When the home is under siege, the feeling of being “at home” is irrevocably lost, often forever.
Posted on – 12:45 AM, Fri – 16 December 22
![Opinion: At home, nowhere](https://cdn.telanganatoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/River.jpg)
Pramod K Nayyar
AK Ramanujan writes about a house in the iconic opening line of a famous poem:
sometimes feel nothing
ever entered the house
go out.
Ramanujan defined the qualities of this “big house”—inclusive, diverse, compassionate, multilayered—and in the process defined India itself. But how does a poet describe a homeland that exists only in myth and memory, when everything else is destroyed, its inhabitants scattered and its possessions left behind?
left home
Robin Ngangom in ‘A Poem to Joseph’ talks about family
The ethnic cleansers are in power
Your newly built house is on one person
nice back to pure blood
As a result, residents flee:
left
object of desire
…collected over twenty-five years
These objects have a way of traveling with the displaced. We turn to refugee/displaced poet and Kurdish Choman Hardi to find out what it’s like in “My Mother’s Kitchen.” Her mother thrives on displacement:
The 69-year-old is excited about starting from scratch.
This is her ninth time.
no regrets,
she never talks about her lost furniture
When she keeps leaving the house.
If Ngangom’s spokesman said the displaced were only mourning the loss of family photos, then Hardi’s mother was only mourning the loss of
front garden vines
It’s spread out over a trellis on the porch.
Hardi’s own regret is that while she could inherit her mother’s pottery (as the old woman assured her), she ‘Will never inherit my mother’s tree’. Elsewhere Hardi speaks of her father’s books, which still exist, have been rearranged, and some have been abandoned:
pack yourself in a duffel bag
Buried in the back garden,
to recover after many years,
Crumpled and eaten away by moisture.
The books, like her mother’s glasses, are physical testimony that can be used to tell their stories of displacement, loss of home and painful memories. But, as Hardi points out, that kind of telling needs the right audience:
The rest chose a more suitable home
They will never be abandoned again.
they shine on someone else’s shelf
Keep it a secret for yourself.
The mystery will remain until sympathetic readers unravel the mystery of the books’ original owners, their trauma and loss.
Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish also lists his home in “Where I Belong”:
I have a mother, a house with many windows, a brother, a friend, and a cell
The objects in the home constitute the identity of the inhabitants: the objects in the home bring together the life narratives of their owners and users. For residents, their life narratives include narrative elaborations of the objects they desire, own, show off, and use. So when items are separated from their owners, thrown away, or abandoned, it’s not just that they lose their value: their owners lose a bit of their ego, too.
home under siege
Choman Hardi can only imagine home under siege, like in ‘Invasion’
we will hear
their voice
in their death-bringing uniform
They will come to our home
The only thing to do, Hardi said, is to “keep your head down and stay indoors” because it’s a losing battle. But will it make residents feel at home? Mahmoud Darwish speaks of the brutality of the invaders:
We see the faces of those who will throw
Our children from the window of the last space
As Nissim Ezekiel says in “Background, Whatever,” “How you feel at home is the point”. When the home is under siege, the feeling of being “at home” is irrevocably lost, often forever. Under the siege, the poet’s career was at stake, so Darwish’s speakers “learned all the words needed to judge by blood”.darwish would say elsewhere
There is no land on earth to bear me. Only my words carry me…
When the poem ends, he can only break down the remaining words:
I have learned and disassembled all the words in order to derive a one word: Family.
never home
Displaced people do not feel at home. They cannot settle down and are not allowed to settle down. The Kurds were driven out of any family they settled in, Hardi writes in The Birds:
turn to travel illusion
between warm and cold climates
their home country
They “don’t build nests,” endlessly
from one country to another
Still haven’t realized their dream of settling
Mahmoud Darwish anticipated Hadi when he wrote of the land to which his people were forced to flee in “Our Journey Home”:
We go to a home that is not our flesh. Its chestnuts are not our bones.
its rocks are not like the goats in the folk songs
The land they were forced to occupy and make do with was as foreign as it was to them. They came here like pioneers in Canada, as Margaret Atwood captures beautifully in “Disembarking in Quebec”:
flowing water won’t tell me
my reflection.
Rock ignored.
I am a word in a foreign language.
In another poem, Darwish refers to the planet as “squeezing” displaced people, alluding to how they are being squeezed go out from anywhere.This leads to myths and memories of homelessness and homelessness However get. Darwish wrote:
For our home, we only see what is invisible: our mystery.
Perhaps as the poet Eliot said, “A man’s destination is not his destiny”, because in the poetry of displacement, the destination turns out to be another stop on an endless journey. They lived in makeshift shelters and camps, the latter of which is made famous by Primo Levi’s poem “The Survivor,” the speaker of which told his former cellmates nightmare.
Camps, like hotels in Marianne Moore’s Silence, “are not lodgings,” even if they constitute a lifetime of nightmares and never-ending anxieties about home. Elie Wiesel sums up his camp experience in which the stove representing the home was replaced by “hellfire” (“the massacre”):
I will never forget that cigarette.
I will never forget the little faces of the children I saw their dead bodies
Turned into smoke under the silent sky
From these camps, displaced persons can never achieve the status and stability of home. Therefore, people yearn for stability, first for home and then for home. The last words on the impossibility of home must be Darwish’s:
Where should we go after the final frontier?
Where should the birds fly after the last sky?
(The author is Professor of English at the University of Hyderabad and a UNESCO Chair in Fragility Studies, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society)