Abstract
In this postcolonial gendered autoethnography, I critically examine how my understanding of home was first imprinted and how, once dislocated, I have negotiated my desire for and imagination of home. I argue that colonialism and patriarchy are interconnected structures of oppression that contribute to individuals’ understandings of home. For transnationals, a dislocated understanding of home need not result from migration but can arise long before oceans are crossed. Specifically, I emphasize how readily the notion of home is romanticized, silencing disruptive understandings of home. I trace how trauma-infused understandings of home reveal the consequences of feeling continuously uprooted and exiled. Thus, the fragmentations surrounding the notions of home, old country, and new country show movements in liminalities, where “home” is a site of experience, memory, desire, hope, and imagination.
I stare at the picture I have kept, secured in its brown, fabric-covered square photo album, for over three decades. It is as if it needed a sacred space of its own. Fearing either I would lose the picture or its colors would fade, I scanned it into my computer a decade ago. But still I keep the album neatly tucked in the drawer of my nightstand.
In the picture, my brother and I stare back at me, me at 11 years old and he at 7. We are sitting on a sofa in the living room of my childhood home in Kolkata, India, staring blankly at the camera, as if held hostage by the lens. My brother is wearing a white striped shirt and khaki-colored half pants (known as shorts in West). I am wearing a white dress with two pockets in the front, and a blue-green vine of flowers flowing from the hem to the waist. My brother and I sport identical haircuts. Perhaps the barber was instructed to put a bowl on our heads and cut around it.
Between our shoulders, if I look closely behind the sofa, I can see my blackish-red handprint on the wall. The sofa covers most of it, so only the fingertips are visible. I have looked at the scanned version of the picture a thousand times over the last 10 years, and wondered if I should Photoshop the fingertips away so the wall is completely white, matching its surroundings. But I have not whitewashed the prints. They have remained.
***
I try not to think about the details of how my handprint came to be on the living room wall. But as I sit here tracing my relationship with home, I recognize that I was imprinted with a disrupted understanding of home at a very young age. The sense of dislocation even within the space of my family’s physical residence comes flooding back to me.
Maa and Baba had an arranged marriage, meeting only once before their parents agreed to the marriage. There was no option; their understanding of cultural tradition was obedience to what one’s parents demanded. Within the first year of my parents’ tumultuous marriage, I was born.
I have distinct early memories of Maa screaming from inside locked rooms, of hearing her body thrown against the walls or banged into the ground. I would run to the neighbors’ houses to ask for help, but they never answered. When they saw me coming with tears in my eyes, they would shut their doors and windows. These people lived so close, yet kept their distance. I used to fantasize about running away to a place where no one screamed or cried or pretended to be a happy family when they were not. Home was never really “home” for me.
One day when I was about 6 years old, I came home from school to find Maa on the floor of the living room with Baba straddling her, pummeling her body. Shocked by the violence and terrified by the blood pouring from Maa’s head and mouth, I jumped on Baba’s back, trying to pull him off. But my little girl body was no match for the force of his anger. He threw me off easily. As I tried to break my fall, my palm scraped against the bloody ground, then hit the wall, leaving a red print.
Over the next few days, servants were repeatedly ordered to wash the handprint off the wall, but nothing could fully remove the evidence of my attempt to save Maa and myself from Baba’s cruelty. When I tried to talk with relatives about the violence, they would respond, “It is your mother’s job to please your father, to manage the household well, so he doesn’t have to be so upset all the time.” The women were as excusing as the men. How easily they normalized gendered violence and suffering.
Despite numerous attempts to wash the handprint off the wall, to erase the evidence as though it had never been there, it refused to disappear. On the wall, an indelible sign of my resistance was imprinted permanently. Baba moved the couch in front of it, but it still partly showed over the back. Later, for reasons I no longer remember, he took the picture of my brother and I sitting there. I remember only that we were neither amused nor willing subjects. Obediently, we posed anyway. By the time he took the picture, the handprint on the wall had dried a blackish red.
