Sunday, October 2, 2011

homing: a prelude



What is home?

If you were asked to describe home to someone for whom that concept was completely alien, what would your answer be? What words would you string together in a sentence, a phrase, if you were asked to articulate the human meaning of home?

“What does home mean to you?”

This is a question I have been asking people across Australia for the last five years
, first as a PhD scholar, where I spoke at length with a group of young people whose experiences of homelessness had seen them hopping from one temporary, insecure living arrangement to another. These were teenagers and people in their early twenties who, for months and even years, lived between multiple ‘roofs’ but never once could feel that they had a ‘home’. Second, and more recently, I have been asking this question in my capacity as a housing researcher and social scientist, going out across Australia and interviewing  people living with physical and intellectual disabilities, some with chronic and terminal illnesses, people struggling with mental illness or drug addiction, people who have been homeless, and some people who have been so badly assaulted that their short term memories have all but evaporated.

For many of those I have spoken with, experiences of finding appropriate housing have been vexed by all kinds of barriers that seem unimaginable at first. When people share with me how they eventually found a ‘place to call home', it is in essence the story of their entire lives. These stories speak, always, of having tread the weary landscape of a long and often tragically unforgiving odyssey. And when in the course of the interview you are told, time and again, that you are the first person who has ever taken the care to listen to the story of that odyssey, you cannot help but feel honoured and at the same time, shot through by a sudden sadness. And you realise then how precious and fragile and wonderful this is, to bear witness to the opening up of someone’s story about home. Stories that had for all this time been lost to invisibility and the tyranny of isolation.

Over the past five years, I have somehow become the keeper of those stories. Without even particularly choosing the path, it has become ‘my thing’ to unravel, in simple conversation with others, the most fundamental meanings of home. And in doing so, to be given the most intimate, often heartbreaking, insight into people’s struggle against its absence. You come to know this from the first moment you are shown around a person’s home with pride, and told of how someone’s life has been transformed by the smallest of spaces, the most humble of little details. By the peace and quiet they have now, by no longer having to live in boarding houses where witnessing stabbings on the stairwell is par for the course. Or by the fact that at last someone can live in a house where they can reach the kitchen cupboards, use the toaster, or do their own washing without calling in a carer, because their house has been designed from the ground up by a wheelchair user; by someone who understands what they need. Or, perhaps, you catch an essential glimmer of home in someone's eyes, when the person you’re speaking with says they're 'at home' now because they can finally unpack their belongings and not worry about where they are going to find another place to sleep tomorrow. Yes, after a while of being the keeper of these tales, it is not hard to get an idea of what home truly means. 

Having some form of home is essential to life, foundational to biology itself. It can, in equal measures, be something that is taken for granted and longed for. Home, for many, is built of idealisms and hope. It embodies the search for safety, for acquisition and investment, for ownership and security of self and place. It has become the core basis for family, reproduction and social mobility (and divides). Homes in reality can also be anything but home at all. They can be places and sites of hidden violence, of being homelesss under a roof. Homes can be built as much on unsustainable decadence as on the dinginess of neglect and decay. Home is also fundamentally tied to housing, and with that the trappings and responsibilities of property. From these material foundations, we take the ride of the bubbles and the busts; our search for home acting as the powerful generator of market demands, driven on by the tides of fortunes and dreams. And at the same time, through all these ebbs and flows, home speaks constantly and most directly to the heart of human desire. It speaks of (and for, and with) what are a set of deep and inviolable needs.

To understand the human meaning of home is, I would hazard to say, a gateway to understanding what it is to be 'us'.

Of course, it makes sense that I have become so invested in this questioning of home. My interest (or obsession, perhaps) with the essence of home goes back much further than my time spent of late as a housing researcher. It goes back beyond even my PhD journey of the past five years. To trace the moment when I first became interested in the meaning of home, I must first trace the beginnings of my own story. And this is a story that begins with another  important question: 

"How long will I have to make a home of the next place?"

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