Provoking question: How do we find ourselves at home in settler colonial societies? How do we approach land, food, and spirituality from the perspective of Home? What does it mean to belong?
In Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s poem “Permanent Home,” I find prompts for reflecting on what it means to diasporically inhabit a colonized place.
I seek a permanent home, but this structure has an appearance of indifferent compoundedness and /isolation, heading toward hopelessness.[1]
The search to resolve longing and lack through “home” opens onto an unfriendly abyss. Its yearning for attachment is unrequited, lonely, and almost despairing. In attempts to heal unbelonging, we might readily center the people and structures that uphold empire rather than our relationships to Land or the people whose land we are on. Berssenbrugge suggests,
Give a house the form of an event.
Relate it to something there, a form of compassion.[2]
Perhaps this is compassion for the reach for home, belonging, and safety, which can only be experienced ephemerally and are not lasting possessions or states of being. Accepting these forms of impermanence allows for alternatives:
You don’t have to consume the space to exist…[3]
What we perceive as our shelter within colonial structures may instead be negative space—an unseeing of what else exists, and the absence of what can be built instead.
Food
Spirituality
Land