***
“Colorman, colorman, what color do you see?” I played this game with friends as a child in Kolkata. Although we typically spoke Bengali, we used an English prompt to start this game. In response, the girl playing “colorman” named a color, and we had to find that color and touch it to be safe. The last person to do so became the colorman for the next round. We used to play the game in the front courtyard leading to our living room. Banana, fig, and papaya trees lined the left side, accented by colorful flowers whose names I know only in Bengali. The flowers usually came in handy for this game.
I was always bad at this game. I don’t know if my sense of color was weak, or if I just did not match colors well. Perhaps it was my overanalytical mind. If the colorman said green, I would ponder: lime green, banana leaf green, toad green, slime green? By the time I figured out which color to look for, everyone else was safe. When it was my turn to name a color, I could never stump my friends. But all that changed when I discovered a color no one could find.
“Colorman, colorman, what color do you see?” my friends shouted in unison.
“I see . . . blackish red,” I responded.
They scattered in all directions, including the living room, searching frantically, but no one could find blackish red. Everyone missed the fingerprints peeking out from behind the couch. It felt powerful to stump them, and I secretly declared myself the savvy winner of this game.
Now, tracing the events that imprinted on me in the first 10 years of my life, it is evident how desperately I needed to reframe my fragmented and disrupted understanding of home to something more desirable, not entirely grounded in trauma. I actively sought to transform the powerlessness I felt at being unable to help Maa to a sense of empowerment, in the context of play. The game lightened my heart, providing reprieve from a home life that was less than ideal. This was my way of transmuting the dark, unsettling understanding of home, with a normalizing act of empowered play.
Liminalities
My mother divorced my father and moved to Canada when I was 12 years old. I followed her when I was 13. She’d remarried a Bengali man living in Toronto. In my 20s, I moved to the United States to pursue graduate study. My brother stayed in India, with my father. I have remained in the United States for a career in academia as a qualitative research methodologist with a substantive interest in transnational issues of race, class, gender, and identity in U.S. higher education.
As a member of the diasporic Indian population, my sense of home was disrupted long before I crossed oceans. Therefore, in this article, I not only discuss the sense of dislocation surrounding an understanding and desire for home but also problematize romanticized notions of home in the old country. Beyond understanding the uprooting produced by dislocation from the old country to the new, demonstrating the fallacy inherent in utopian imaginations of home reveals the concept itself as fleeting and unstable.
For me, writing a de/colonizing 1 (Bhattacharya, 2009, 2013) autoethnography informed by a postcolonial sensibility inevitably entangles multiple discourses of external and internal colonization, patriarchy, displacements, and living in hybrid spaces. In the old country, I was expected to engage in idealized public performances of home, to the extent that when I was in crisis and could not perform the illusory version of home, people rendered me invisible, unwilling to witness such disrupted performance. Is bearing witness to the trauma of a dislocated, fragmented home itself a trauma that breaks apart the utopian imagination of home? What lies in the ruins of a broken home’s foundation?
In the new country, dislocation is strongly marked by a desire to return the postcolonial subject to home, to where she “really” belongs, with the subtext that wherever that is, it isn’t here. People from the Indian diaspora (and others) are frequently interrogated about where we are from and when we will return there. Such questions convey the message that wherever we are it cannot be our home, and we must return or be returned to a space where people look like us, speak our language, eat the same food, and pray to the same Gods. Yet the “old country” as we lived and remember it, is no longer the same old country; nor, given our different paths, are we the same as the people who remain there, or even the same people we were when we left.
A de/colonizing autoethnography emerging from postcolonial gendered sensibilities thus calls me to understand the liminalities through which I author myself and am authored. Such autoethnographic work problematizes any easy discourse of belongingness or superficial identification with subject positions based on where I was born or grew up, my ethnic background, or my professional aspirations. When I write from the spaces of postcolonial dislocations and hybridity, the discursive subject positions that rise to the surface do not settle easily within my being. Consequently, the oppositions that arise within me become an invitation to scrutinize the wounds I carry from displacements, fragmentations, and border crossings.
