Rambling through Home

By Meer Ako Ali:

From Beirut, Lebanon

The author of a novel I read seems to think that the more you wander away from home, the less you want to be at home. I wonder what the same author would say about a home of one divided into several. It is a terrible catastrophe, you know. Having your home separated into halves or say quarters. What does the husband of four call “home”? Where does he go when he wants to be at home, not just at one of his four “temporary residences”? More importantly, do four temporary residences make a “home”?

They say home is where the heart is. Are our hearts big enough to be spread over four quasi-homes? We would like to say yes. We would like to be the persisting nationalists. The tremendously accomplished ethnic group that shows countries how nations are run. That tells them they can put fences or even boundaries between us, but they won’t be able to keep us apart. We will give ourselves equally to all four of our wives. But it is difficult.

It is so difficult… almost impossible. We might have to yield soon if we are not one home again. Is identity a state of mind? It might be, but that is not what my passport claims. Call me a separatist. Label me whatever you want. You won’t understand unless you have been roused awake from a dream of where you want to belong by the reality of where you belong. Or unless you have four wives, of course.

Separation is an awful thing. Separation is death, in so many ways. It is the end of contact and the dismissal of relationships, whether social or “strategic,” and everyone will be the poorer for it. I would never wish to promote any of that.

However, I’m afraid that wandering so much between quasi-homes will destroy our sense of home. I’m afraid that the bans, the executions and the discrimination will soon deter our spirit. I’m afraid that our Leyla Zanas will finally be silenced and my children won’t learn Kurdish. That somehow this legacy will disappear, and my people won’t live anywhere besides in the pages of historic books, stacked up in the deepest parts of some labyrinthine library, dusty and untouched.

Funny I should mention dust. I heard that there is a dust storm coming.