About Home

18 December 2024, Fort Portal, Uganda

Dear Raphaëlle,

I’m in Uganda sitting by Lake Nyinambuga near Fort Portal and the Congolese border, overlooking a large part of the lake, listening to the birds and crickets in the morning.

This place is so beautiful—so green, so kissed by this earth’s beauty—, I would like to feel at home here. In a way, I do—and then again, I don’t. I want a home that’s a healing place, a healthy natural setting, with a slow pace of life, where I can find peace and quiet. But my own restlessness always drives me on, searching for where exactly this place might be.

Can you simply make any place your home, your homeland? Some people do it, have done it, and would say it’s possible. I’m not so sure.

What makes a home a home, and when does a home become your homeland—or Heimat? I’ve always understood that homeland is where you were born, where you grew up, where your parents come from, where your ancestors lived. But isn’t that a very narrow definition? The concept seems too restricted to me. It pinches and squeezes; I feel uncomfortable in it.

Isn’t a homeland rather a collection of feelings of connection, attachment, and familiarity? And can’t that apply to many of the places and cultures that one encounters? Can’t they also be called ‘homelands’—Heimaten—without sounding strange?

As the daughter of an Ethiopian and a German, I’m more or less familiar with both countries. There are things I love very much about them as well as things I criticize and wish would change. The differences between the two countries are united in my personality, in my heart, and in my longings. When I’m in one place, I miss the other. This longing for... is part of my sense of home.

Home is really where I can call a space my own, a place where I can create a daily routine once I’ve decided to live there for a while or always—too big an idea for me. Does that feeling change when you own land and property? It doesn’t make a place a home, let alone a homeland.

Am I conflicted because I don’t fit into the usual concept of Heimat? Can a person be rooted in different places at once?

So many definitions and seemingly contradictory categories apply to me, the binary nature of things keeps me claustrophobically trapped. Black father, white mother; Muslim family on my father’s side, Christian family on my mother’s side; Afar vs. Swabia; Addis Ababa and Dessie vs. Stuttgart and Deizisau...

My childhood was spent moving back and forth, and I had the privilege of being socialized in both countries. I always felt a sense of homecoming in the places where my closest family members lived. That changed over the decades, and yet my memories are inscribed in the city’s architecture: the playground where I learned to ride a bike; the nursery, my first school; the step where my brother cut his chin; the youth welfare office; the gas boiler we always passed when we moved from one parent to the other; the park where I experienced my first kiss; the airport concourses; the courtyard where like little cats we watched the chickens being slaughtered; the roundabout that led to Grandma’s farm; the kiosk that always had the best sweets; the street corner where my father was asked by the police if these were really his children.

When I come to a place that is full of memories, I can turn the pages there like in a picture book, and life events—good and bad—flash before my inner eye like a movie. It’s impossible to resist this; it happens automatically; it’s impossible not to remember. The longer you stay in a place, put down roots, and share experiences, the more your self becomes enmeshed with it. Doesn’t this enmeshment of your personal memories make a place your home?

I’m enmeshed with several places and grateful for the wealth of differences I’ve been able to experience; differences that taught me different realities. I feel at home with different social codes and understand that cultures are constantly changing and always drawing on the past.

You can feel at home in a place even if other people there perceive you as a foreigner. It’s not a healthy or pleasant situation, but the feeling also becomes intertwined with your sense of home. Conversely, a place can welcome you with open arms, but you don’t stay long enough to put down roots.

Do you know that feeling? You think, I’m not at home here, I feel like I don’t belong here, I’m just a guest here, but after a few years, you leave the place, move to a new or old one, and suddenly there’s an ache. Unexpectedly, you dream of the deserted streets, the unique smells of this place that shouldn’t really belong to you, of the languages and sounds that imperceptibly became the familiar music of your life. Only when all that is gone do you realize: it has become a piece of home.

I carry some of these pieces around with me, often wondering if there’s a single place that will capture them all and stop my search filled with longing, that won’t make me miss what I’ve left behind.