Yet none of what I say encompasses my thoughts alone. The ideas that emerge as salient are in relationship with the work of other scholars. Exploring how understandings and discourses of “home” play out in the lives of the diasporic Indian population is not a new undertaking, having already been approached from multiple perspectives. Mohanty (2004) traces a genealogy of home, stating, I have been asked the “home” question (when are you going home?) periodically for twenty years now. Leaving aside the subtly racist implications of the question (go home, you don’t belong), I am still not satisfied with my response. What is home? The place I was born? Where I grew up? Where I locate my community, my people? Who are “my people”? Is home a geographical space, a historical space, an emotional, sensory space? Home is always so crucial to immigrants and migrants—I even write about it in scholarly texts (perhaps to avoid addressing it, as an issue that is also very personal?). What interests me is the meaning of home for immigrants and migrants. I am convinced that this question—how one understands and defines home—is a profoundly political one. (p. 126)
Mohanty’s dislocation resonates with my own, which lacks any easy identification of home with either the old country or the new. I cannot simply go “home” again or go “back” home, when I have no rooted understanding of home to begin with. Nor can I accept my current dwelling unproblematically as home, as issues of belongingness plague both spaces. As a result, home may become a place of nostalgia, imagination, and memories that never actually happened but have been romanticized through the utopian desire for belongingness.
In her book Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India’s Partition, Chawla (2014) explores and interrogates an array of dislocations, including ancestral dislocation after the British sliced what was known as India into pieces, violently displacing people from what they knew as home. Chawla further explores a contemporary sense of dislocation, including a loss of language, in which a cultural elder recognizes that his grandchildren will be unable to read his autobiography unless he writes it in English. English thus becomes the connector of history and of heritage, erasing Urdu, the cultural elder’s native language.
This notion of language loss is not innocent; it is a pervasive and accepted form of colonization that has become part of our psyche. It is our expectation that we will lose our language: that such loss is inevitable, and we must prepare for that eventuality. That we will be thinking in English as we write about the exiled conditions of “being here” (in the new country) and about what’s “over there” (in the old country), enacting the “anthropologist’s being there—writing about one place from another” (Visweswaran, 1993, p. 304).
A transnational Indian, then, is an Other in both places. Having crossed oceans, she can never achieve an insider space in the old country the way she once did (or if she ever did). Simultaneously, she is constantly reminded of her Otherness in the new country because she is not really “from here”; her belongingness is always suspect.
Ocean Crossings 2
“Wear your red salwaar kameez for tonight,” Maa instructs me before the first dinner party we host in Toronto. It is 8 months after our arrival. I am 14 years old. “And don’t forget the jewelry set your Mashimoni gave you. The jhumkas are very pretty. They will go nicely with your salwaar kameez.” She hurries from the room to put together her own outfit.
“This is like going to a wedding, Maa,” I complain, following her. “Is this really necessary for a dinner party? Can’t I just wear jeans?”
She ignores me and continues assembling her outfit. I stand stubbornly in the doorway, waiting. Finally, she turns and says exasperatedly, “There will be kids there your age. You need to make friends here.”
“Maa, I have friends,” I argue.
“Not just the friends you’ve made in school, who come from everywhere else in the world except your own country. You need to fit in with these Indian kids. They come to fancy parties dressed like Bollywood stars. Go get dressed. Quickly! Go!” She orders.
I had a hard time making friends with my peers of Indian heritage born in Canada. I am considered a FOB (Fresh Off the Boat). Being seen with me reduces the Indo-Canadian kids’ coolness quotient. Instead, I have made friends with other recent immigrants from Guyana, Trinidad, Bahrain, and Armenia at my high school. My sense of belongingness comes from connecting with other dislocated, disoriented young people like me, who also want to maintain some connection to the old country, even as the new country is inevitably changing us.
