I really enjoyed reading various classmates’ stories of home, but found it incredibly challenging to write this post, connecting the assumptions and experiences of various authors. What I liked most, perhaps, was navigating the small details of home speckled throughout larger themes of what home meant to the individuals I read. Quirky anecdotes about great danes and ostriches added so much more meaning to the words of my peers, but also made me feel cautious when making assumptions about the assumptions/similarities of these stories. I found that a main theme between myself and my peers, in discussing home, was this notion that home is a strange combination of the tangible and the emotional, and I feel very humbled to engage with and try to understand and connect to the emotional significance and undertones of my classmates’ stories.
Anyway, I will be looking specifically at Saarah Ghazi, Freda Li and Whitney Millar’s stories about home. Common threads between these three (and others) included drawing back to memories, and childhood–this notion of time as important in solidifying and reifying what we call home–the concept of change in the recognition of home and the relationship between comfort/familiarity and building or growing into home.
The use of childhood memory in the definition of home was apparent in essentially all of the blogs I read. Perhaps this was more just along the line of the use of childhood/memory in storytelling, but I found it interesting that home was most often explored and referred to in the context of the past. I think this connects to the next two themes I explore, change and comfort, but also speaks to what we refer to in our knowledge of self and place. Saarah’s discussion of her childhood was interesting because she maintained a certain ambiguity with regards to timeframe–it didn’t feel so linear: like childhood was more of realm rather than a the first however many years. This was useful because it implies that there is a certain set of values or way of experiencing things as a child that form memories and perceptions of home. Freda continued this stretching of history and knowing by connecting her childhood perceptions of home with her parents as immigrants. Freda acknowledged that her parents were “forced to look forward and create a new home,”, that home being her childhood. I appreciated this look into history that isn’t directly experienced, but passed down and formative–continued memory and time, layering perceptions of home.
I found these discussions of home in relation to childhood important to understanding how I relied on time and memory in legitimizing my definitions of home. To quote Missy Elliot, “it don’t matter where you from it’s where you at,” why do we tend to directly go to the past, rather than current states and feelings when defining home. Is home always a nostalgic thing, rooted in preliminary experiences, or can we have multiple, different definitions of home, some very new? Saarah brings balance and comfort when she notes that, “home is understanding and accepting the future while simultaneously honouring the past.” I guess we always see home in relation to wherever we are now; the past becomes significant with the present, but speaks the fact that our current definitions of home heavily rely on our initial definitions of home. Histories are incredibly valuable in orientation and wholeness of self.
The thing that amplified the focus on childhood as formative to notions of home was a specific change that challenged and then cemented perspectives. Again, this use of a causative incident is also probably just related to good storytelling (well done, team!), but it does speak to how we recognize and define norms. Whitney speaks about trying to replicate home when she moves to a dorm, and “rediscovering the familiar”, and Saarah speaks about slowly growing into seeing a new place as home after a move. The fact that all of our definitions of home come from preexisting experiences is valuable in understanding what norms we set when hearing others’ stories. Subconsciously we are holding up everyone else’s definition of home, to our own, just as we would when living in a new place. Change allows us to see all of our assumed norms, we often define home in terms of differences and similarities to a preexisting constant. In reading my peers’ blogs, I often found that they would either challenge or align with my own experiences and definitions of home–my memories set the norm form how I read everyone else’s.
A huge thank you to my peers for the interesting, heartwarming and challenging stories that helped me to better understand my own definitions of home.
Works Cited
Li, Freda. “Home is Not (Always) A House.” Whose Canada Is It? June 5, 2015. Web. https://blogs.ubc.ca/fredaliblog/2015/06/05/blog-4-a-home-is-not-always-a-house/
Ghazi, Saarah. “2.2.” Saarah Ghazi. June 4, 2014. Web. https://blogs.ubc.ca/saarahgeng470/2015/06/04/2-2/
Millar, Whitney. “Let Me Come Home.” Whitney Engl 470 Experience. June 5, 2015. Web. https://blogs.ubc.ca/whitneymillar/2015/06/05/let-me-come-home/
Missy Elliott. “We Run This.” The Cookbook. Atlantic/ Goldmind. 2005.