Seeking HomeVignettes of Homes and HomingAmina ElHalawani

Vignette 1: Scenes from Salt of this Sea12

Salt of this Sea is a film which poetically packages difficult questions of belonging, of home, of loss, of trauma in a series of reduced or concentrated images both beautiful and painful. Annemarie Jacir’s film demonstrates the tension embedded in (re)visiting Palestine for those in the diaspora, and how one constructs an image of home, as well as how one faces a place of which one has no firsthand experience but through inherited narrative memory. Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian-American poet, author, and political activist, plays the lead role in Jacir’s film, Soraya, whose story in fact resembles very much Hammad’s own.

The casting of Hammad in this role is significant. Hammad, who was born in Amman Jordan to Palestinian parents, travelled to Brooklyn, New York with her parents when she was five, and through the film both actress and character encounter their homeland firsthand for the first time.1313Hammad wrote her poetry collection breaking poems (New York: Cypher Books) after this experience. It is an encounter, though, with a place they already know!

In one scene from Salt of this Sea, Soraya is sitting with Emad, the Palestinian she meets and becomes friends with in Ramallah, on top of a hill, The landscape sprawls beneath them while they look all the way towards Jaffa and the sea. As Emad gestures to Soraya where Jaffa is, she in turn accurately describes the city and her grandparents’ daily routine:

Soraya: My grandfather swam in that sea every morning, then he’d walk on Al Helwa Street to reach Al Tawfiqiya library, then on to Al Nuzha Street. Cars weren’t allowed to pass on Al Nuzha. The orange traders — Jaffa oranges — met at Al Salahi market. My grandfather always talked about the Al Madfa Café: Umm Kulthum sang there, and Farid al-Atrash. My grandmother really loved Farid. Sometimes, my grandparents went to the cinema. The Hamra Cinema. When they were broke, they’d wait by the side door and the doorman would sneak everyone in. Have you ever been there?

Emad: Are you sure you’ve never been?

Soraya’s narrative of Jaffa is not one of a simple fixed place but rather of a lived space, full of movement, itineraries, and experiences. It reveals a complex understanding of space in practice, as constantly produced as it is being experienced or lived, a space in which the real and the symbolic intertwine and which is based on a ‘trialectics of being’: ‘spatiality’, ‘historicality’, and ‘sociality’.1414Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Spaces (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 70–71. According to Henri Lefebvre, social space is made up of complex relations between three levels of experiencing it, which Soja identifies as: perceived space, conceived space, and lived space. Building on Lefebvre’s triads, Edward Soja conceptualizes his idea of third space, as a space where ‘[e]verything comes together’: ‘subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history’ (pp. 56–57). Soraya’s grandfather’s walks of Jaffa draw out the city, not as a concept, not from above, but as spatialized utterance. In comparing walking to speech acts, Michel de Certeau considers pedestrian activity as a three-fold ‘enunciative act’: ‘a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian […], it is a spatial acting-out of the place […]; and it implies relations among differentiated positions, that is, among pragmatic “contracts” in the form of movements.’1515Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 98–99. Within this narrative, the freedom of movement of Saraya’s grandfather was not only allowed, but a certain ownership of place was practiced.

On the other hand, as Carol Fadda-Conrey points out, Soraya draws for us ‘a narrative map of her grandparents’ Jaffa’, one that ‘link[s] her life to a history that she feels she has missed’ even though she has not in fact experienced it except through ‘ancestral memories and stories’.1616Carol Fadda-Conrey, Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging (New York: New York University Press, 2014), p. 96. It is exactly at that moment in the film that Emad recounts his confinement and frustration, his experience of borders creating a tension with the free uninterrupted landscape they are in. Emad is sitting on top of a hill, looking into the horizon all the way to Jaffa and the sea, and yet is unable to navigate this ‘open’ landscape due to the enforcement of checkpoints and restrictions based on his identity. This juxtaposition of the ability to travel through inherited memory to Jaffa (so in a way through imagination) and the inability to experience it firsthand, is an example of the characters’ continuous active confrontation with the material conditions of what they consider to be home.

In this particular frame, however, the camera pans out and exposes the open landscape sprawling towards the sea, posing no real barriers, but rather positioning them at the edge, at a threshold, which, if surpassed, would reconcile them with their past and allow them to reclaim their freedom in the present, a quest they decide to subversively undertake over the course of the film: to discover the land which they consider to be theirs but from which they are barred.

In this still frame from Salt of this Sea (Figure 1), the gaze of the camera through a car window, the refracted images and mirroring along with the close up on Soraya’s face, bring us closer to understanding that what we are getting is a very personal, even visceral experience of the story. Soraya’s face/body is made to merge with the territory it is trying to reclaim as its own. Over the course of this journey, the film plots out a map of traumas where Emad gets to visit whatever ruins are left of his village of Dawayima and Soraya gets to visit her grandparents’ very house in Jaffa right by the sea.

