Am I home yet? Is my tenure as a guest a welcome one? I’ll let you know when the salmon tell me. — from Am I Home Yet? (July 2021)
One can construct all the housing in the world and never make a home, which is a place where not just people but the memory of belonging dwells—of belonging to oneself and to the earth, as well as to others. —from Homeward
Ownership and belonging are not the same, and undoing the confusion between these two concepts is a necessary and urgent task for our time. As others have said, “Decolonization in many ways is an inversion: land does not belong to us; rather, we belong to it.” —from Getting Over Guthrie, quoting Syed Khalid Hussan in Undoing Border Imperialism
I have a working theory about how a place becomes home. Its primary tenet is this: a place is home—somewhere one belongs—when its problems come to feel like your own. They’re not outside of yourself; they’re not other people’s problems to be handled by someone else. They’re yours. You may, in fact, come to have a kind of love for those very problematic things, even as they remain only ugly or troubling to those who do not experience that place with similar feelings of belonging.
I once walked underneath a dripping underpass in Chicago on a cold night, past a large pile of bags full of garbage, and had my heart fill with warmth. It was, at that time, my adopted city; the place where I expected to find myself many decades down the road. I had left once, then twice, and come back both times; the second with the intent to stay forever, as far I was concerned. It’s a complicated story as to how that didn’t quite turn out. But on that particular night, my future dislocation as yet unknown, I remember smiling as I said out loud—“Oh Chicago, look at you. What are we going to do?”
I didn’t see the trash as someone else’s trash—though obviously, it was, so far as I’m aware. And I didn’t see it as a reason to either dislike or abandon this place that I loved. My question wasn’t about what they—that nebulous grouping we blame for the common intransigent problems that happen in society—were going to do. It wasn’t even what I was going to do. No, the question that came out of my mouth constructed a “we” to which I belonged: What are we going to do?
Maybe I was just reading too much Nelson Algren at the time, making it easy to find the romance in the grittiness. My favorite bartender at the neighborhood dive where I was a regular was just then helping edit a new edition of Algren’s Chicago: City on the Make; it was easy to feel connected to the longer story and long history of the down-and-out parts of town. But I don’t think that feeling of warmth was just some young person’s dramatic, beer-fueled projection of excitement onto the difficult and mundane. I think it came from a real feeling of connection and belonging, one grounded in a sense of shared responsibility. There were things to be taken care of, and we—the people who found our home in this particular place—would need to take care of them.
Some time about four or five years after I left Chicago for a third and much longer time, when I still believed I was on a trajectory to eventually find my way back there, I began to panic. I would read about this or that event from the city in the news, and discover that I felt relatively little emotion about the matter, or wasn’t inclined to dig into the issue to learn more about it, as had been my norm. I knew my connection to the place, my sense of Chicago as home, was becoming deeply frayed. Was it at risk of being cut altogether? I felt the fear of impending loss. How long is too long to be away from one’s home?
And if that is lost, and you find yourself in freefall—how does one ever come to be at home again?
In my meanderings over the last couple years, I have been checking in with many of those places that have, at some point, been home. I wrote previously about returning to the city of my youth, to see if I still belonged to it. The answer there was complicated: there was much to learn in retracing the footpaths I traveled as a child, and I grew many friendships during my time there, but I kept feeling called away. So away I went.
And this last summer I went back to the Midwest, and to Chicago, and walked the neighborhoods I used to walk in my twenties with the very people I used to walk with, and whom I still care for very much. This was another set of curious retracings. It’s a strange experience to be able to see clearly how your own life might easily have played out, had you made only one or two different choices, and to view your own absence in that path’s current unfolding. Here are the events I’d be attending if I still lived here… here’s the kind of house I might have lived in had that person and I not moved away, and stayed together… here are the people and groups and causes I’d be supporting… But the truth remained—I had stayed away too long, and that sense of belonging to the city that was once my home was not refound. Even my requisite conversations with Lake Michigan did not revive it; the lake seemed distracted, busy with other people, too full and irritatedly splashing high up over the rocks meant to keep it from pouring into the city. If anything could have called me back, it would be have been the lake. Instead, the visit served as something of a personal reconciliation. Here’s the life that I might have had—and it’s okay that I don’t have it.