26 January 2025, on the beach, Malta

Dear Raphaëlle,

Yesterday, my mother and I were talking about feeling at home, and I said that I don’t really feel at home anywhere, in the sense of having a homeland or a place where I feel I truly belong, where I feel secure, relaxed, cared for and familiar. There’s always a part of me that doesn’t quite feel at ease or is missing something.

The puzzle never seems to be complete, and I have the feeling that it may never be. Why? Because the foundation for it would have had to be laid in childhood? That makes me sad. But I hope that the sadness is just a farewell, a way of letting go of this idea of home and this longing and allowing for a different reality of connectedness.

I was thinking these things because I always feel quite comfortable and somehow at home in hotels. The anonymity there is so familiar to me. Travelling about and only ever staying in one place for a short time, with the possibility of returning, with the possibility of closing the door behind you and calling those few square metres your own for a short time, letting yourself go and recharging your batteries.

My brother and I were often on the move when we were kids. In hotel lobbies, on buses, in cars, at relatives’ and family friends’ houses. My childhood memories are full of impressions of different places and spaces, different norms and cultural rules. It was always important to quickly get a grasp on where we were and what was considered right and wrong there. That could change a lot depending on the surroundings.

But in many hotels, the procedures and customs were similar: sometimes the rooms were cleaner and of better quality, sometimes less clean, but always with a bed, table, chair, and a door to shut—and, bang, we had our own space. We were guests at the hotel, but there was no pressure to contribute to social conversation as ‘good guests’. It’s a great freedom that I still feel today.

Yet I still long for a place that other people call ‘home’. ‘Where are you going for Christmas?’ ‘Where are you celebrating Eid or Hanukkah?’ ‘Where do you feel safe?’

Is this place really where your family comes together? Where you grew up? What if that place is full of negative memories? What if family gatherings only cause discord? Do you still call it home? Then home isn’t a happy place. I want a home that makes me happy and makes me feel safe. Is that a utopia? A projection that doesn’t even exist?

The home I return to should be a healthy and welcoming one. I’ve decided to build it myself. Free from compulsive norms and traditions. Free from the constraints of blood relations. Free from fears—

I go to sleep at night asking myself: How do we create spaces and homelands that are free from fear? What answers do you have?

Good night,

Miriam

 

28 January to 2 February 2025, Berlin, Germany

Dear Miriam,

When we first talked about our correspondence, I imagined writing this letter to you by the water, close enough to taste the salt of the Atlantic on my lips. I wanted to be in motion, to write to you from a ferry. Under no circumstances did I want to write in German, standing still, about Heimat*n. I started the letter several times: Hi Miriam, Apsilon says: ‘Fuck your integration / I feel good when I’m out of place’, and I wonder which longing I’ll let go of first, the longing for a place I feel good or the longing to be so cool that I feel good when I’m out of place. Dear Miriam, isn’t heimaten something we do for others? Hey Miriam, I’m listening to the latest Apsilon album again. Dear Miriam, I think: if heimaten is a verb, then it’s one like vertrauern or erfreudigen—a desperate attempt to define oneself despite the circumstances. I have nothing against this desperation: in French, or at least in my mother’s French, there’s an expression l’énergie du désespoir, the energy of despair. I’ve often acted out of this energy. I welcome it.

Dear Miriam,

I recently returned to Germany, and the news of the acquittal of Mouhamed Dramé’s murderers hit me surprisingly hard. It’s astonishing because I’m aware of the different values placed on human life by the society I live in. The next day, I was standing on the train watching drunk men pointlessly harassing each other, thinking ‘whatever’, until one of the drunk white men said, ‘They should be deported’, and the three men he was referring to got off the train. Heimat is where you deport people from. Where some can be drunk and rowdy and others cannot. I wonder if Heimat is where you don’t have to be quiet, sober, friendly, or discreet.

Now I’m sitting up, leaning on two cushions in a room in a B&B Hotel, the light from the breakfast room on the opposite side shining into my room. On the bedside table to my left is a book by June Jordan, a small frame with a twenty-year-old photo of my brother and my mother, and the (tolerable) smell of the plastic bowl of Nissin instant noodles that I poured water over for dinner last night. I feel infinitely lucky. It’s 7:45 a.m. I’m leaning against the two pillows, looking at the breakfast room, which I need to enter soon to be on time for my meeting, and of course this is the moment when all the feelings about home come up.

