." It was the strange duality of my Lebanese experience which my paternal uncles erased when they lamented the "loss" of my Lebanese roots, and I was unable to articulate to them that the erasure of my "Palestinian roots" was structurally embedded into the entire legal, socio-political, and historical situation of Palestinians in Lebanon.
Indeed, although I was a Lebanese citizen, I grew up in a neighbourhood where being the daughter of a Palestinian woman was a (social) mark I carried with me everywhere I went. The very aspect of my roots erased by citizenship laws, international relations, and civil wars was consistently and socially reinforced in ways I found both confusing and frustrating. Although nobody commented on my speech when I slipped into a Lebanese accent, I was constantly told to watch my pronunciation when I sounded Palestinian (and the ability to "contain" their "accent" was a matter of life-and-death for many Palestinians when they came upon roadblocks during the years of war). Ultimately, although Lebanon was my legal national home, the social meanings given to that nation as home were very specific and exclusionary.
All this is not to say that I had an awful childhood. I have some of the most wonderful and pleasant childhood memories associated with Lebanon (and with my uncles). What I remember most, however, and what I have been trying to understand and articulate for a long time, is a continually strong sense of ambiguity about where my mother and I fit into that landscape as some sort of coherent, inclusive entity. Upon my "return" trip to Lebanon, two things remained consistent for me. The first was this sense of uncertainty, always accompanied by the suspicion that I did not "belong" to the place. The second was an inability to understand what these feelings meant for me in the present. I knew why I felt the way I did, but I could not decipher the meaning of the feelings that washed over me. Such memories and feelings of dissonance are the starting point of this paper, for they have often led me into considerations of what it means to speak of home. I want to unearth the processes involved in the construction and contestation of the notion of home, and the place of emotion and memory in such processes.
I begin this paper by working through the ways in which home is conceptualized as a dwelling space, expanding my discussion to include articulations of the nation as home. In the first two sections of this paper, I pay close attention to the dangers of thinking of home exclusively as a safe, cohesive space of belonging. I go on to discuss national home-building projects, especially for those living in exile or diaspora, for whom the national ethnoscape (Appadurai, 1991) is globally dispersed across space and/or historically distanced in time. Particularly interesting in such articulations, is that "home" ceases to be simply a place of origin. Instead, at least conceptually, it simultaneously becomes a starting place and a final destination. In diaspora, the work which goes into maintaining national homes, and the desires which often surround home, are more explicitly revealed.
I argue that for those living in exile or in diaspora, articulations of a national home are often based in collective memory or nostalgia; that in exile, "home" is something people (must) struggle to maintain, and it is often maintained differently as past place of origin, present place of residence, and future place of return. My main argument is that although the processes involved in maintaining collective memories of home, and the nostalgia associated with it, may be dangerously selective and exclusionary, they may also contain possibilities for potential political and social change and redress. I end the paper by reflecting on such possibilities and returning to my personal search for my home.
Home as (Dwelling) Place: Constructing and Contesting Dominant Articulations
I begin this section by working through Theano Terkenli's (1995) discussion of what makes a given region of space one's home. I then problematize Terkenli's argument by highlighting some of the contradictions or ambivalences that complicate any straightforward or homogenous notion of home. An idealized notion of home as a physical space of safety and comfort is only partial, exclusionary, and constructed through multiple erasures. Such a notion, I argue, is built on what Judith Butler calls "contingent foundations," themselves "constituted through exclusions which, taken into account, expose the foundational premise as a contingent and contestable presumption" (1995, p. 7). By beginning with a homogenous conceptualization of home and then interrogating this understanding, I highlight that which is excluded or occluded in its production as an apparently coherent and uncontested terrain. I do so to emphasize the power relations disguised and reproduced by uncritical conceptualizations of home, and to understand what is at stake in such definitions.
Terkenli begins by defining home as a physically and psychically protective domestic dwelling. He argues that as one moves further away from this starting point, the region of space signified by the term "home" expands. Home is thus not limited to an individual small-scale dwelling. Instead, as one moves away from their dwelling space, the region thought of as...
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