by Sumita S. Chakravarty

Ideas of home and belonging– long a staple of migration as lived reality and structure of consciousness in that home is often defined in the very act of leaving it– have once again become food for thought during the coronavirus pandemic. One of the earliest impacts as institutions started to shut down in mid-March was the disruption that students felt across colleges and universities in the U.S. and elsewhere as they were asked to “go home.” Packing hurriedly, they headed to various destinations, either within the country or abroad as home countries recalled their citizens and closed their borders to foreigners/ non-citizens. Our classes moved online, and we resumed our teaching and learning from the safety of our own homes.

Nevertheless, a certain crumbling and pulling-back from what, for lack of a better term, had emerged as a “global society” could as easily be seen as the face of the future. There has been a lot of speculation over the last several weeks of what the “new normal” will look like. Already there are dire projections of the fall in enrollments across universities in the U.K., U.S. and Australia that have become heavily dependent on students from China. While much of these analyses are economic in nature, it is equally pertinent to wonder how culture itself can thrive, both in our classrooms and in society at large, without embodied presence and the closeness of personal connections.

As someone who has long been interested in shifting notions of belonging, I was curious to see how returning students experienced their sudden and unexpected reintegration into milieus that some had left years earlier, perhaps after high school. What did “home” look and feel like? Here are some reflections from my students, sent soon after they were asked to leave New York in mid-March. Meret returned to Switzerland and wrote:

“My last two weeks are characterized by so many changes.  I would never have expected to sit now at my table back home, walking through an empty Zurich (my hometown) and seeing my family. About a week ago, I started to wonder if I should go back home because the health systems of every country will care more about their citizens than about people from abroad.  As I wasn’t sure about this decision, I called a friend back home, who is the head of an important Swiss newspaper in order to ask how he sees the situation. It became quickly clear that going back home would be the safest option. For that reason, I booked a flight for the following day.

Since last Wednesday I am back home, which on the one side is completely normal and on the other side very strange. Since then, I installed my sewing machine and because I can’t really see my friend, I had a little sewing marathon throughout the past days while listening to the Italian music of my mom.

. . . I don’t feel overwhelmed and know that this also will pass. I do think that it feels quite natural to me because as a Jewish child I was always aware that life isn’t safe and that everything can change every moment. I remember that I always thought about what I would need to pack if war starts in order to have the most essential items with me and know it felt a little bit like that when I left New York. But of course, even though this is dramatic for everyone, I can’t complain because here in Switzerland we have a stable social system that supports us even in a crisis like this quite well.”

Serin and her brother left for Istanbul and as they flew home, “It felt like an apocalypse among the clouds.” She goes on to write, “The Turkish government issued a directive that all the passengers coming from Europe will be quarantined in university dorms for fourteen days, two days before we arrived. I was really afraid that they would quarantine us too, but thankfully we were only advised to be self-quarantined. I’ve never been home this early in the semester and never came home without knowing when I’m going to go back, maybe even if I’m going to be able to go back anytime soon.”

Carmen is from Singapore and had this to say, “A real struggle for me personally was dealing with the widespread fear, panic and racism that has sprouted from Covid-19 news. . . . I have remained in New York City as my hometown in Singapore is dealing with the virus more massively. It is also safer for members of my family if I do not come back and live in the same household. Singapore seems to be handling the virus much differently than the U.S. or U.K. with much more success that matches China’s timeline. There is more frustration in the U.S. because of the imperialistic, individualistic and capitalist nature of the West. My own frustration comes from the fact that China held back the virus for MONTHS so that other countries can begin preparing their infrastructure for when it reaches them. During this time, the leadership in the U.S. took precious time away from such preparation but rather pulled their energy to vilify China. It is definitely a bleak time in history and I hope that we can all get it together soon.”

Domestic U.S. students found the experience disruptive in different ways: many chose to stay in New York as they didn’t want to endanger their families, just as Carmen did. Many of them had lost their jobs and were either confined to very small apartments or faced the hardship of eviction. Still others who returned to their parents’ home in Miami or Detroit or Seattle felt a strange sense of disconnection as they readjusted to being surrounded by objects in their home that they felt they had outlived. For everyone ‘home’ meant something different because they had changed. But, as a student, Nicole, wrote wisely, “But even through all of this negativity there has come positivity that helps to give everyone hope that these dark times will be over and bring about something much better. There has been news of the decrease in air pollution in areas of China and water pollution in Italy. Social distancing and quarantine have brought families together and small acts of kindness have been shared through strangers. Sometimes hard situations can bring out the best in people. I feel like this is somewhat of a reboot or update of the world where society will come out of this more united and with different perspectives on life.”

There are many other reflections that give us glimpses of the inner landscapes shaped by the coronavirus pandemic. This one from Simone is particularly poignant in capturing the paradoxes of belonging and non-belonging. Simone is from Denmark, but as we see, she is from many other places as well. “Oddly enough, this (the pandemic) hit hard but in a very unexpected place. The lack of knowing and being sure was of course a concern of mine and many others, but the main alteration was that I felt completely lonely. I have thankfully never been lonely in my life before, but during this experience I have come to feel a sense of being lonely and lost that scared me.