Reluctantly, I head back to my room where the red salwaar kameez and jhumkas await. It’s no use arguing, even though I know that the people with whom I match most closely in terms of ethnic heritage and the hue of our skin consider me unsuitable company. To cope with the threat of being Othered, these Indo-Canadian teens conformed as completely as possible to the dominant, colonizing white culture, mocking their parents’ accents and taking pride in their own Anglicized speech, fashion, and other evidences of assimilation. Yet I remain proud of my heritage and want to retain those elements of it that provide a sense of stability, while remaining open to my new cultural space.
As the aunties and uncles 3 begin arriving at our apartment with their families, Maa instructs me to entertain the teenagers. I take them to my room, where I immediately feel socially awkward and incapable of striking up a conversation. We lack shared ground. We don’t have the same pop-culture references. We don’t even attend the same school, and even if we did, they wouldn’t associate with me due to my FOB status. Today they are forced to interact with me because I live here. We all feel trapped.
I go to the living room to bring back drinks for the teenage prisoners in my room. The task momentarily eases my feeling of being a social outcast. When I return to my room, they are talking with each other. Having grown up in the same community, they know each other well. They complain about how their parents’ nostalgia for “home” leads them to discipline their children harsher than their relatives in India, who, to them, seemed to be more open-minded parents. Stifled by such rigidity, my peers share the ways in which they rebel that are entirely unfamiliar to me: doing drugs, joining gangs, skipping school, and engaging in risky sexual activities. They laugh about their ability to deceive their parents by acting like obedient children at home.
I listen, but can add nothing to the discussion. All the red salwaar kameezes and matching jhumkas in the world cannot help. Regardless of our shared heritage, we are worlds apart. Unable to connect with my peers, I make another excuse to leave the room. In the living room, the adults are talking competitively about their children’s accomplishments, social lives, and supposed adherence to archaic cultural norms.
“What’s Priya doing these days?”
“She is studying microbiology at Harvard,” her mother brags.
“Oh, nice. Good girl. Does she have a boyfriend?”
“No, she is so focused on being a doctor, she doesn’t care for that stuff.” Spoken with pride. “How is Raghu doing?”
“Raghu is great. He just got on the President’s Honor List of Most Accomplished Senior. We’re so proud. He wants to be an engineer and a doctor working with prosthetics.”
“Great! Is he dating anyone?” (Exploring potential marriageability.)
“Well, some girls call at the house. I think he dates them all. He doesn’t tell us these things.”
Pretending to be busy in the kitchen, I eavesdrop on these conversations, informing myself of the criteria by which I am judged. I don’t want to pursue science or become a doctor. My mother is on her second marriage, which compromises my value as a “good Indian girl” in the marriage marketplace should I want to marry. Although I get decent grades, I am not at the top of my class. I do not adhere to restrictive cultural norms in either country, old or new, and I am pretty close to falling in love with a white guy at school. In innumerable ways, I don’t live up to the expectations of people who look like me, from the old country or the new.
Dejected, I return to my room and sit in silence listening to my peers talk. I long for a sense of home that makes me feel stable and rooted, understood, and supported. Although I have yet to experience it, this is something I desire deeply, a yearning born out of hearing my parents and their friends speak lovingly of a place called “home,” which may be no place at all.
***
An email arrives in my inbox from the new faculty orientation coordinator at my university. I see someone named Ram Prabhu has been copied on it.
Dear Kakali,
I am copying Ram on this email. You’re both from India. I think you two should meet, as you would have a lot of things in common. Good luck.
Robert
Does Robert think being from the same country is all that is necessary for connection? Ram responds immediately and kindly.
Dear Kakali,
Welcome! Leena, my wife, who works in Mathematics, and I are having a small dinner party this weekend. You’re invited. Robert can’t come since he has other obligations. Incidentally, I see from the new hire website that you are here with your partner, Paul. Please extend my invitation to him too. Leena will call you and give you directions.
Ram
Perhaps it is the fear of appearing antisocial or uncollegial that makes me consider a dinner invitation from a complete stranger. I know little about him, except that he shares my ethnic heritage. Besides, I wonder what impression it would give Robert, who seems well connected with the campus leadership, if I reject the invitation. I agree to go.
