Read at least 6 students’ blog short stories about ‘home,’ and make a list of BOTH the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find and look for differences as well; look to see if you can find student peers who appear to have different values then yourself  when it comes to the meaning of ‘home.’ Post this list on your blog, and include commentary please.

It’s telling of how intimate and elusive a concept ‘home’ is that – upon having the immense privilege of being invited to glimpse into those of my fellow classmates – the first common ground that became immediately apparent was nearly everyone beginning their blogs by outlining how daunting, elusive, and unsettlingly emotionally vulnerable the act of sharing theirs was. There’s no question that this was my experience as well. Regardless, my own trepidation quickly dispelled with the deep comfort of noticing  how comfortingly familiar a narrative of ‘home’ arose across the board, even for those students whose life experiences varied dramatically from my own.

Appropriately enough, ‘home’ was not a fixed or singular concept for any single writer, across the board. This is perhaps unsurprising, as I did not come across a single blog where the writer had lived in a single place their entire life, instead finding a variety of stories of people struggling to reconcile homes of past and present. Ross and Sean both offered very similar accounts to my own experience navigating the distinction between ‘hometown’ and current home in Vancouver, while Georgia – my only fellow Ontarian I came across – demonstrated an amusingly similar dismissive indifference to our province of origin. Indeed, both Anna and Ross offered strikingly similar accounts to my own of how travelling outside of the country helped concretize and reify the feeling of Canada as home – perhaps an ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ kind of scenario.

For some writers, however, these warring concepts of ‘home’ spanned a far more expansive geographic distance, and far more of a translocation paradigm shift than any I have ever had to experience. Both Anna and Dana expounded beautifully on their experiences of immigrating across the planet, and building new homes in Canada, while still awash with vivid but fleeting memories of their homes of birth. I immensely appreciated this variety of perspectives, and the reminder that, while moving is always a jarring and emotionally laden experience, the loneliness and alienation inherent in acclimatizing to a new country, language, and culture (as Dana eloquently explained, even to the extent of having peers struggle to even articulate her name) really does extrapolate that feeling to a level beyond any I have ever had to make sense of. I thank my fellow students for their bravery in sharing their experiences here.

Many of us were drawn to the natural beauty of British Columbia as intrinsic to our sense of home and belonging here. Anna in particular isolated a beautiful moment of the sun shining over the Rockies on a trip to Banff a a moment of such serenity she temporarily found a sense of deep belonging and peace superseding most residential affiliations of ‘home’. The oceans, mountains, and general scenery have resonated comparably deeply with me since moving across the country nearly seven years ago, and I have also found myself more at ‘home’ while lost in a forest or gazing out over the water than even under the roof of my own abode.

Here is a picture I took from the seawall connecting Granville Island to Kits Beach – one of my favourite walks in the city, which reminds me of how privileged I am to reside in a place of such stunning natural beauty. Or, as I casually titled it, ‘Just Another Thursday.’

It’s this sense of unprecedented connection to the land that has also helped bring into sharp focus for me how appalling the unconscionable uprooting of Indigenous and First Nations communities on this same earth in which I sit and enjoy beautiful mountain views and sunsets is. If I can find this sense of mindfulness, belonging, and peace from a land I have only dwelt in for under a decade, it is all the more unspeakably tragic that countless people were wrested away from lands that not only they, but countless generations of ancestors before, forged stories and intimate relationships with. Sean and Georgia also ably articulated similar tensions in navigating personal senses of ‘home’ built on the unsavoury and unpleasant history of countless Indigenous and First Nations communities stripped from theirs – although Sean, interestingly, grounded his impressions with considerably more face-to-face interaction with Indigenous and First Nations communities in his upbringing in Penticton than my own upbringing in Ontario, where any land disputes or even Indigenous Canadians on the whole remained predominantly a convenient blind spot. Becoming better versed in historical accounts of how the history of the land I now live on has been shaped and changed through the centuries (and most recently through Colonization) has brought my incredible privilege and gratitude to be able to have these experiences here now to the forefront, and reading the comparable ruminations of my classmates has redoubled my efforts to never take this for granted. I particularly appreciated Georgia’s eloquence in navigating this experience, stating that she “learned that being at home in my own body, in my own knowingness of self and that which is beyond self and identity, allowed me to be grounded enough to offer my respect and to show up as a good guest at someone else’s home” (though I aspire to comparable confidence in feeling ‘at home in my own body’ and ‘knowingness of self’).

Still, perhaps the most common thread of connection across the board was the concept of ‘home’ being anchored in families and loved ones. Simran found her sense of home beyond a geographic dwelling place, instead rooted in the community and spiritual experience of her meditation centre – though the peace and positivity radiating from her own beautiful account marked a pleasant disconnect from my own early childhood experiences attending church, which I found largely claustrophobic and unsettling. Dana, in particular, offered the beautiful sentiment that “One day, when I have my kids in Canada, I believe I will feel fully grounded in the new soil.” If ‘home is where the heart is,’ as many of us referenced, with varying degrees of self-aware irony, the fact that so many of us are lucky enough to ground our sense of home in others we are fortunate enough to share in our lives, the prospect of continuing our family and laying down our own foundational roots – which will subsequently become ‘home’ for our children – is both a surreal and immensely powerful bastion of hope. So many of us, it seems, have felt ‘home’ to be an elusive and fluid concept – so, the prospect of being able to usher in a foundational sense of home for a new generation, imbued with more awareness and gratitude of whose ancestral home they live, grow, and play on, is comforting indeed.

-KH

WORKS CITED

Chalhotra, Simran. “Blog #4: Home Is Where My Heart Is.” Simran’s ENGL 470 Blog! Accessed on February 2, 2019.

Dyer, Sean. “Penticton: Peaches, Beaches, and The Syilx Nation.” Sean Dyer’s Canadian Literature Blog English 470. Accessed on January 30, 2019.

Hillam, Ross. “Home – Beautiful British Columbia.” Here’s A Thought. Accessed on February 1, 2019.

Roy, Susan. “Mapping Tool: Kitsilano Reserve.” Indigenous Foundations. Accessed on February 3, 2019.

Truhar, Dana. “Assignment 2:2 – My Home Story.” Dana’s CanLit Blog. Accessed on February 3, 2019.

Wilkins, Georgia. “no place/ everyplace/ my own/ someone else’s – home – assignment 2:2.” A Wilderness Called Someone Else’s Home: Georgia Wilkins’ English 470A Class Blog.  Accessed on February 3, 2019.

Zhang, Anna. “Assignment 2:2 – Home.” Understanding Canada – Canadian Literature 470. Accessed on February 3, 2019.