Home is so sad: On Waiting

What do we mean when we say “home”? And how is this different to what refugees and asylum seekers mean when they use the same commonplace word? “It’s all impermanent,” one refugee reminded me, in conversation in Zaatari Refugee camp, before offering a testimony that implied that displacement is perpetual.

In this talk, I will explore the ways in which “talk about” home registers the perpetuity of displacement. My research has involved interviews with Syrian and Palestinian refugees, and throughout them, I have been asking these subjects of displacement how they make homes in impermanent, temporary, liminal spaces, often established without the intention of lasting beyond a year, yet now—in the case of the Syrian crisis—in their eighth and even –in the case of the neighbouring Palestinian camps-turned-slums—its seventieth.

I examine how three inherently literary forms (poetry, oral history, and testimony) engage with the contemporaneousness of migration, yet present distinctions in the shapes of their responses, varying in their immediacy, factuality, sensibility, and implicit and explicitly intended audiences. In so doing, I aim to humanize the (often life-long) refugee plight as one of home-making, as evidenced in the repetition of themes throughout various reflections of displacement. Just as ‘invasion is a structure; not an event,’ [1] so too, this work argues, displacement has interminable, structural implications. This paper will consider the ways these various genres intersect and diverge in their treatments of the “structures” of home and displacement.