Almost immediately, I begin to dread the event, and the inevitable discussion that would expose my deviant Indian-girl archetype, which I otherwise relish and cherish. My life path has not been what anyone would call traditional Indian. I have married and divorced. My current partner, Paul, is a white man from Canada attending graduate school in the United States. We have lived together for 11 years without any intention of marrying. We have a dog, but no children, which for many Brown people—including my mother—represents my failure as a woman (and perhaps a human being?). From this perspective, career success is a masculine goal; by focusing on work over family, I have lost my glorious femininity.
We approach a palatial house with a circular driveway, wide-exposed brick façade, and four big windows revealing warm lighting inside. Ram greets us at the door, hugging us like we are old friends. I am a hugger, but Paul is more of a pat-on-the-back-and-back-the-hell-off kind of guy. As we enter the kitchen, Leena comes running and also hugs us warmly. Paul gives me an uncertain look.
The other guests are mostly of Indian heritage, though there are some faculty from Ram’s department who are white. As Leena introduces us, I squeeze Paul’s hand tightly. He is the most familiar person to me in a stranger’s house. I am surrounded mostly by people who look like me, some of whom even speak Bengali. Yet, I am clutching the hand of a man whose ancestors enslaved my people for more than 300 years.
The Indian guests thankfully do not ask any personal questions. Instead, reminiscent of my parents and their friends in Toronto, they begin discussing the best airfares to India, sharing recipes, and comparing their children’s activities and accomplishments. Paul has positioned himself in front of a bookshelf, intently surveying the books, to avoid the awkwardness of having little to contribute to the conversation.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the discussion, with catching up on one another’s lives and inquiring about their kids. Staying at the periphery of such a conversation, for me, is highly preferable to being the focus of intrusive questions about my own deviant life choices. Nevertheless, I feel waves of insecurity flow through me.
***
Growing up in Toronto, I dated people from various cultural backgrounds. When pressured to pursue a career in medicine, I performed poorly. My real interests were in the social sciences. I drank alcohol, and brought my non-Indian boyfriends to Bengali gatherings, flaunting my rebellious behavior. In college, when I started dating Garnet, a Black man of Jamaican heritage. My mother, then divorced from her second husband, disowned me, leaving me homeless.
I distinctly remember the day I moved out of my mom’s apartment. Members of the Bengali community had gathered in the living room to talk some sense into me. Garnet stayed outside to prevent unnecessary drama. With tears in my eyes, I packed a suitcase with some clothes and books. I had called a homeless shelter to secure a bed for 3 months until I could get a place of my own.
This was perhaps the most unsettling uprooting experience I had ever endured, more dislocating than crossing oceans. I was parting from my mother, whose womb was my first home, and whose homes I had shared my whole life. Being ousted, severed all connection with my roots, a consequence of my choice to live fearlessly, reject prejudice, and refuse to allow others’ skin color to determine whether I could love or be loved by them.
As the Bengali elders took turns lecturing me, conveying dire warnings “for my own good,” I lowered my head, stared at the ground, and watched my teardrops form a small puddle.
“Think of what people will say about your mother. How can she show her face in the community? Think of the position you’re putting her in.” No one expressed concern about the position I was in as a result of believing that one need not love or marry only people who look like themselves to be happy. Are they forgetting the fact that my mother had divorced her second Bengali husband by now?
“What is so special about this kallu boy? Tell me naa.” Garnet was referred to not by his name, but by a derogatory term denoting his skin color. I looked up with righteous rage in my eyes that stemmed from the core of my being. But I said nothing, lacking the energy to even try to have a sensible conversation.
“You know no one will marry you after this. You will just be a black spot for your family and your community. Do you really want that for yourself or your mother?” Where, I wondered, was this community when my father and my stepfather were abusing us? Then they locked their doors, or looked away. Now they want me to cater to their judgmental whims?