Soraya’s encounter with her ancestral home is overwhelming. The encounter is reminiscent of lines from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish dedicated to Edward Said. Set as a dialogue, the speaker, probably Darwish himself, asks Said what it was like to go back to his home in Jerusalem, while the voice of Said in the poem responds: ‘I could not meet loss face | to face. I stood by the door like a beggar. | How could I ask permission from strangers sleeping in my own bed?’.1717Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading’, trans. by Mona Anis, Cultural Critique, 67 (2007), pp. 175–82 (p. 180) <https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2007.0026>. Likewise, finding her grandparents’ house already inhabited by someone else makes Soraya sick. Though the current owner invites them in, Soraya cannot make peace with the fact that her grandfather was never compensated for the loss that he and his family had to endure, accusing the current owner of the house of stealing her family’s home as they were forced to leave. In the following frame in the film Soraya breaks down by the sea. And while the dream of capturing home diminishes — as only memories survive in the form of waves which enact the whispers of those who lived there, of those who left, memories that are impossible to grasp because of their fluidity — the house itself and its tiled floors stand witness to its original owners. Nonetheless, the confrontation with the material structure of the house is only a confirmation of Soraya’s loss of what she identified as home. The imagined is lost with the encounter of the real and the narratives of her grandfather’s house are now complemented if not overwritten by her own very painful encounter with its loss.

An equally moving scene is that in which Emad and Soraya embark on a process of homemaking in Dawayima, the village that was razed to the ground, and where Emad originally comes from.

In this scene, an attempt to reclaim what was lost is enacted through the simple actions of spreading a bedcover to sleep on and hanging a picture on the wall with the word home on it, almost akin to how a prop changes the setting immediately and magically in theatre, even if for a moment.1818I’d like to thank Manuele Gragnolati for the interesting conversations we had about this scene in particular. The contrast between the act of homemaking and the violence inherent in the image of the ruins of the village provides a moving encounter with a past that intersects so viscerally with the present only to remind the characters of their perpetual loss (Figure 2). And yet it allows for that fleeting moment of homing to occur: in this moment, the past (they light a candle for the dead), the present (they hang a picture, make a bed, put up a curtain even, and plant something in the garden), and the future (where they sit and dream of what they would do if they lived there or rather what they would have done if the present was different) set home as a notion apart from time, as a place where temporalities converge.

These moments of homing are brief, however, vignette-like, real enough, and yet elusive in contrast to the reality in which they live.

Vignette 2: From John Hughes’s The Idea of Home

John Hughes is an Australian writer whose maternal grandparents travelled from Ukraine to Australia fleeing the Second World War. And while his book The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays presents itself as a set of essays, its subtitle gives away its own subjective trajectory and reveals that these essays are in fact ‘autobiographical’ — hence, highly personal.

The depiction of houses in Hughes’s text, especially his mother’s obsession with the basement, sheds light on how houses home people and objects rather than just ‘house’ them:

The basement is the memory of the house. It expands though its walls remain fixed. In truth, it makes a mockery of walls. […] My mother has no time for walls. She refuses to allow them to get in the way.1919Hughes, The Idea of Home, p. 52.

The basement walls in Hughes’s text expand to accommodate objects that Hughes’s mother either keeps collecting or refuses to throw away, so that the structure of the house explodes beyond the contours of its designated space because of the mother’s act of compulsive accumulation of objects which outgrows the storage space.

According to Casey,

Built places […] are extensions of our bodies. They are not just places, as the Aristotelian model of place as a strict container implies, in which these bodies move and position themselves. Places built for residing are rather an enlargement of our already existing embodiment into an entire life-world of dwelling. Moreover, thanks to increasingly intimate relationships with their material structures, the longer we reside in places, the more bodylike they seem to be […] they become places created in our own bodily image.2020Casey, Getting Back into Place, p. 120.

The analogy between the basement and memory is central, thus, because it nods to a layering of narratives and a constant resurfacing of that which lies forgotten, perhaps repressed within the body of the house, which represents an extension of the bodies of its inhabitants.

For Hughes, the objects his mother hoards are a means of turning the house into a home, a means of creating belonging, a process of homing, despite having ‘no interest in what she collects’.2121Hughes, The Idea of Home, p. 67.

Her collecting is an act of rescue: all the unwanted, unloved, broken, bargain, superseded things of the world are, if not redeemed by her keeping, at least given a home. They belong. And there can never be enough.2222Ibid., pp. 67–68.