I’d like to write the story of how I came to exactly the place where I am living now, with the belief that the kind of belonging I once felt and lived out in Chicago could be had here, in this other very different place. I’m still sussing out what feels most truthful to say; it feels early to make any certain claim. And I remain childishly superstitious about the potential for jinxing the whole situation by talking too loudly about it before it finishes setting, and all the little building blocks of life gel more firmly together. It’s one thing to send friends a new address, another to proclaim it to the whole internet that I’ve found it. Home.
What gives me the right, anyhow? Or any of us, to the places we would claim?
I think one is often in good standing if starting not from the position of claiming a place, but of letting a place claim you. It’s not a subject-object relation, in which there’s an I enacting ownership over the object that is a city or land or community. It’s an intersubjective kind of relationship—that “we” again.
To bring it back to my working theory: is one part of the “we” who professes belonging to the very flaws of a place, to its problems? Where what troubles you isn’t some outside entity to attack, but rather, quite possibly, part of what constitutes your own self, because you do not see yourself as existing separately from the broader place—the land and the people and what they have built upon it and the many other beings dwelling there as well—but see yourself bound up in all these things?
I don’t know if I’m yet at the ‘surprisingly warm feelings for garbage below the underpass’ stage of things here. I do know that I’ve made it through one of the things many people find most difficult, which is the persistent smoke from wildfires that can occur during the summer. Until rain washed up the West Coast last week, regional blazes had been keeping all those dots on the air quality maps quite red and even deep purple for a couple weeks. I could have felt any number of things with the arrival of this year’s smoke. Dread. Climate anxiety. Resentment. Fear. But rather than experiencing a desire to rush for the coast (as many often do here), or making plans to move to Vermont (as some have also done), I found myself mostly attending to the practicality of it all. Checking the seals on the windows, pulling out the better N95s. Packing extras to offer to those who might need one. That last part already an indication that, although I’m new here, I might be part of a ‘we’ facing these challenges together, not alone.
Many people these days opt into the individualist vision of life, in which collective problems are to be locked out at the front gate, be it the rusty iron outside a fading brick walk-up or the automated and heavy gates of the very wealthy. My theory produces an interesting conclusion—namely, that these people are not truly at home anywhere, regardless of level of comfort or length of residence in a particular locale.
On the one hand, this might seem absurd to suggest; on the other, quite obvious. Consumerist culture treats a home as though it’s something you can purchase, starting with a deed and followed by a set of objects whose acquisition never ends, with the need to get ‘just the right piece’ or to upgrade or to replace all the little things whose obsolescence was planned in their design. The ‘we’ here becomes only one’s immediate family and their possessions, to be protected from the messy others out there in the world. It’s a vision of home that actively destroys community and deeper belonging. It’s also possibly the norm in this country, meaning a great many people lack a deeper experience of home even when they have a roof over their head (yet another reason to avoid the phrase ‘the homeless,’ for those forced to sleep rough, who may lack shelter but actually be more intimately acquainted with where they really live).
I wrestle with my own proclivities around all of this, which include tendencies toward closing windows and grumbling whenever anything remotely noisy is happening outside. I understand desires to shut the world out. But I also know that porosity, and the softening of borders, is what allows some sense of belonging to subtly grow, so that one day you find yourself part of a ‘we’ with the actual capacity to address the issues looming beyond the front door—and find yourself home in so many ways you might have never known.
Am I home yet? If home really is this intersubjective state of belonging, requiring a collective, I’m not the only one who can answer that question. But I’ve reason to believe I’m at least on the path towards an answer. The hills and mountains, whom I have gone to consult, seem open to conversation; that’s a promising start. We’ll see what the following years have to conclude.