Concept: Home

Definition: 

(noun) 
1. the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.
2. belonging to, center of affection, refuge, rest, satisfaction (OED).

Related Terms: belonging; domesticity; habitus; homeland.

Description: ‘Home’ is perhaps the idea most charged with emotion in immigrant and migrant stories. It is also the most contradictory. On the one hand, the loss of home (and homeland) makes nostalgia the dominant mode in much immigrant writing and cinema; on the other, the desire to build or own a new home in a new place is shown to be fraught with danger, even hubris. In A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), Carribean-British writer V. S. Naipaul uses dark humor to portray immigrant characters whose hopes of climbing into the middle-class are symbolized through the protagonist’s pathetic attempts to build a sturdy house. An Iranian immigrant character’s dream of owning a home in Los Angeles turns into a nightmare in the Hollywood film, House of Sand and Fog (2003).

Confined domestic spaces often denote the loneliness and isolation of immigrant characters, particularly women. Attachment to memories of an ‘original’ home are conveyed through objects such as family photos, artifacts, and other minutiae. But the domestic sphere can also suggest intra-family cultural clashes, as typically a man from a society that subjugates wives to husbands seeks to impose those values on his spouse who wants to adopt the host country’s way of life.

The immigrant other can also be placed outside the home. In the European film, Caché (Hidden, 2005), a series of videos are mysteriously left outside the door of an affluent French couple. Later events suggest a connection with an Algerian adoptee who was abandoned to the margins of French society by the main characters.

‘Home’ as provisional for migrant laborers is the motif in the Malaysian film, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2007). Here, ‘home’ is a dingy place in a seedy neighborhood and symbolized by a mattress which three characters share by the end of the film in a kind of silent affirmation of their displaced lives.

The ‘homeland’ is a more murky entity than ‘home’ in the migrant fictional universe. It is typically a psychic or memory-space, conveyed through dream-sequences and flashbacks in films and through evocations of value-systems in writing.

S.C. 2016

“Home is a barbarous idea; the method of a rude age; home is isolation; therefore anti-social. What we want is community.”

— Benjamin Disraeli, in his Home (in the British imperial imagination), commemorating the landscape of country lanes and small cottages.