Home is Elsewhere

“No, they were not human. Well, you know, that was the worst of it- this suspicion of their not being inhuman.” — Achille Mbembe (2001).

“When it breaks my heart, I know it is my country & I cannot unlove it — when it kills me, I won’t know.” — Henneh Kyereh Kwaku (2020)

Home is the intersection of two lines- the vertical and the horizontal; meaning bound up with spaces and landscapes to create the joint line — the place, particular locations given meaning by people, either through lived experiences and realities or through conceptual representations. The terms of demarcation such as fields, boundaries, borders, margins, territories, states, network’ and other constructed spatial metaphors that project meaning to an area, and informed identities such as nationhood or statehood connecting representation of local and global relationships of power to geography. This informs discussions in mobility and movement in topographies of culture, that meanings and cultural forms are not only created in places, but also the relationship between places, one in relation, or, in binary opposition to one another in a practice of othering the other.

Leaving home can only happen because there is a home to leave. And the leaving is never just a geographical or spatial or geopolitical separation; it is an emotional separation- wanted or unwanted. Steady or ambivalent. Social and political conflicts can be played out as cultural conflicts, i.e., religious identities competing over spaces and the definitions of these spaces. It is then of the essence…