***
Now, surrounded by Indian people at Ram and Leena’s dinner party, I feel my stomach tied in knots. If these people knew about my nontraditional choices, I wonder if they would see me as the Bengali community in Toronto did. I wonder if my silence in this conversation signals a shared understanding of being a good Indian girl, or does the fact that I have now moved to Paul’s side, joining him in staring at the bookshelf, signal my outsider status in relation to a culturally familiar conversation?
Soon Ram announces that our buffet dinner is ready, inviting us to serve ourselves. In the living room, two of Ram’s white colleagues from the Physics Department eat quietly. Paul and I enter and sit down.
“This will sound enormously stereotypical, and I’m sure you get this a lot, but is the physics correct in The Big Bang Theory?” I ask anxiously but with a bit of a smile.
“The stuff they write on the flip chart and the white board is usually correct,” Steve responds. He’s a white man in his early 40s wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. “Those formulas are accurate. But what they say to each other, and what they can do, that’s exaggerated.”
“Well, that has to be exaggerated, for entertainment.” Tom, who has been quiet all evening, explains. Tom is in his 50s, dressed in khaki pants and a white button-down shirt.
The Indian folks enter the room and catch the end of our conversation. They say they rarely watch the show, but think Sheldon is an interesting character. Steve looks at me and asks, “How long have you been in the U.S.?”
“Who, me?” I ask. I find it an odd question, given that Steve is Ram’s colleague and certainly knows of Indian folks living in the United States for at least two generations.
“Yes.” Steve nods his head.
“Oh, for a while now.” I stay vague on purpose.
“Do you plan on going home? I know Ram and Leena go home all the time. Like every year or something, don’t you, Ram?”
Ram exchanges a glance with me and smiles. I don’t know what to make of that smile. Is he thinking what I am? That even after living in the same place for decades, owning a house, educating countless American students, serving as a faculty member and department chair, and entertaining colleagues at his house, this is still not seen as his home. That he must be reminded of and returned to his proper place in the world, a place where people look like him. As I must.
“Yes, I plan on going home,” I answer. “I wasn’t going to sleep here tonight.” Uncomfortable laughter breaks through the room. However, I might have angered Tom, because he has locked eyes with me.
“He meant home. To India. When do you go back home?” Tom clarifies in a serious tone.
“I don’t know,” I shrugged. I could say more, but out of respect for the strangers who invited Paul and me to their home, I restrain myself. People look at each other in awkward silence.
“Hey, this is really good chicken,” Gita, an Indian guest says, finally breaking the tension. “Leena, you must give me the recipe.”
“It is really easy to cook. I’ll tell you now.” Leena shares her recipe with Gita while others listen. I think of a polite way to make my escape. This is not my place. These are not my people—even if they are academics, even if some of them look like me, even if we all love Indian food.
***
I go home and immediately pull out the picture tucked safely into the brown photo album—the one of my brother and I and the blackish-red fingers behind the sofa. I hold it close to my chest and cry. It is as if I am letting go of decades of pain, accepting that despite others’ efforts to match me with people with similarly hued skin, despite my own longing to match those who look like me, in fact we are not the same Brown. I will forever be a stranger in all spaces.
I run to my computer and open the picture in Photoshop. Something compels me to decide, once and for all, what to do with the peeking fingerprints. I could simply paint white over the prints to match the rest of the wall. Paul often reminds me that the stories we do not tell have the most power over us. The stories we hide or erase can be equally powerful. This is my story, but it does not have to define me.
I decide not to make a decision about the prints. Maybe it is a reminder about desiring a utopian home through whitewashing trauma, and yet remaining true to the (im)possibility of such a desire. I no longer need to reframe these haunted memories of home. The reframing of “home” remains elusive and imaginary, so I try to root myself in my life experiences, to cultivate feelings of being “at home” in temporary moments of belongingness, knowing full well, that these moments are unstable, and inevitably in continuous movement between multiple contested desires.
***
Returning, Reframing Home?
