Home Is Where

& what is it?

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Nomadland, Chloé Zhao (2020)

After waiting to watch Nomadland for many, many months, I finally got a chance to be still with it a few weekends ago. It was worth the wait. I love Chloé Zhao’s work primarily because I find it so uncomfortable. Her attention to discomfort (the way she stylizes the prickliness of life layered under the roaring windswept landscapes she captures) is drawn out with such strange delicacy. The tempo of her filmmaking makes me feel like I’m being lightly tickled by the steel slight point of a knife. I watch her films always awaiting a jolt and a jab, knowing I will be engulfed by the simultaneous tension of beauty and rage.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to have a home, and above all Nomadland wrestles with the thematic of belonging in such a masterful way. Without ever speaking to loneliness, Zhao shows it so clearly—through the expanse of country, through the sparseness of the lands. It’s not a perfect film, but there are subtleties that felt necessary to witness—especially now—the realities of life for those who don’t have a choice when it comes to freedom over security. Some of us would much rather die than to not live our lives on our own terms.

Yet, home as a motif is the eternal nostalgia that I am (and many of us are) governed by. I am an extremely longing individual. Above all, I want to belong to people, to a community, to a partner, but ironically this has been where I’ve met some of my biggest challenges; to attain a home and all that that means. So, to see that onscreen, to grapple with the kind of space that is left in oneself/life when home is an abstract term, felt like a momentous reflection during these dark times.

*

I think a lot about my father dying. At the top of last year, the first covid death I heard of was a former lover’s best friend’s dad. There seemed to be a long and protracted conversation about whether or not the friend would be able to go and bury her dad, they lived in different cities and this was during the time, early in lockdown, when flying was very prohibited. Looking back, I remember thinking and rethinking how my dad lives alone in a country that doesn’t want him. I think of how far he is from any kind of comfort and how hard that is for me to bear. But, not so ironically, I, too, am all alone in a country that doesn’t want me. As we sit between two oceans and a continent, I wonder what would happen if he was to suddenly die. Or if I was to suddenly die. What would happen to our bodies? Who would wash them clean and do our last rites? Would I be buried in a Muslim graveyard? Where would he be returned home to?

These things have meaning and consequence and all of a sudden I think I have always felt as if I was lost at sea, a person that is landless in so many different dimensions. But to write about the borderlands, the hinterlands of being, is also to envision a life outside of the borders. So these days I’m embracing that there other ways to describe being outside of limitation.

I broke my family apart when I said no to my mother. That was my fault. I carry that with me every day and I yet I no longer feel grief about it, or shame about it, just an understanding that I chose myself, and that was the first act of committing to making a home of my own. At the same time, my actions have left all of us, including my mother, in disarray. A family that has no-one, barely sometimes each other, and yet all of us wanting so desperately to just be loved. That’s something everyone in my family has in common, we just want to be loved. Except I don’t think children can make up for the love their parents didn’t get. I tried.

*

I did not have a home that was mine until I was twenty-nine-years-old and only got it, ironically, after my longest (and potentially healthiest) partnership ended. I had always thought I’d marry my former partner. After doing long-distance for over a year (Montréal and New York) I immigrated to America in 2017 with his help. It made sense that, as his parents have a brownstone, that we both move into his family’s home in Bed Stuy, the home he was raised in. So we did. It was a very very big deal and it felt like my first real chance at a home. I felt as if I had made it and felt safe for the first time, maybe in my life. I loved his parents and was told that his mother had said she wanted to be the mother I never had. It felt like a real chance at something that was the closest thing that I ever had to stability, and I was so hungry for it. Almost entitled.

When my former partner and I decided to break up one of the hardest things to fathom was losing another home. The day I moved out of the brownstone and into my current apartment, the mosque shootings in New Zealand happened. Another unraveling layer was that I was also beginning the process of retrieving severe memories of incest and abuse. At the same time as this, I was being haunted by the concept of home and the unreality of what a home is to me. As in, the abstract notion of familiarity, of heirloom, of family, is so severed to me. I was suffocating in sadness, of losing my partner, my new family, and suddenly a physical home, too. The most beautiful home I’d ever had.

I sometimes feel like I’m a Frankenstein of hope wrapped up in the fear that I will never have a home to share because deep down I worry I’m unlovable. At times, I have felt cuckolded by that fear. I know rationally it’s untrue, but trauma likes to hurt.

*

I’m currently reading my beloved Safia Elhillo’s “Home Is Not A Country,” which is about so many things, but as I read it, gently absorbing each page, I keep returning back to this concept of the dislocation of the multiple selves. Nostalgia for a homeland is really just nostalgia for a place that is yours, a place that will accept all of you, all the conflicting parts that exist. But, in a deeper way, it’s also a longing to be connected to yourself, of your own depth, and all the things you know yourself to be but have no language for, forever grasping at the past and discriminating it to find answers. It’s that feeling of hauntology, of what good songs are made of, the concept of saudade, of melancholic incompleteness, of forever longing for a time outside of this. Of wanting the future to come quicker but still lingering in the past.