The more i think about the word—heimaten—the better i can think with it. Like the way i sometimes write all words in lower case in german to make it look more like french, so that the page has a familiarity to it. Even if i don’t do it very often—that’s my decision, my responsibility. A few years ago, i read an article with students in which the sociologist Avtar Brah talks about ‘homing desire’, a longing for an unshakeable sense of geographical belonging, but one that doesn’t exclude criticism of discourses about origin. I’m happy to take responsibility for my homing desire, my longing for a home that’s easy to imagine while on the move, my occasional minor concessions to the part of me that feels more comfortable in a language written in lower case. But it seems that there are people who don’t have to take responsibility for their sense of home. They wouldn’t have any homing desire, no moving and motivating longing, but only a very natural feeling, a very natural entitlement.

Dear Miriam,

I made it to breakfast. In grey leggings, a grey hoodie and a grey satin bonnet, I look like a little ghost. Saturday morning at the B&B Halle—two families, a couple of very old men in suits, a large table of young men in those Carhartt sweatshirts that I love, but that on them look like a disturbing uniform.

Hotel breakfast is an interesting scene anyway: obvious class privilege, rampant prejudice; reactions to the sight of me there ranging from surprise to fear to offense from other guests or staff. Being asked two or three times for my room number, then watching as everyone else just walks in. But fuck, here we go again. I want to write you philosophical, delicate but well-rounded thoughts, and I get caught up in the threads of crass banality, allowing myself to be distracted, even though Toni Morrison warned us about the distracting function of racism. ‘Scuse me’, says one of the very old men, reaching for cutlery below me, while I stand on tiptoe to take a bread roll from the high basket, because the only thing at eye level is organic eggs. And I’m like—

Oh Miriam, I don’t want you to think I’m rude or unfriendly or that I don’t respect the elderly and the physical toll the years take. You probably don’t think that anyway, but who knows—we don’t really know each other yet, and I want you to like me; and the wives of very old men, too, by the way, who I smile at to let them know that I’m not threatening, only that—and this is what I was getting at, Miriam—I refused to make room for the guy; I tensed my thighs and turned my body into a mountain, icy and immovable and unavoidable.

Last year, in a poem called ‘OBSTRUCTION’ I wrote:

[…] instead, i channel the menace of small obstacles,
the ball of hair that clogs the wheels of moribund
progression
nicknamed progress.
duck i bathe my feathers in shame then
rub myself against the passerby’s leg
he no longer feels innocent.
root i place myself inconveniently
enough for men to have to detour in
large, cumbersome moves.

In my reflection, i seek out the shape of
nettle
unseen at first then burning like hell
guarding the steps of a house or a son’s
bed or the room where lovers come.

Whatever the outline of my body, let it stand in the way.

And what does that have to do with heimaten, you ask me, at least in my mind. I imagine what it would be like not to spend all my time searching for the right shape for my body—years spent searching for the adjustment that would align my sense of home with the views of the people I share that home with. Then, years later, the search for the toughness that would protect me by turning me into an obstruction against racists and deporters and right-wingers. I often imagine what it would be like. What my body would look like if its outline were changeable.

When I recently told you about the African literature festival I attended in Morocco, I found it difficult to describe to you that fleeting feeling, the feeling of having the right body, the right heart. The changing outline of my body a natural thing. Perhaps that is a tendency of heimaten. And if not, then I don’t want to heimaten. I already know I don’t want a Heimat: I don’t want a country or a border with dead people on it, and I don’t want to be part of little groups of people shouting ‘mine, mine, mine’. I want those who love me and whom I love to warn me if I become overly possessive.

Dear Miriam,

Writing letters was one of the first assignments I had in German while learning the language. It was so strange: all the rules about where to put the date, the teacher’s red corrections, the notebooks that were lined very differently from those I had learned to write in in France, those damn capitalized words, which were somehow exciting, felt like an extra gadget, and the expectation that I completely surrender to a fictional ‘Viktoria’ from my holiday at the end. ‘Yours, Raphaëlle’ I should write, even though I had only known Viktoria from a few pages in the exercise book.

