There’s No Place Like Home: Only Somewhere In-Between, Part I
by Péjú Oshin AFHEA
They say that home is where the heart is, but what if where we consider to be home is still an unknown? What happens when everywhere we place our feet somehow reverberates through our bodies causing a confusion within us because the places that we travel to and through seem to exist in the liminal?
As children of the African diaspora, these spaces hold the possibilities for the creation of memory and nostalgia while simultaneously holding up a mirror to the present as we start, or maybe continue, the journey to locate ourselves in the now, as we desperately try to stabilise the futures that we will into existence for ourselves and the hopes of our parents who brought us to these foreign lands that we now call ‘home’.
Péjú Oshin giving an art talk at the British Museum (2016)
Home always feels like an easy word as it is one of the first that we learn. It is part of the language that we are given by our parents, carers and educators who form part of the vital structures within the context of our primary socialisation, which is attributed to later stabilising our adult personalities as described by sociologist Talcott Parsons.
As children we are trained through the process of repetition to locate where home is: as we close our front doors behind us each morning, then arriving at school, where we are asked to tell our classmates what home looks like, and who occupies that space with us, then leaving to repeat the same journey in reverse, telling those within our containers about the details of the lives that we now see outside of our own.
“Home always feels like an easy word as it is one of the first that we learn.”
Image: Limbo, Between Words & Space (2021) by Péjú Oshin. Photo: RAI
People whose home lives sound similar but are wrapped in nuances that we are yet to understand – we are operating at the lowest common denominator and so this is how the process of our shared experiences begin.
Home always feels like an easy word as it is one of the first that we learn. It is part of the language that we are given by our parents, carers and educators who form part of the vital structures within the context of our primary socialisation, which is attributed to later stabilising our adult personalities as described by sociologist Talcott Parsons.
As children we are trained through the process of repetition to locate where home is: as we close our front doors behind us each morning, then arriving at school, where we are asked to tell our classmates what home looks like, and who occupies that space with us, then leaving to repeat the same journey in reverse, telling those within our containers about the details of the lives that we now see outside of our own.
Stills from Péjú Oshin´s conversation with YPPE curator Nicole Rafiki. Photo: RAI
“Perhaps in a world where we cling so tightly to our national identities because the majority of things are in flux, unity, although required, is menacing because it necessitates a relinquishing of control and a temporary, perhaps permanent, occupancy of the in-between that voids us of an absoluteness.”
People whose home lives sound similar but are wrapped in nuances that we are yet to understand – we are operating at the lowest common denominator and so this is how the process of our shared experiences begin.
As we develop through our teenage and adult years, the ‘shared experience’ is one that we seek out increasingly. Our feelings of being alone or not quite ‘fitting in’ often accelerate a need to draw links and parallels to people, places and objects that offer familiarity. We find this particularly in how we engage with the arts, be it as participant or producer.
As art, artist and audience engage in a dialogue supported by the many other vital elements of an arts ecosystem, language rises to the surface again with specific thought about where one might place oneself to be understood by the surrounding world.
Still From That's Not My Name (2015). Courtesy of Péjú Oshin
For some, the categorisation of being a ‘A Black [insert noun]’ does not always do the job of speaking to and for what is in front of us, as it only tells part of the story and opens up a Pandora’s box of questions in asking ‘where is home?’. This question, in its many variances, has been the subject of numerous think-pieces and sparks feelings of anxiety and frustration.
Even when the respondent feels sure of their answer, there is a process of second-guessing oneself, as many of us have gravitated towards a multi-hyphenated approach to identifying ourselves. This is a methodology of multiplicity that, at best, helps us to identify, explain and maybe soothe and protect the wholeness we crave. I think of the term Afropolitan – partly coined and popularised by Taiye Selasi in a 2005 essay[1] – and wonder what a continued shift in questioning towards ‘where are you local to?’ might start to afford us.
[1] Taiye Selasi, ‘Bye-Bye Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?)’, LIP Magazine, March 2005, https://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/2005/03/03/bye-bye-barbar/.
Péjú Oshin is a British-Nigerian curator, writer and educator based in London. Her work explores liminality in culture, identity and the built environment through working with artists, archives and cultural artefacts to create and further explore shared experiences across a global African diaspora.