*

A close relative of mine is living out of their car as we speak. A lot of it is financial but it’s also because of a bad domestic situation so they’ve been living in their car for a couple of months now. Watching Nomadland I thought of what war has done to my family, but mainly what mental disease has done, and how that adds to unbelonging in all the ways. There is a massive burden in the choice to break a family by being the first to leave, the first one to say enough, to learn how to put up a boundary, block numbers, never reply back to emails, to look my mother in the eyes and say no more and mean it. The mental cost of creating a division between your spiritual and mental self versus what you know should be your family, your home, your first home, is heartbreaking. Some of us can’t choose our families, our homes, but some of us also have to learn how to say no to a home that can’t house you, how to speak up for yourself against the only possible home you might ever have. That’s always the first choice you make as a survivor—when you make the first choice for your freedom.

This last year, in slow moments when I find myself meditating over my life, I thank God that I’m not stuck at home with my mother during a pandemic. It gives me a reference to then think, and mourn, the collective grief of all the children, all the people, that are stuck at home with the people who abuse them.

*

I think what’s complicated with when I say I’m lonely is that loneliness is a conflicting state for me. In many ways, I prefer aloneness to most social encounters. I prefer my own mind and my own company but have also reached an adulthood where I also feel very nurtured by my friends. I am learning the language of asking, relying, needing, wanting—from people close to me. I’m forming new ways of being in myself.

Loneliness is a disposition more than it is a state to encounter. I think I was first borne in loneliness because it feels foundational for me. But, is that just inheriting trauma then? It’s important to bet on yourself, to have high standards despite once having none and learning what feels like home. When I was a teenager I was trained to help and aid homeless youth in Sydney. I’ll never forget one of the first things was to always, when approaching someone, to ask for their permission to talk and enter their space. As a sixteen-year-old, it gave me such incredible insight into home-making, how one creates and protects their home. It’s taken me years to get it, and maybe many more to actually actualize into it.

A couple of years ago I read The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls and have recently returned to the story, turning over what home means again and again. People want different things, that’s just the truth. Truth is, my relative wants to live in their car. When you’ve never had safety, you think of it in expansive ways. I thought I used to want a conventional life as well, but these days I just want peace and sometimes you have to fight your entire family to get it. Watching the Harry and Meghan interview I understood what Harry said when he said his father and brother are stuck. Yeah no shit, that what’s trauma will do to you, what inheriting the literal genesis of white supremacy will do. You’re telling me the main arm of colonization isn’t neck-deep in a very intense reckoning… this is just the beginning of a royal shift. Sometimes you’ve got to be the one to break your family. Sometimes getting a real home is destroying what you have and building anew.

In Carmen Maria Machado’s In The Dream House she interweaves a memoir of surviving an abusive relationship while constructing her tenuous “dream house” in her mind’s eye. But, as she points out so subtly, when you’ve experienced childhood trauma or abuse it creates limitations in your perception of what is good or right—meaning if the fairytales you were fed are poisonous, especially wrt violence, that when that same energetic violence is imposed onto you by a partner, sometimes replicating a parent, the dream house adapts and takes on the role you played as a child. She writes: “That my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine. That no space was truly private; anything of mind could be forfeited at someone else’s whim.” Some of us have to ruin our mental homes too, scratch all of it away, and start again, too.

*

I tell myself I have a poet’s sensibility. Longing to cure the ache of nostalgia of a time not yet known—but yearned for.

Whenever I travel I take mundane household items with me wherever I go so I don’t get homesick. When I used to visit my mother in Australia I’d have to prepare for weeks to pile in a suitcase all my favorite books, treasures, art, ceramics, notebooks, ink, tarot — all of it — to replicate my sense of home, knowing she would test my boundaries of safety. Living in a country where I’m still an illegal alien adds another sense of dislocation. Where am I wanted on an earthly plane? Where is my physical home? Last year, just before my tour with Like A Bird was to start, I wasn’t allowed back into New York from Lisbon because I’m not American. I had to eventually, after many many calls and emails to every embassy possible—that were all shut due to covid—fly to Montréal and quarantine before I could enter back to the only home I’d ever known. I felt so small after this experience that coincided with the release of a book that took eighteen years out of me. Half crazy, I had to do press and publicity, pretending like I wasn’t quietly going insane, I spoke about writing the first book I had written to survive my first supposed home.

There are no answers, only a desire to heal. As I write this, something small inside of me rises and reminds me at the very least, I’m here. In my body. Here, sitting at my laptop in Brooklyn. Today is another day I’m landing in myself, another day where I’m returning. I’m finally realizing the value of finding a home within yourself. How it’s ok that it looks big and small at the same time. Unseen and messy at the same time. It’s ok, I tell myself, to be in the process of becoming. Belonging takes time, but it feels good to rest and feel my backbone, my flesh squished against the chair and feel at home right here, right now.