I was having trouble writing. The beginning of my plot was buried deep in my chest, and I was too scared to dig it out. Troubled by an elastic deadline, a patient editor, and a paralyzing inability to press fingertips to keypad when anything I really care about is on the line. (It’s been like this for years; have not yet learned how to out-run it.) The loose topic was homeland, the specific was self, and I don’t think I got more than a few hundred (painful) words out over the course of weeks.

This entire blog started as an exercise in home-finding. That word, nowarian, the closest I’ve come.

So, CL-H suggested I write about that senator from Chicago. That guy just might be president some day, he said, and he’s a nowarian.

On June 4th, the day after Obama clinched enough delegates to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, he spoke at a session of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, with the intention of assuring American Jews of his allegiances. Once more, he invoked his own story and told of how, when he was eleven, he first learned about Jewish traditions, history, and the “dreams of a homeland, in the face of impossible odds”:The story made a powerful impression on me. I had grown up without a sense of roots. My father was black; he was from Kenya, he had left when I was two. My mother was white and she was from Kansas, and I’d moved with her to Indonesia and then back to Hawaii. In many ways I didn’t know where I didn’t know where I came from. So I was drawn to the belief that you could sustain a spiritual, emotional, and cultural identity. And I understood the Zionist idea — that there is always a homeland at the center of our story.

From here.

Part of the obsession with home and roots is tied tight with the idea of person value. Without a home, in essence, you ain’t shit.

This plays out on a streets-level; the homeless, reviled, ignored, punished, shunned and lesser. Their smells the soundtrack to an internal amongst-us exile.

And then there are the stateless. Millions of them, uprooted and kicked out through centuries. Without a home of your own, you necessarily occupy the space of another. At their mercy, at their whim. Not woven in their fabric, excluded from their power definitions.

There is this tugging question: is home to be discovered or created?

&

Are there a finite number of home-spaces in this world?

Because unless those lands are limited, I can’t see how displacing one people from their physical home to create one for yourself can ever be justified. But no, wait, that’s even worse…

Those uprooted by war, hatred, expressway construction and condo developers know you can sustain home in your head. You can carry it in your chest for generations, draw comfort from it, and point to your center, your belly, when you need a reminder. But without a home for your body, how long before that home in your heart just starts feeling heavy?

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« That’s my house, that’s my house ! »

Moussa, 6-years-old, hopped from side to side— right foot, left foot, green shoelaces untied and muddied – pointing out the crumpling building to anyone who’d listen. But no one was listening to him, their eyes and camera lenses already stuck, enraptured, to the spectacle.

His «house» – apartment 13D, building 5 –  was folding before them.  The towers that had stood so straight and tall for decades , strong as the leanest athlete’s back, now slouched, now crumpled, boneless, toneless. The concrete, pulverized and cracking, jumped up startled from the explosions, and the towers fell sideways to the ground with a great crash! Building 4 and building 6 swayed to the same sounds. First a low boom, almost a growl, on the ground. The heavy bass shook the towers, quivering like the dashboard of a souped-up hatchback, out on the prowl on a Saturday night with the volume cranked. There was a moment of hesitation, the buildings jolted from the boom!, and bowed in unison, as though pushed. They had no other choice.

Great, dense, grey clouds of dust puffed out with a whoosh! through shattered and shattering windowpanes, a symphony of exploding, sparkling glass. Moussa swore he could smell the dust that used to be his bedroom. It smelled older than him, dank, dry. There were chemical smells he did not understand and could not place. He swore he could feel it in his hair, coating his curls, grainy and unpleasant to touch. This one use to be his wall. This one, his kitchen. This one, his balcony, once sun-soaked, now cracked, creased, buried under concrete folds so heavy they would never again be smoothed into home.

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… just messing around. I wanted to save it, somehow. Destruction as distraction.