Finding home

If home means familiarity, safety, and predictability, how does one return to an unfamiliar country in crisis?

Professor Wendy Pearlman's latest book, The Home I Worked to Make, asks a simple question - what is home? Pearlman, who is a distinguished scholar and has written extensively on war and conflict, interviewed hundreds of Syrians who left the country since the beginning of the war in 2011. She interviewed people in five continents. Some of the people she spoke to were close to her own home in Chicago, others were in Istanbul, a city with the large Syrian diaspora, and some in cities and towns all over Europe. For some who spoke to Wendy, home was about family - parents, children and spouses. Others felt home was about familiarity - a walk by the water, even if it was not Euphrates, reminded them of home. Some answered Wendy's question by reflecting on what was lost, and what was rebuilt. Others felt home was about safety, autonomy and agency. Many wondered if home was not a place but a process, a journey that you get to bit by bit.

I heard Dr Pearlman give a talk about her latest book recently on my campus. The beautiful prose is both heartbreaking and uplifting. As she spoke to students about the Syrian diaspora, and their rich and layered understanding of what home means to them, I wondered about two groups of people many of us may have met, or heard about, and what home may mean to them.

The first is the group of our people in cities all across Europe who took extraordinary risks to get there. Pushed out by injustice, economic and otherwise, tens of thousands of Pakistanis leave every year from all parts of the country. Demonised by the privileged on prime time talk shows as somehow being unpatriotic, lazy or lacking faith in the Divine, some of these migrants go through the long and painful journey on foot from Pakistan via Iran, Turkey, Greece and the Balkans to reach European Union. I have met people in Bosnia who left the country months ago and traversed jungles and mountains, on foot and in the airless trunks of small cars and cramped trucks. Some told me about losing their friends on the way - to hunger, fatigue and violence. Others pay millions to agents to get on a crowded, unstable boat across the Mediterranean. I have met taxi drivers in Lisbon and Amsterdam, restaurant workers in Frankfurt and Athens, and many others working in all sorts of jobs in Rome, Zagreb and Valencia who were forced to leave because the doors of justice and fairness were shut on them. When they found out that I was from Pakistan, they showed the same hospitality they would in Pakistan, insisting that I should not pay for my meal, or my taxi ride, or inviting me to their home for dinner. These people were honourable and kind, and I reminded them of home - in a place that was home now.

The second group of people that Dr Pearlman's book reminded me of are Afghans, who were born in the country decades ago. I wondered when they are told to go back home, what does that mean to them? If home is defined by familiarity, safety and predictability, what does it mean to go back to an unfamiliar country in the middle of a humanitarian crisis? Perhaps one day, when we think with our hearts and not just become automatons who simply repeat slogans, we may stop and ask someone about what home means. We may find their answers to be no different from the answer any of us would give.