On Homemaking, Materiality and Exile
Text by Rashof Salih (Freie Universität Berlin)
Photo by Rashof Salih
This essay aims to take a closer look at objects as such and the affective bonds we build and nurture with them. Therefore, I seek to outline and understand the connection between objects and the practices and processes of homemaking and the emotional labour it entails. In doing so, I take an autobiographical approach and place my personal experiences of forced migration at the center of the analysis. Building on this, I will explore how the engagement with, and use of objects play a role in the various ways in which home is made and unmade transnationally, and the ways in which objects and possessions can mediate the process of home reproduction and belonging in exile.
"Mine is the ghost and the haunted one.
The copper pots, The Throne Verse, and the key are mine.
The door, the guards and the bell are mine.
The horseshoe that flew over the walls is mine.
Mine is all that was mine.
The pages torn from the New Testament are mine.
The salt of my tears on the wall of my house is mine.”[1]
Mahmoud Darwish - Mural (2000)
I sit on the sofa in my living room and quietly observe the space around me, letting my gaze flow over the space while my eyes register the pictures. I glance at my books, the green plants scattered around me, the pots of flowers and vegetables leaning on the side of the balcony, souvenirs on the shelves, pictures on the walls, paintings, my stock of olive oil in the corner, dishes, cooking utensils and the spice rack that's about to explode. At this moment, it all feels so surreal. When did it all come together? Although the answer to that question is not a mystery, as I have collected every single item in this room patiently and carefully over the past 8 years. And yet it still feels unreal. There are still days when all of this feels like a vivid dream, so true, yet I am on the verge of waking up from it. And days when all of this seems unfamiliar and disjointed.
The idea for this essay emerged during a seminar, where we were asked to bring an object that played a major role in a crisis situation, being the COVID-19 pandemic, and try to use this object to narrate the emotional experience of this time. I went back home that day after the seminar and wandered in my flat trying to find my object. Suddenly photos, smells and moments started flashing in my head while I was looking at the different things around the place. At that moment, I realised how much the mere idea of having all these objects around me affects me emotionally, simply because they evoke home.When you arrive with nothing but your passport to a new place, how will it ever be home? If you have no connection to the things in that place, is it really home? Clear white walls, empty kitchens, identical Ikea furniture that all of Berlin has, are too generic to be home. Spices all over kitchen shelves, photos around the place, random clothes that I can complain about not wearing for the past years, and plants growing out of control is what makes a place home for me. It’s the feeling that I am not a time passer here, that was embodied in all the things around me.
Home and Homemaking: An Introduction
It was just like those days 8 years ago that I arrived here in Berlin with nothing but my personal documents, my phone, and a jacket. Later that month, a parcel that had a much more pleasant journey than the one I had, arrived in Berlin as well. Inside was my laptop, 4 photo albums and 3 small boxes of various bits and pieces and a few items of clothing. At that moment, these things were my world. Wherever me and these things existed, was home. A tiny, sticky, fragmented home that could barely hold itself together.
Home, in the sense of shelter, has been a fundamental aspect of human life throughout evolution, but soon home began to play a more complex role in the everyday life. This process of homemaking has become intertwined with notions of belonging to a place, of relational and social ties, or even of ownership and possession, as home became something that is “constructed, built or made” (McCarthy 2020, 1309) over time and space. Objects more specifically shape homes through the way we collect, display, and use them as they act as reflection and extension of us in one way or another. Through these artifacts and objects, we can “create, recreate and display (…) personal, familial, ethnic, religious, social, professional, etc. identities” (Brujić 2023, 304–05).
These roles that objects play are omnipresent in every house, yet the significance of these objects becomes more visible when home, as such, shatters or becomes unreachable. To trace this connection, various disciplines, anthropology in particular, have long been paying more and more attention to the study of the social functions of domestic possessions in general and recently more specifically in the context of migration, with an interest in understanding how objects hold memories, evoke emotions and display belonging for (enforced) migrants, as “the relationship between migrants and their ‘material worlds’ represents a newly expanding social science field” (Brujić 2023, 305)[2]. Further, contemporary works attempt to shed light on the similarity of the relationships we build and nurture with things to the relationships we build with other individuals. This is because both kinds of relationship can have similar psychological and social significance for us, as they both provide us with emotional grounding and feelings of companionship (Pérez Murcia and Boccagni 2022, 591).
