Last night, I dreamed that the house in which I was living, and with which I felt smugly satisfied, began to disintegrate around me. If this was a classic case of subliminal insecurity syndrome, who could be surprised? I might feel safe and sound in my present circumstances, but life is a pitfall waiting to happen – and that’s before you factor in the steady progress being made by authoritarian tyrants and their billionaire accomplices making short work of capturing power via wealth, limiting political freedom and destroying the ecosphere with their extractive, destructive economic policies.
So, now
that’s off my chest, and notwithstanding the slough of despond into which I am
trying to avoid sliding on account of foresaid doom scenario, I want to make it
clear that I live in an apartment, not a house, though my point is somewhat
pedantic in that respect. Whatever the form of dwelling in which one happens to
reside, the important thing is not to confuse it with ‘home’. Is it just me, or
do others shout at the telly when politicians promise to build new “homes”,
when what they really mean is habitations? A house is not a home. Home is where
your heart is – or where you hang your hat. Just ask anyone who is homesick.
What’s more, it is misleading to refer to people as homeless, when what they
really lack is shelter. It is perfectly possible to be at home, i.e. on the
street, in the town of your birth, yet without a residence.
If you
happen to visit the Tate Modern, London, you will be able to see exhibitions by
two artists that illustrate the difference. Aboriginal Australian artist Emily
Kan Kngwarray painted her home, whereas South Korean artist Do Ho Suh
reconstructs the houses he has lived in.
The
traditional lifestyle of the Aboriginal Australians did not involve the
building of permanent dwellings, therefore in referencing her home pictorially,
Kngwarray had no problem of definition. She painted the landscape and the flora
and fauna that inhabited it; in other words, her homeland and that of her kin –
which included its non-human inhabitants, whose spirits are revered. This was
the sole subject of her work. She hardly ever left the Northern Territories (her
region is called Utopia, so named in 1978 as a result of aboriginal activism) and
she certainly never travelled abroad.
Do Ho Suh,
on the other hand, has lived and worked in three cities that he has, at one
time or another, called ‘home’ – Seoul, New York and London. By his own
account, all three have shaped his experience of life and deposited memories
into his subconscious mind. His ingenious re-creations of the houses he lived
in contain these memories and illustrate his point that ‘home’ is not necessarily a fixed
place. It evolves over time and is redefined as we move through the world.
This last
point might be contested by those who have experienced the trauma of forcible
expulsion or who have become refugees from war and other disasters. Their
experiences have nothing to do with lifestyle choices. The visceral pull to
one’s home is not simply geographical; it is tied up with community and
tradition as well. It is also surprisingly local. Studies of statistics in the
(relatively small) UK indicate that the average UK adult lives 25 miles from
where they were born, only a slight increase on the 19 miles that was recorded
in 1921.
So, as I sit
comfortably in our well-maintained apartment, in the city of my father’s
ancestry (though I spent my entire working life elsewhere), I feel at one with
the statistics, though uneasy about the latent, snugness-induced tendency to
smugness. Perhaps my dream was a wake-up call.