But just now I thought: this closing formula is also an expression of longing. A longing to belong to a person or a community. A longing for belonging. I’ve learned to love it.

In friendship and solidarity,
Yours,

Raphaëlle



3 February 2025, a conversation between Hamburg and Berlin, Germany

Miriam: Right now, I no longer believe that Heimat and home are what I was thinking of and what we wrote about. I now think that being in between, arriving at the non-binary, is where true home lies.

Another thought is that a homeland can also be or become a bad homeland. And yet it remains the homeland. If we imagine that people are anchored to a place, to a culture, and suddenly there is a coup or some other kind of change, little by little hatred can arise, perhaps something as terrible as war and genocide will happen. The Heimat—homeland? It won’t remain the same! If it has been destroyed, lies in ruins, what kind of homeland is it then? The idea that there’s such a thing as a permanent homeland is paradoxical.

We should ask: what is a good homeland? What is a desirable homeland? Then the questions of freedom, justice, and prosperity come more into focus.

When people in Germany talk about Heimat, it’s a projection. It’s always nostalgia for a past that never was, that no longer exists. And if it’s nostalgia, a memory of something, then it’s incomplete and romanticized. So fuck your Heimat.

Raphaëlle: Absolutely. I’m so glad we’ve reached this point. It’s really interesting to see Heimat as a nostalgic and even past-obsessed concept. And I also think: Fuck this Heimat. Above all, this nostalgia is clearly for a time when, for example, you and I didn’t exist. We’re not part of this nostalgia or of what is projected onto it and through it.

Miriam: Projected by whom?

Raphaëlle: When we talk about Heimat, the way it’s discussed in mainstream German discourse, or when we say: in reality, we’re not talking about something fixed. Instead, a nostalgic longing is solidified, and people pretend that it’s a real thing. And I would argue—regardless of whether it’s consciously or unconsciously racist—that you and I aren’t in the picture.

It strikes me how much this word Heimat has to do with the past and looking back. That’s an important revelation. I’m just imagining that we’re stripping this concept bare. This concept of Heimat is presented as something real, anchored in the present, connected to the past, but even then, only as a projection and not real. The way you describe it—and I would fully agree—what I hear is: the thing is just air. There’s actually nothing there.

Miriam: In many Afro-diasporic traditions, looking back, for example at one’s own roots and ancestors, is practised in a completely different way. It’s very important and always associated with empowerment. But it’s a different kind of memory than that associated with the word Heimat, because in the German context, Heimat is rooted in a specific location, and the location is strongly associated with borders and nationality. By contrast when we talk about ancestors, it associated with the people, their biographies, their lives, and their influence. For me, it’s not the same as a place that one calls one’s own. And yet, in some African cultures of remembrance, there’s also a longing for and connection to a place where, for example, ancestors are buried or the ethnic group feels connected. But if the idea of Heimat is always and exclusively linked to a place, then ‘your Heimat can become our nightmare’.[1] For sure.

Raphaëlle: Hmmm. But I think that Heimat—perhaps historically, definitely today—isn’t a word that describes a place but encloses it within boundaries. I would be reluctant to associate the feelings and traditions of being at home, of belonging, of connection to a country and a place that you describe with this German word Heimat, because I think that when we attempt to expand the concept of Heimat, we always encounter the paradox that Heimat is not just the place, but the place with the fence around it. The place that must not change; the place where not too many or even no people from outside are allowed to enter, because otherwise those inside will lose their homeland. How fragile that is! The place itself is not threatened by migration. If it were really just about the place, all these fretting German people would have nothing to worry about. The place remains completely intact. But the fact that they feel they are losing their homeland has to do with the fact that it’s always about the fence.

Miriam: And about the idea that their homeland belongs to them alone; that they have a claim to this specific place, as if through some primal force. And if this connection between claim and place is in danger, then they have the right to fight for it.