Thus, for a long time, the focus of the literature on this topic was ‘home’ in ‘homeland’. Recent works though have shifted the focus to migrant practices of homemaking (Fathi 2021, 980) that is things that give home a meaning (Blunt and Dowling 2006). Nevertheless, much scholarly work still places emphasis on ‘ethnic’ objects. The centrality of the ethnic component [3] in such studies has the disadvantage that such studies can fall into the trap of overstating the importance of migrant objects or adopting an orientalist lens of analysis (Pérez Murcia and Boccagni 2022, 595, 601–02). Transcending such orientalist perspectives, Luis Eduardo Pérez Murcia and Paolo Boccagni (2022) try to understand the power of objects in the process of both homemaking and home reproduction. Their study identifies four ideal typical functions that objects play in migrants’ lives, and that is “embodying collective backgrounds and identities, affording migrants to feel at home, encapsulating their biographical memories and ties and eliciting connections with settings and events that meant ‘home’ over their life course” (Pérez Murcia and Boccagni 2022, 590).
However, my focus here is less on what certain things symbolize and how they evoke emotions of collective belonging and more on the individual experience of owning things after losing everything. I shed light on the stability that this action offers in relation to being constantly on the move. It is about the affective process of being able to put down roots in a place and not be pushed aside, focusing on the here and now and the need to feel at home as a way of countering alienation. Therefore, I approach the concept of home as a ‘search’ (Fathi 2021), rooted in the practices of homemaking rather than in the stable physical entity of place. In this sense, objects here are tools that mediate our search amidst efforts to navigate the new unknown in exile.
Homing: An Emotional Need
It was August 2012, I was standing in the middle of the living room, suitcases packed, face tense and eyes wandering around the place. I don’t remember the exact moment. But around that time, I gave away my personal key to my childhood home, the first house key I ever had. After that, the images in my head get fuzzy, but the story is clear. That was the last time I stepped out of that door frame. Cars, buses, ships, and planes took me far from home over the years. Here I am, living over 10 years later in another continent, writing about it as if it was yesterday and as if time had stopped that day and I had just stepped out of a still picture frame.
Years later, when I came to Berlin for the first time, I lived – compared to others – for a short time in a refugee camp that was the polar opposite of a home. You are not allowed to bring your own things, welcome guests, or even choose when you leave and when you come back. The agency that home entails was simply not available, and its denial was enforced by law. So, I tried to move out as soon as possible. I started living with a friend and he started collecting our empty wine bottles. Our first flat moving – which was followed by many to come – consisted of a small red suitcase, that had all our stuff combined, a backpack with our devices and personal papers and a box filled with bottles. These bottles that brought many laughs and jokes over the years, were heavy to carry, almost injured me severely when a pile of them just fell down, were a safety hazard for any child in the place, and almost caused the bookshelf to burst due to the pressure exerted on the sides. But looking back, it seemed like this action was a subconscious decision to collect memories in our new world. An object that puts us in the stream of normal life, as if these were the only witnesses that life is still moving. A birthday wine bottle, the bottle opened when we found a new flat, a bottle after the first day in the German language course. From this red suitcase and bottles box a Frankenstein home sprouted over the years. Pieces came, pieces went, and the process of making a space feel like home never stopped, as my relationship with space, time and objects continues to be ambivalent.
Making my home here in Berlin, piece by piece, was not just an emotional need, but also a socio-political decision, to be included, and influential in the space. To take agency as a refugee to represent oneself, and to move from the periphery to the centre, as homemaking reaches out of the space of a house and goes beyond it to aspects of “bridging and bonding, making boundaries or opening spaces for others” (Gezici and Düzen 2021, 674). The action of homemaking as a migrant becomes an act to reclaim the right to exist in a space and make it safe, personal, and intimate, a sense of “resistance” as Mastoureh Fathi (2021) describes, and “lifelong struggle for recognition” (Fathi 2021, 988).
Yet not all objects are settled in the here and now, some bridge the connection between the past and present, and keep this connection between the migrant I and the normal I alive. According to Pérez Murcia and Boccagni (2022), pictures are one example of such time capsule objects, as they allow us to “coalesce the memories of people, places and events that lie at the core of migrants’ sense of home and make them symbolically present, while physically remote” (Pérez Murcia and Boccagni 2022, 599). The pictures that made it to Germany with me are among my most precious possessions, because they are my reminder or my proof that I did not begin to exist at the moment I arrived here, that I had a life before that. A life full of family, memories, food, holidays by the sea, laughs, tears, birthdays and much more. As a forced migrant, this previous life is almost disregarded. All these moments are compressed and sifted to keep only the sad story that brought you here. You present this selected story to the court to gain as much sympathy as possible. Because that is your ticket to get asylum and thus live in safety. After you have passed this stage, you are required in every form to “integrate” or rather assimilate. And this pressure pushes you far away from your memories, strips you of the right to be yourself, and waits for you to forget. With photos, you fight amnesia and keep the memory alive. Pictures scattered around the house become my sensory guide, I look at them and smells, textures, faces, and sounds fly by.