Despite the process of boxing or repressing these items to lay forgotten, on a deeper level the mother’s refusal to get rid of objects from their past, their childhood, etc., as well as her compulsion to continue homing ‘other people’s junk’, may resemble a more complex desire to both remember and forget by burying these items indiscriminately in the basement, never to be disturbed.2323Ibid., p. 67. ‘Once the object is put in the basement it need never be visited again. Forgotten, it is at peace.’2424Ibid., p. 70.

As Hughes points out, however, even though his mother never intended these objects to resemble a legacy, when she dies, someone will have to sort through them, remember them, in a way archive them, as Hughes himself is now recalling all the stories of his grandfather in this very book upon the knowledge of his loss. ‘That is the curse of objects, and their beauty I suppose: they keep the past alive and they guarantee the future, straddling the present like a bridge.’2525Ibid., p. 59. The boxes his mother stores in the basement and beyond, like his grandmother’s recipes which he received during his PhD years in England, ‘bridge’ temporalities and geographies. These recipes of home cooking link Hughes’s present in England with his family’s present in Australia and their past in Ukraine. They take him home, which like the basement defies walls, borders, and geographies, and is only graspable through association and affect.

I will not dwell on that further and would like to instead look at an episode in the book in which, unlike Soraya who could sketch a narrative map of Jaffa, Hughes confesses that he knows very little of his family history, beyond what his grandfather was willing to share. According to Hughes, a continual project of forgetting haunted his grandfather’s life. Erasure was actively sought to cope with the interminable process of homemaking, which manifested in his grandfather’s obsession with building houses.

Hughes’s grandfather continuously built houses but ‘he treated them like tents’.2626Ibid., p. 50. As soon as he finished a building project, he would start the next to the extent that the family would not need to make a trek across town to move from the old house to the new one, because the new project would be housed on the plot of land next door.2727Ibid., pp. 49–50. Every time he finished a building project, he would start a new one, a relentless endeavour of starting anew, of becoming, of defying fixation and walls through creating structures that are continuously denied to house memory, constantly denied to become home.

My family knew the houses themselves would last forever; knew, too, that each, for them, was just another transit camp. There could be no attachment. Before they’d even settled my grandfather would sit at the dining table drawing plans for the next move.2828Ibid., p. 50.

Hughes’s grandfather’s building endeavour is ultimately a continuous project of homemaking and unmaking, in which the family is not allowed to settle into a state of being but is constantly forced to move, and restart the process of appropriating their dwelling place and forming new relations to it. Home becomes a continuously moving trajectory in this context.

In continual search for a feeling of home, Hughes is fascinated by his family’s almost mythical journey during the Second World War in which they walked from Kiev to Naples, where they boarded a ship to Australia. In an attempt to recreate their journey, he decides to retrace their route by train but this time from Naples to Kiev, as if through retracing his family’s footsteps before their exile, he would be able to conjure something of that memory which was forever lost to him. His encounter with the city of Naples, in his hands a map drawn by his grandfather which he fails to follow because it does not concord with reality, makes him realize his own fascination with the imagined over the real space: ‘I preferred maps to reality and words to actions.’2929Ibid., p. 169. His family journey could only be relived in his imagination. He writes:

When I returned to Naples the unreality of the city hit me with a force even stronger than my first experience of it. I realised then, as I should have realised two years before, that the journey could only ever be imaginary for me. My journey had nothing whatsoever to do with war, or exile, or survival. By retracing my family’s steps I would erase them one by one until all I was left with would be a list of names [of cities and train stations] like the one I had outlined above.3030Ibid., p. 171.

Hughes then decides to cancel his plan because ‘[He does not] want the past to change’.3131Ibid., p. 173. The only means by which he could own these places would be to not encounter them at all. Without an encounter with the reality of those cities, Hughes would be able to keep intact his imagined construction of them, which otherwise would shatter in the face of experiencing such spaces firsthand. At another occasion in the book, for example, Hughes writes of how sharing the photographs of his visit to Kiev with his grandfather ‘stung in a way [Hughes] never fully realised. They destroyed Kiev (for him) [his grandfather] as effectively as the Germans did’.3232Ibid., p. 24. For Hughes’s grandfather, those stories destroyed the possibility of affectively reconstructing a memory of the place at the time when he left. In this view, to encounter the space anew would be to destroy its memory, and thus destroy the perpetual longing for what it represented or is constructed to represent.

Grasping Home

Home in these narratives is constructed not only out of places or houses but in the meanings that they carry. Home may be emplaced but is not spatially bound by its very walls. Bodies home houses as much as houses home people. As such, home in both cases signals to something that lies beyond its very structure. Grasping it is made both difficult and possible because of the fact that it is itself a reduction caught up in a complicated entanglement between the past, the present, and the future, which allows it to only be captured in fragments or vignettes, be they stories, objects, or lived moments of getting close or veering towards it but never really catching it. In other words, there is always something very elusive about home, and in these two works, we can never really be home or rather reach home, we can only get almost there…