Lonely in where I was – New York in a new apartment with a new roommate who fled to Vermont the second her job started working online. With all my friends vanished out of the city to each of their homes (mainly the US).

Lonely in terms of where I could be, my many homes, Los Angeles, Perugia (Italy) and Paris (France) – places of distant loves in people, memories, places, foods, and languages. All of which have closed borders and no homes that can facilitate me in times of crisis. Not a true belonging I assume.

Lonely from my “true home” – my original home with my parents, my nationality, my upbringing. Where grandparents live close by whom I could potentially endanger by coming home into a country of self-quarantines and closed cities. Not being able to see the friends I have kept in contact with over the years and that I long for so dearly. Being there and not being able to physically prove to people and myself that I am in that country, since it is a rarity. And the fact that it would be the longest period of time over the last 3 years that I’ve been in Denmark. Furthermore, the longest period in a long time of having to live in my parents’ home. That no longer is mine.”

A similar kind of estrangement awaited us as we moved our classes online. Although in the highly mediated and technology-driven world of higher education, the turn to distance learning has seemed like a viable option, the promise of a seamless transition from physical to virtual classroom is hardly guaranteed. Much has been written over the past several weeks since social distancing and lockdown came into effect about the conveniences as well as the challenges of conducting (and receiving) instruction online, so I will not go into them here. My own experience with my students, now scattered in different time zones, was mixed: on the one hand, our Zoom meetings reconstituted the classroom and provided students with some sense of community, albeit through audio and video links. The initial challenges were mostly technological: an overburdened internet in my area in central New Jersey would often “pause” or “freeze” our conversations, as connectivity ebbed and flowed. For some students, questions of access to wi-fi now that school was closed became an issue, for normally they used the institution’s computer labs and internet. Frustrated, some dropped out of class entirely, although I heard from them via email and we somehow managed to keep the instruction going. For others, particularly those who lived in one of the New York boroughs, the loss of jobs and consequent struggle to pay rent completely took over, compounding concerns over health and exposure to the virus. As faculty we have been asked to be flexible and accommodating of student needs, and that has meant being open to a range of situations for which there is no playbook. Confined to our rooms or home offices, we simulate “presence” and encouragement as best we can.

For one of my classes, though, in which we have been exploring the meanings of technology, responses to the pandemic offered a living laboratory to study technologically mediated life on a global scale. As workplaces, doctor’s offices, conferences and meetings, recreational activities, family gatherings, and upcoming graduation ceremonies have moved online, we have ample opportunity to test our theories and our affordances. At no time perhaps has digital technology played such a crucial part in maintaining a semblance of normality after the initial shift to self- or mandated isolation. All the old fears about technology ruling our lives and the countermanding visions of technology harnessed to social good have coalesced in one tense historical moment.

Our new reality has also given a new turn to our notions of “home” and “belonging.” At its most fundamental, we are realizing that we all have a stake in the well-being of planet earth, our primal home. In my “Photography and the Other” class, a student is comparing pre- and post-Covid-19 images of air and sky, of beaches and oceans to signal changes that many have reported, and that can lead to a cautious hope of what might be. On a more somber note, another student is building her project on the juxtaposition of the state of health care in New York (despite the early dire reports of under-preparedness) and Guayaquil in Ecuador which is the hardest hit town in Latin America and where she has relatives. She points to the fact that while “we are all in this crisis together,” economic and other disparities cannot be overlooked. Many, however, are looking closer to home, seeing their surroundings and their families with fresh eyes, with feelings of both appreciation and alienation.

As thousands of videos, poems, reflections, and memes about life during this pandemic are shared from across the globe, making sense of which will take several years, will we also remind ourselves of the need for community, the room with a view of the outside, the otherness at the very heart of belonging? Or, as the British cultural scholar Raymond Williams wrote in an entirely different context of a time, now seemingly so distant, when European theater (he mentions Ibsen) first recorded a sense of the outside moving in, and down to our own time; “at home, in our own lives, but needing to watch what is happening, as we say, “out there”: not out there in a particular street or a specific community, but in a complex and otherwise unfocused and unfocusable national and international life, where our area of concern and apparent concern is unprecedentedly wide, and where what happens on another continent can work through to our own lives in a matter of days and weeks–in the worst image, in hours and minutes” (Raymond Williams on Television, 1989: 6).

In a similar way, this pandemic is fostering reflection on the importance of community as we struggle with isolation, on the interconnectedness of inside and outside, of the virtual and the physical. From the confines of their homes, artists of all persuasions are reaching out to a global audience, as shown in this image of the live gala (and there have been numerous others) held by the Metropolitan Opera in New York City on April 24th in which over forty singers and musicians from eighty different countries performed their signature pieces.

In our Zoom meetings, the simulated classroom provided my students with the community they had created and to which they also belonged. “Home’ and ‘belonging’ are as much matters of the heart and mind as they are definitions of the body. It would be disastrous if the coronavirus, having deprived us of so much in terms of lives and livelihoods, should confine us to our homes and home countries for the foreseeable future.