There's No Place Like Home

The idea of home itself sounds deceptively simple. Yet, it is tremendously hard to define, as once you start untangling it, it reveals layers that are hard to pin down.

On a campus as culturally diverse as ours, this topic must be something many of us, if not most of us, can relate to. For anyone with several ethnic backgrounds, “home” is not a neatly folded answer you keep at the back of your mind, ready to unwrap with ease when asked the question “Where are you from?”. Personally, I usually stutter, give up, then blurt out the three places I am linked to, in a random order.

I have always felt that way because “home”, to me, has always been a patchwork. There’s the place you were born, the one you grew up in, the countries tied to your heritage, and now a campus far away from everything you ever knew. Each one of them feels like “home,” but then again none of them quite do. They overlap and argue with each other—they coexist like siblings fighting over the bigger room.

“Home” is a notion that is both comforting and weirdly elusive for people navigating multiple worlds. That’s because “home”, at its very core, is a strange concept in itself. It is a human construction that materializes your attachment to a place and shapes your cultural identity, your sense of belonging. Yet, it’s also a feeling, an instinct and – for the lucky ones – a safe place where you can seek refuge.

Growing up in France, I knew I was Arab because I was told so, loudly and often. Strangers reminded me that my hair was not straight enough, that the beard of my grandfather didn’t belong in “their” country, or that my grandmother’s accent was too thick to count as French. And then there was my middle school gym teacher, who decided my name was “too complicated” and renamed me Lea. Unfortunately, no, I am not making this up.

But when I would visit Morocco or Algeria, I was the French girl. Even though I bathed in the culture through my grandparents, it often felt foreign and distant. My Arabic was clumsy, I couldn’t pronounce my “ع” (‘Ayn) properly and I somehow always managed to get lost in my own family’s house, like a tourist in a museum.

The irony was painful: I was either too French or too Arab, but never in the right place. So where did that leave me? Not fully French, not fully Moroccan or Algerian, but somewhere in between, stranded. 

You live in this paradox of being uprooted in every place you’re supposed to be rooted in: always both an insider and an outsider. It’s a constant dissonance. Maya Angelou once wrote: “The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” What happens when that place doesn’t exist? When it’s scattered across continents? When every supposed “home” comes with conditions, tests or suspicions about who you are? When you feel like you’re stuck in a permanent audition, scrutinized by unforgiving eyes. 

I had this almost systematic urge of proving to some that I was French enough, while trying to prove to others that I was Arab enough. Unsurprisingly the jury is still out, I remain in the waiting room, and that  is the heart of the issue. 

Growing up in a context where people make you question your legitimacy due to your ethnicity, it takes work to deconstruct the internalized shame. As living with  the idea that you should be ashamed, that you must reject this intrinsic part of yourself in order to fit in, is also and foremost woven in racism. It’s the constant reminder that certain features, accents or cultural practices are deemed less “acceptable”, less “normal” and less “worthy”. The hardest part is that this work of recovering is ongoing: It’s about reclaiming a sense of pride, resisting the subtle pressures to erase or dilute the parts of yourself that society has historically marginalized.

The truth is, this heritage is an asset rather than a burden, and probably one of the most precious strengths someone can have. Especially here, at Sciences Po Menton, you realize how much of a privilege it is to come from multiple parts of the world, to have several places you hesitate to call home. That is why I would argue that truly, home is within. It is both what you decide and what befalls you. It is several places and several moments in time stitched together.

Again, it’s a patchwork.

Because you carry the traits of your ancestors on your face. 

Because you still feel the grass of your old backyard on your skin.

Because you can speak the language of the land—which, for me, mostly means that I am fluent in complaining.

Because you remember the people you grew up with, even if you’ve forgotten their birthdays.

Maybe that’s where we find comfort: knowing that even if home is fragmented, fluid or endlessly questioned, it remains something you carry, stubbornly, quietly, whether or not others (like your gym teacher) recognize it.

So yes, the concept of “home” is confusing. It is warmth, it is the spicy food that makes your nose run, it’s the stories told by your cousins in a language you half understand but fully feel. It is contradictory. It is far and near at the same time.

But it is still, somehow, uniquely yours.

Perhaps what I have been trying to say is what James Baldwin understood before me: “[…] Home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

Perhaps that’s the closest I can get to an answer.

Photo Source: Evgeniya Bolyukh, Dreamstime