“Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home any more. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home.”
Dear Readers,
There was a time when I wouldn’t have given a second thought to opening a piece of writing with a quote. And yet here I am feeling like an intellectual impostor, contemplating how to justify my use of this heavily hackneyed literary technique.
But at the risk of subjecting you to some grand confession, or worse, a commentary on why writers shouldn’t suffocate self-expression by over-relying on quotes, which would really defeat the purpose of my ever-so-intriguing introduction-- I will refrain.
Coming back to the very thing that sparked this rant: the wonderful words of James Baldwin on the elusive nature of home. As an itinerant, it's something I’ve given a fair bit of thought to. It was the dissonance of home, similar to the one that Baldwin describes, that inspired some of my first writing. That bittersweet feeling of betrayal, when you can no longer recognize a place or the person you were when you lived in it.
The implication here is that home, cultural baggage and all, is a dynamic concept. Or at least that is how I have believed it to be.
And with that let me leave you a piece I just wrote called Of Cultural Incoherence, an attempt to make sense of home and everything it embodies.
As always, happy reading, reflecting and bearing with my musings.
Yours half-baked,
Saanya
PS if you’re curious, the James Baldwin quote is from his book Giovanni’s Room. Full review to follow on my Bookstagram handle.