Raphaëlle: The irony is that if we’re really talking about the places that many people currently claim ownership of, if we’re really talking about who financed this prosperity, these buildings and these ports, and whose muscle and labour made it possible for Paris to have these buildings that people from all over the world come to visit—if we define who ‘owns’ them in this way, then it’s clearly, to a large extent, African and Afro-diasporic people. I’m not a fan of ownership as a concept, but even if I were to go along with it, this white French or white German claim to the homeland makes no sense. Then we could just as well argue that it also belongs to the descendants of countless people from African countries who therefore have every right to stay in France or Germany and not drown in the Mediterranean.

Miriam: I want to seize this concept: what should Heimat mean to us as marginalized and excluded people? How should we understand it? I think that’s almost more important than pointing out what is white or exclusionary. I want it to encompass us, too; to do what you just did, to change the perspective.

There’s something beautiful in our letters, and it’s so important that it’s given space. Of course, we can talk at length about how unhealthy this concept is and how it’s perceived by many in Germany. But I, too, feel the nostalgia of finding a place where I can arrive, where I am safe. We can also call it Heimat, but then I can build it anywhere, it can arise anywhere. This longing, which is contained in the word Heimat, exists in you and in everyone I know. There’s a kind of longing for a state of rest, of arrival, of creation and belonging. If we, as marginalized and excluded people, don’t get this from society, we will find it difficult to make this place our home. But that doesn’t mean that certain homes don’t already exist here. For example, when we feel at home in Black sisterhood.

Raphaëlle: That’s true. Yet I’m also concerned with the word itself. Heimat is so laden with violence and mechanisms of exclusion. What we wrote to each other, the way we talk about this longing is so nuanced and so open that I don’t necessarily want to associate it with the word Heimat. In our letters, we both talked about unrest versus security, about a feeling of home, of comfort and safety. I wonder if we’re trying to squeeze our feelings into this concept of Heimat in the hope that we can somehow expand the word. So my question is: Does that make sense? Wouldn’t we rather talk about our security, insecurity, belonging, our home, using words that feel inherently better? Otherwise, we’re just adapting to a certain narrative again, and even when we talk about ourselves, we’re back to the dominant society because we’re adopting its structures and narratives.

Miriam: This also applies to the question of whether we can appropriate the language, the word, for ourselves. Can we ‘occupy’ it, can we transform it? Or do we have to say goodbye to this language and this word? And not just this one: where else is the German language hurtful? Where does the language itself contain a mechanism of exclusion or a mechanism that is hurtful to marginalized people?

I have to think about whether I simply want to give up the word, because it can also be important to allow for transformation and not immediately cancel it, like: ‘That’s your word, then.’ No, it’s mine too, but I want to use it this way and give it a different meaning.

Raphaëlle: If we say we want to continue using the word, then it can only be as a genuine reappropriation, like the use of the N-word in the US. And there are two linguistic strategies for this: one is reappropriation, and the other would be to say that we reject the word, or rather that we leave it to racists, for example, but not because we’re giving it up, but because it has always belonged to them and we stop pretending that the word is neutral and can be used by everyone.

This may provide clarity about what the word actually means. My concern is that if we attempt to appropriate it, many people who may view this word as less problematic won’t see it as appropriation it in the sense of a fundamental redefinition, as with the N-word, but as evidence of the ‘rehabilitation’ of the old word, once it’s been vaguely diversified. And in doing so, we’re covering up the history and violence and specific worldview that the word embodies. That’s why I feel uncomfortable about it.

Miriam: We both carry different cultures within us, and they can’t be distinctly separated from one another. So we would constantly be chasing after this pure German sense of Heimat, because it doesn’t fit together. That means you never fit into this one idea. And basically, I don’t think anyone really fits in.

Raphaëlle: I think that it’s not just we who are chasing after this and could chase after it forever, but 99 percent or maybe even 100 percent of people. Perhaps it’s not just about carrying the cultures of two countries within you, but of two socio-economic classes. And if it’s not that, then it’s two cities, or it’s the village you come from and the city you live in. There are all kinds of variations on this supposed inner conflict.

Miriam: But I reject the fear that because of us this homeland is under threat. Because we have long belonged to this homeland and to many others, because the idea of homeland as something static has never corresponded to reality, ever. That’s why the nostalgia is entirely exclusionary.

