In April 2024, we met at the Putney Public Library in London to start workshopping ideas about the future pieces. We had wonderful conversations about places, people, and languages close to our hearts, and worked on a very fun writing exercise.
Inspired by the Surrealist game exquisite corpse, writers collectively created multiple poems, which all had to begin with the words “Home is…”
Each poem is a polyphonic ensemble of voices, rhythms, and poetic images.
Home is where human beings are…
It’s where humanity and love meet at a junction called life.
It’s the warmth of a welcoming smile. The enveloping of a rich dinner table conversation. The love you feel for someone’s laugh.
The pinch that you ignore because it’s at home. The same pinch in a public place? You would have created an enraged roar. But mind you, home is also the place of “beings,” does not have to be “humans” all the time. Maybe a cockroach or a rodent?
Home is those people that call you on your birthday. No matter the time or place, they go to the shop and take the time to find a card you would find funny. Home is the people you would invite to your wedding. Even if you don’t ever plan on getting married, the thought of all of them in one room.
And there is no need to try because you understand every word written on every card. Its meaning comes to you, as naturally as your birthday comes to you, without your effort. It just happens, like how your mother tongue just happens, and your home just happens.
Home is where your head…
spills out of the window
and roams around
without knowing how
to return.
Or, even if you return
or even if it fits as your home.
Like an old childhood friend
desperately trying to make small talk
look for similarities
but the only relief is going back in time.
Outside every window
there hangs a clock,
like the moon.
Time follows a different order
on your moon clock.
Sometimes it returns you
to your childhood.
Or sometimes it’s the moon’s childhood.
The moon is a friend.
And so are the stars, the sun, the whole universe is your friend. And remember, you are forever that lovely creature called human.
Don’t wait for the return. You have another journey up ahead. What will you do with it all?
Home is the sea that doesn’t roar…
It doesn’t crash or beat the cliffs to a pulp. It becomes.
Although you yourself are a maze of darkness to follow the beckoning. The further you move the bigger yet fainter the sea seems. Maybe it crashes or beats to the people who came to stay near it. Who are you to say what home is? You’ve left it.
Home is realizing that it’s easier to let yourself go into the sea. Go with the waves, don’t fight against the inevitable foam coming your way. It’s noisy, uncontrollable, and intimidating, hard to define at times, not easy to compartmentalize.
Home is a shell washed ashore, a different shore, multiple shores, over and over again. It is clean, beautiful, and dead, like a lot of things in the sea, from the sea. What makes it beautiful is its remembrance of all the deaths.
Home is where memories are. Not just good ones but bad one’s, too. As to remember the good things, sometimes makes us forget the goodness of bad things.
Home is where the heart is…
they say, but mine is divided in three messy pieces, multiple homes, is really what I feel I have.
But a heart, in itself, has multiple chambers. In which chamber lingers my home, and where is my heart of hearts? If a heart gets broken, do I get more homes? I will end up with a beehive but I’m not a bee.
If you can’t be the bee then be the honey, to feed the world. Be sweet and melt under every human tongue forever. Be sick with it. So open with generosity. It empties you. And refills again. Each time another melody of heart.
Melody of heart? How about melody of body? Is this not what home is for? To learn the melody of the body? To hear the melody of your mum’s womb. The forever divided, forever joined-up tie that you want to get away from, but you just retrieve. Oh, yes, you do return to the multiple chambers that you want to call home.
Home is where you are not…
where you imagine your presence and absence at the same time. But how? We leave but we stay.
We know each other but we don’t. Home is where we smell, heart, touch, taste, and humanity, where authenticity mixes with soil. It’s aching roots still on your back, weaving their irrevocable map. Every new branch felt in all its pruning pain and joy. You will never forget it.
Forget? No, you re-member every grain of forgetfulness. The love you never had, the warmth you missed, the quarrel your sister won, the prize that your brother tricked you to give away. And the joy! Oh the joy of making it to home. From school, from the shop, from the local field, from the first kiss that made you feel wet even in your toes.
Leaving home makes you remember it all with much more clarity. You don’t take it for granted, you become the person with the sharpest memory in your family. Which also makes you the black sheep, the one who always brings up the past, the shit-stirrer. Home is wondering if it really happened or if you’ve been making it up all these years.
Migrant Writing 