Coping Through Homemaking
When looking back at the past years, I realize that my need to transform the space that I live in to become home became my coping mechanism. Devora Neumark (2013 as cited in Jacobs and Gabriel 2013, 214) also points out in their work so elegantly that “the way we feel at ease in the world is through the creation and modification of our home”. This has less to do with the objects themselves, but more with how we affect them and vice versa, as through this affective relationship a sense of what the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991) describes as ‘ontological security’, is established. My feeling of security was sometimes maintained by having certain cultural items or having personal belongings around the space, but the turning point in my process of homa making was having plants. Like many other people during the nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, I did 30 days of home workout challenges, I cooked, read, and changed the décor of my flat. But something was still messing and missing. I missed home! While being captive at home. It was this constant need to familiarise the space and create a new home (Pérez Murcia and Boccagni 2022, 592). I started to obsess about plants and gardening, so it became difficult to move around in my small Berlin WG. You could easily knock a plant off the ground, or if you moved your arms too fast, you would probably hit a leaf. Having all these green plants around me brought me back home, where my mother managed to find a place for something green in every corner, and where the grape clusters hung like little chandeliers from the sky above our terrace. I remember the first time I brought a plant home; I felt a responsibility to care for it and my heart grew with every new leaf. How do things become so close to the heart?
One other way of caring for things was collecting unwanted stuff because one of my favourite Berlin activities was passing by the Sunday flea markets and searching Facebook groups for giveaway things. This all started as I was once picking up an artwork of a dancing Sufi from a random girl from Facebook. The piece was not in its best shape, but I wanted to have it anyway. When I arrived at the meeting point, the girl and me started talking, and she told me that her mom made this artwork by hand many years ago, and it was just sitting in the corner of the house unattended collecting dust, that is why they were giving it away. This story touched me, and I suddenly had an emotional connection with the object. I went back home and got to work to restore it and refresh its paint. Since then, it has always been hanging in the middle of the main wall of any flat I lived in. From that time on, I have become interested in collecting such items, and giving them life again. Every time I bring something with me, it feels like not only things are giving me home, but I am doing the same to the things.
Conclusion
Eight years have passed, and Berlin does not feel like home. On the contrary, it feels more and more foreign with time. I cannot pinpoint where this feeling stems from. But I stopped trying, not because I gave up, but simply because it does not matter anymore. Not every place needs to feel like home. I enjoy living in Berlin. I like Berlin, but it does not have to be Berlin, it can be Beirut, Brasília or Belgrade! Eventually, and ironically enough, it was not the place that made home for me, it was the things! As Braeunlein (2020, 2 as cited in Pérez Murcia and Boccagni 2022) observes, “home and belonging are atmospherically produced, and this requires things”.
This feeling of home remains ambivalent. Today I may sit on my sofa and feel warmth, belonging and love, and tomorrow that same sofa will be a brick stool. So cold, stiff, and grey. Some days I feel rooted, connected, and present. Other days it’s hard to sustain those feelings. I feel so far away. Home feels so pieced together. Like pieces of a puzzle that just don’t fit together. It’s my own personal Frankenstein that I lose control over some days.
Three years ago, I moved to my current apartment. The place had nothing in it but light bulbs, blank white walls, and empty rooms. The first thing that I brought with me on the first visit was a small baby plant, propagated from the very first plant that I managed to keep alive. It took us very long to gather everything together. But now I sit on the sofa in my living room and observe quietly the space around me and feel a sense of achievement. As Fathi (2021, 989) remarks in his work: the process of homemaking entails a sense of salvation, as I keep on planting my home down, not in the ground but in pots.
Notes
[1] Darwish, Mahmoud. 2013 [2000]. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems / Mahmoud Darwish, Sinan Antoon, Amira El-Zein. Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein (eds.). [Online]. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
[2] On this topic see also Miller (1998; 2008) and Wang (2016, 3).
[3] On the ethnic lens in migration studies, see Glick-Schiller (2014).
References
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