In Tamil, there’s a question that someone you’ve just met is bound to ask within the first few minutes: ‘unga ooru enna?’ It loosely translates to ‘where are you from?’, but that’s not quite it. Your ooru is your native place, the town or village your family traces itself to. It may or may not be where you were born, grew up, or have ever actually lived.
Every generation in my family has had a more complicated answer to this question than the one before. When someone asks me now, I answer, and find myself with deep questions: what is my home? What even is a home? And why does it seem so hard for those of us building a life in a different place to define one? Given the resurgence of debates around immigration, these questions have been on my mind.
So what is home?
The English language squeezes many different meanings into one small word. There’s the house: where your things are. The hometown: where someone spent their formative years. The homeland: where their family or ancestors originate. The birthplace: where someone was born. The residence: where someone currently lives. This is before we get into the complications of ‘citizenship’ and ‘nationality’. For most people, these overlap but others are obliged to choose. This post focuses on one subset for whom that choice weighs heavily: people who move (whether willingly or by circumstance).
Scholars of migration have wrestled with such questions for decades. Avtar Brah draws a distinction I find genuinely interesting. She points to a tension between two dimensions of ‘home’ for the diaspora: home as an imagined/mythical place of desire versus home as the lived experience of a locality (the sights, sounds, smells, the daily interactions). Her idea of a ‘homing desire’ captures how you can long to feel at home without wanting to go ‘back’ anywhere. Ghassan Hage goes further and describes home as something you build based on a handful of feelings: security, familiarity, community, and a sense of possibility, the sense that you can grow and have a future there.
What I like about these interpretations is that they turn home from a physical place or location into conditions and feelings that can be built.
An Expat or an Immigrant?
While debates about home tackle the internal turmoil in the minds and hearts of those who move, there’s another sticky issue around the label (of how people identify themselves and what is attributed by others around them). I often think about who I am, an expat or an immigrant, and whether the host society views it the same way.
The term ‘expatriate’ comes from the Latin ex patria: out of one’s homeland. It’s an identity defined entirely by where you are not. In practice, this privileged term is often reserved for people with roots in a Western country and/or people of high social class. An immigrant, on the other hand, is someone who comes in, either temporarily or permanently. The motivations to move, circumstances guiding the move itself and duration of stay define related, but often conflated, terms such as migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. It’s difficult to disentangle these labels without considering their intersections with race and class, with expatriates signifying an ‘unproblematic’, ‘favoured’, or a ‘more visible’ immigrant. Somehow, identifying, or being identified, as an immigrant seems to place a heavy burden of proving one’s worth.
What’s jarring is that this label isn’t entirely the immigrant’s to choose. However long one stays and integrates, they could still appear as an outsider to someone else. There is a discomfort in knowing that belonging lies, in part, with others whose views rarely stay private. Those views shape political discourse, public policies and the social narratives on immigration.
Looking beyond the labels, if I think of home in Hage’s terms as something to be built with a sense of community, possibility and hope, the practicalities of working in the development sector (which is my own vantage point) don’t quite allow for it. It manifests in conditional and renewable contracts with an end-date always looming, a feeble voice within the host society that sits out of politics altogether (while paradoxically attempting to ‘do good’ in faraway countries’ politically charged environments) and the international social bubble with similar others in transit. What does home-building even mean in this case?
Along these lines, popular debates on immigration rarely get into the fact that policy infrastructure in host countries is built on short-term, conditional thinking (like periodic permit renewals, long and opaque paths to permanent residence, rigid laws around cultural symbolism in public spaces, no voting rights, to name a few). How successfully can integration at scale work with these policy instruments? And on whom is the onus to create structures that will help those moving to build the conditions for a home?
Home, in the plural
Having chosen a mobile career and a wonderful partner outside my own culture, I wonder what my identity will evolve into as we attempt to build our lives across several places, and what ‘home’ will mean for us. Perhaps ‘unga ooru enna?’ will have more than one answer across our lifetimes.