Raphaëlle: That’s why I find the concept of ‘homing desire’ so interesting. Normalize the longing! The longing, which is sometimes also called an inner conflict, isn’t something that deviates from the norm—where the norm would be something like a clearly definable origin, a sense of home, a matter of course, from which the longing and the inner conflict then deviate. The way I like to think about heimaten as a verb finds its place precisely in this longing.

I think I could be quite happy with that if I hadn’t been told for twenty years that my longing is a problem. I think the problem was imposed on me before I could even find out for myself whether it was a problem for me. By calling it an inner conflict instead of longing. Sure, if you’ve been hearing about being caught between two stools since you were five years old, that sounds incredibly uncomfortable, and of course no one wants that. And then you have to go through this long process of thinking about it: Hey, is it actually that uncomfortable for me? Or is the metaphor just rubbish?

Miriam: I think your novel Adikou clearly demonstrated that. On the one hand, the search for one’s true self. But the search for a or the homeland is imposed on you. And the sadness, stress, and paranoia come from thinking you have to find it. Instead of saying you already have it. Or it can still happen. But from the outside, I’m constantly being told, ‘You have to decide. You have to choose one chair or the other.’ I’ve always said, ‘Stop it! I’m all of it.’

It’s not even possible. But you constantly try to be everything at once. That’s why there’s additional pain. So it’s not just the pain of ‘Who am I?’ Everyone has to go through that. It’s the pain that comes from a racist idea of identity. From a sense of segregation, a rigidity of culture that doesn’t allow for diversity, plurality, simultaneity. But we live in these simultaneities.

Raphaëlle: What strikes me now is that your letter ends with this question about fear. ‘How do we create spaces and homelands that are free from fear?’ After everything we’ve said, I almost feel that it’s an inherent paradox to search for a homeland without fear. Because, as you say, the search for a homeland already causes so much stress and sadness and, indeed, fear. Perhaps homeland is a concept that—at least as it has been taught and explained to us—conflicts with the way we live, the way we love. And conflicts with the freedom that exists in this longing. That’s the great thing about longing: it’s so closely linked to imagination. Anything is possible. In longing, simultaneity is possible. In longing, these parallel geographies are possible, these connections. That frees me a little from the fear of doing something wrong. I think I also wrote the novel because I always had the feeling that somehow, I was constantly doing something wrong. Somehow my life doesn’t fit in at all...

Miriam: ...in my homeland.

Raphaëlle: In my homeland, exactly. And I thought: What am I doing wrong all the time?

The next time I have this vague longing and think, I don’t have a homeland, my homeland is being denied me, I’ll break it down and say: Wait a minute, what is the object of my longing right now? Do I want to go to a familiar place? Because I know what my familiar places are. I know what they smell like, and I know how they feel. Or is it about hearing the language that is most familiar to me? Or is it about the food or the feeling of not being rejected or pushed away? I can always think about where I can get that feeling right now. That helps me feel more secure and free than trying to somehow come to terms with this homeland thing.

Miriam: What we’re doing right now reminds me of Stuart Hall’s work, in which he breaks down nationality. I don’t demand that we so blatantly deal with the concept of Heimat and this phenomenon. Because I notice that I get frustrated when it gets too academic. And I never demand that we come to a definitive conclusion.

That’s why I constantly feel wanderlust. Because I love Butterbrezel, but I also love injera. I love the vastness of the East African savannah, but I also love the Black Forest, the Allgäu, I want it all. But because these places are so far apart, I’m constantly filled with longing and perhaps also an inner conflict. I can’t be in several places at once. Maybe that’s what it’s all about: being able to deal with it and not speaking ill of it—which in turn has to do with what we’ve been led to believe. We’re the poor, confused victims and the impure. But no. So many people before us have felt this way. And that’s why Heimaten, because I think all that is my heimaten.


Translated from the German by Faith Gibson

 

 

[1] Fatma Aydemir and Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, eds., Eure Heimat ist unser Albtraum, expanded new edition (Berlin: Ullstein, 2024).