When the World Un-Homes Us
What happens when you no longer feel that you have a home? Ece Temelkuran is at Festivaletteratura to present her latest book, Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st century.
Drawing on her own experience of being “un-homed,” Temelkuran moves beyond the personal to explore a more universal condition. To be un-homed is not necessarily to be physically displaced. The ways in which we can become strangers in our homes are manifold: politically, emotionally, morally, spiritually, geographically. Exile changes the relationship with our own body. You feel big, too visible but at the same time invisible, looked at but not seen. Others tend to see what you do not. Your body becomes something that others notice before they know you. Gradually you begin to see yourself through their eyes; your body becomes unfamiliar.
Wrestling with this alienation, Temelkuran seeks to create a collective sense of home, a space in which we might all feel like we belong. For the Turkish journalist and author, home is not a place we remember but a place in which we are remembered. Being at home is feeling like someone, being recognized. Beyond the loss of a physical home, displacement is so devastating for refugees because they are made to feel like no one, nameless and unseen.
The flip-side of this sense of anonymity is the far right's appropriation of the concept of home. Nostalgia for a lost past is moulded into a powerful political tool. Politics can make us believe that we need to rebuild the home we have lost, to recreate the past and make the present resemble an imagined “before.” But, Temelkuran suggests, it is impossible to truly go back home, because what we miss is often not a place, but a time. And there is no going back in time.
She proposes something radically different. Rather than trying to return to an old home, we need to ask what home means and become each other’s home. This question feels increasingly urgent. We all eventually lose a home, be it because of war, migration, climate change or political upheaval. If places can disappear or become unrecognisable, people are perhaps the only homes we can truly have. Temelkuran's attempt to redefine home is an attempt to find a place for herself and imagine a way of belonging for the rest of us.