The entangled relationship I have with home is not simply due to being a Brown body in white spaces as a result of crossing oceans. Instead, this entanglement stems from childhood memories, and my early relationship with what I thought was home. In addition, colonizing forces pervade a postcolonial nation like India, imposing the loss of our language at an early age, compelling us to learn to think and play in English. Once oceans are crossed, the violent forces of assimilation comprise another layer of oppressive colonizing structures. These create a generation of diasporic Indian youth who take pride in having white sensibilities, and who mock their own heritage and reminders of it, as did the colonial masters. No single force of oppression ever acts alone; each is always an element in an interconnected network of power systems. Thus, I can only speak of postcoloniality from an intersected raced and gendered perspective, as that is how I have come to understand and interrogate my experiences.
In this article, I have disrupted the construction of a romanticized, utopian version of home while simultaneously establishing the deep hunger and desire for one. I have moved through various past and present moments, demonstrating a longing for a future that exists only in my imagination. “Home” is a critical postcolonial concept, as understandings of home within the context of broader national and global sociocultural discourses can represent political acts of resistance and liberation. Home, then, may be not only an inexperienced space for some but also a space of liminalities and exile. Thus, discourses of being home, going home, being returned to a place, being banished from a space that could be home, or remembering fondly a home that never existed produce pain and isolation, yielding further personal and political marginalization.
These states of exile are natural precursors to fragmentation. Reflecting this, I have structured this article in a fragmented manner, playing with form and storytelling. I have moved between present and past using narratives that remain present for me in literary present tense and memories that I have storied to be in the remote past, in past tense, while demonstrating the interplay of present, past, and a desire for a future relationship with home. Situating a bridging expository narrative between autoethnographic narratives followed a format of storytelling that I witnessed in my family among the women, which allowed me to stay congruent with my postcolonial sensibilities. The story is told first before the listener understands its purpose. Once the purpose is revealed, the storyteller offers additional narratives to crystallize the purpose.
The autoethnographic narrative of the dinner party was written from spaces of liminality and hybridity, demonstrating the complicated nature of existence as a postcolonial subject. The only person at that dinner party with whom I felt at home (and incidentally, with whom I share a home) is a member of the colonizing group, and specifically a descendant of those who colonized Indians. Because of the fragmented existence in liminality, what becomes salient is that there is no easy way to find “home,” nor to identify which relations and practices constitute “home.”
The cultural insiders (who were extremely well intentioned and friendly) at the dinner party assumed a closeness that did not exist, despite our shared ethnic heritage. Even with elements of familiarity, ethnic heritage does not reliably produce homogenized experiences with which one can bond and create friendships. Both the cultural insiders and outsiders assumed, in the dinner party narrative, that cultural heritage was the key ingredient for familiarity, friendship, and community, reducing differences to sameness.
However, the ways in which the cultural outsiders and insiders engaged in such reduction were remarkably different. The white men sought to place the dinner hosts and me at “home” somewhere over there; binding my cultural identity to one place, they exaggerated its role as the sole location where people who look like me reside. Their mode of exclusion was cold, rude, aggressive, and authoritative. In contrast, the cultural insiders accomplished reduction in a strikingly different manner, assuming familiarity and sameness and warmly embracing me (literally), driven by only one aspect of the fragmentations in my liminal spaces—my ethnic heritage and the superficial match of our Brownness. 4
A return to “home” is thus an eternal impossibility, whereas a reframing of home is a continuous negotiation. Just as my diasporic identity is fragmented and entangled in hybridity, so is the concept of home, which exists in liminality with its own fragmentations. Home then becomes a permanent state of movement and unsettling, with temporary moments of belonging, being understood, and being seen without being marginalized. Reframing home requires identifying oppressive structures and disrupting previous understanding of home. Yet it also requires claiming a space, a relationship, a set of experiences, or a moment as the grounding necessary to feel “at home.” Thus far, I am able to consider being home only in the cracks of liminalities, where I shuttle between mismatched and contradictory sensibilities informed by various types of border crossings.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.