Not as a Noun but as a Verb: Alvin Pang and Laura Jane Lee on home
State of Play brings together conversations between an international line-up of poets, taking place over the course of a year. Edited by Eddie Tay, a Singapore-born, Hong Kong-based poet, and literature professor, and Jennifer Wong, a Hong Kong-born, British-based poet, and Wasafiri's former writer in residence, the anthology explores themes ranging from the sense of home and racialised expectations, community, and language. In this extract from their essay in the collection, Alvin Pang and Laura Jane Lee dwell on the 'unhomed world' and 'home-loose-ness', belonging, and nomadic beings.
Alvin
16 August 2022 Umbria, Italy
As I write this, I am making a sort of home out of a room in Civitella Ranieri, a 15th century castle in central Italy that hosts a long-standing creative residency programme. The air is sweet with hay, summer vegetables, garden herbs, and the olivine air of the Umbrian mineral hills that surround us. Unlike my home city of Singapore, with its hyper-urban clamour and equatorial swelter, the castle offers comforting affordances of quiet, cool, vista, clean air, stretch space, and, most of all, free time. The good people behind this residency work hard to make a home for artists, writers and musicians here. They tend to our needs and then leave us be, to tend to our own processes. They know they cannot do our work for us, but what we experience is their love for the land, for the place, and for the mysterious and fickle weather of creativity under which we labour and seek nourishment.
A restless spirit such as myself can sometimes wonder why it is that my creative energies are always pulling me elsewhere than home (meaning my legal, long-term place of residence, my domicile, my permanent address). A fellow resident artist here asked whether I do most of my work at home. I replied that, apart from differences in quantity and quality of time and attention spent, some part of my creative process always involves being outdoors, or elsewhere, than my usual desk at home; that I find the tension between staying and going, the familiar settled here and the fluid there, stimulating. One of the definitions of home in the Oxford English Dictionary is a place or condition in which something thrives. In that sense, my creative spirit calls that electric gradient home.
My physical body, another kind of home, needs rest, but it also needs movement. It craves comfort but is also curious for sensory input. Intimacy, to me, is a puncturing of aloneness through encounter with an other; it is the gift of vulnerability, which can otherwise evoke terror.
In the same way a castle’s primary purpose is fortification against pregnability, this is home as keep: keeping out and keeping in. When these parameters are defined to a satisfactory balance, trade and traffic become possible. A castle that is absolutely impermeable—that lacks doors and windows; that disallows the passage of water, air, sustenance, occupants, visitors—is lethal and lifeless. What I mean by home might be a kind of managed and manageable permissiveness; a translucency; a filtering; an open well, not a closed urn.
Robert Frost has written, somewhat sardonically, ‘[h]ome is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’ Home in this sense is that which is permeable to us; that lets us in, even as so many structures in the world are about filtering us out in various ways: borders, standards, categories, labels, qualifications, genres, genders, institutions, proprieties, budgets, disciplines… At the same time, there are also situations that shake what we know; that crack our sense of home; that are impenetrable in their ineffability: the death of a loved one, for instance. Or, for many these days, war. The spit of steel against a neck. But it could also be the birth of a child; the discovery of a secret; the burn of a touch, long missed, after a spell of denial or absence.
It is not our place in the world but the world’s place in us that I want to think about during my stay here. In Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit writes of Kierkegaard as an example of a thinker as solitary walker, who as a class of people are ‘unsettled, between places, drawn forth into action by desire and lack, having the detachment of the traveller rather than the ties of the worker, the dweller, the member of a group’. I ask myself:
Can one abide, learn to inhabit, a state not of homelessness but of home-loose-ness?
Do our walls walk with us always?
Is it the distinctive trait of the artist to be nomadic in disposition; to seek sail over shore, even if we might be stemmed in one ground or another?
Are we the ones for whom a window is always open, a door unlatched, springing leaks to and from the unhomed world?
Laura Jane
26 August 2022 Singapore
Where?
I think I understand what you mean when you say that your writing lulls you elsewhere than home. In that sense, your restless energy is not so different from my own restless bones, though the chief difference here is that home is first and foremost a prerequisite for exploring the wide world which lies beyond. Now, after being hastily uprooted from home soil, I think that to be safely nomadic is to always have somewhere to return to permanently. To be home-loose, is as you said, to have somewhere they'll have to take you in.
Lately, I have returned to your city after an extended stay in the UK, and have been stirred at how simple home is to many. Having left some clothes in my parents’ house, my mother told me to ‘come home often’, which deeply irked me, because it is not my home, though she might maintain that it is ‘her house with my room in it’. I said something to the effect of ‘my home is the one I will pay for myself’, though now, having become engaged, I wonder if I would be a ‘houseowner’ or a ‘homeowner’.
What is the difference between owning a home and having one?
I am deeply aware of my legal status in this country as a ‘Long-Term Pass Holder’ rather than a Permanent Resident, and the perhaps pragmatic desire to be able to permanently reside here. Yet I keep contemplating the morality of becoming absorbed into the country. Having been ejected from my city, Hong Kong, where I was born and raised, and unable to return, home feels like an unfinished matter.
Do I dare think about sinking roots?
Perhaps for now, home is having an anchor in a safe harbour, a permanent mooring. Home is a very heavy stone. Paperweight. Carabiner. Though part of me wishes to engage in the act of burying, of burrowing, of belonging, I know that nothing of me can stop my being uprooted, dug up and sent away.
Yes, this seventh month, I am thinking of Hungry Ghosts and their restlessness.
This summer, I visited Oxford, and found that I did not need a map to get around. I visited my favourite haunts with my fiancé and for a moment or two felt something almost adjacent to home, though perhaps more in the person that tethered me like a point of light to the wide, dark world.
Do you think somebody could be home?
Often I have asked him, and he would motion towards a point to the left of his chest, saying ‘here’.
I must confess I do not know how much of home is ‘place’ and how much is ‘person’, and that I am afraid to even think of wandering the world without first having somewhere to return to. So for now I will let my thoughts wander for me, while I write myself (a) home.
I do not think I could ever be nomadic. Migratory, perhaps, like birds, or wild geese. Yes, if I ever had a home I never lost it would be the Mary Oliver poem that held me together.
Alvin
26 August 2022 Umbria, Italy
Your reply makes me think of home not as a noun but as a verb. To home: to adopt, house, give shelter to, take in. To home in on: to seek out and approach with clarity, focus and commitment. So a question for me is how? rather than where?
In reading Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, I am reminded that nomadic peoples traditionally have a stable relationship to their routes and landscapes. They move more like seasonally migratory birds than wanderers. But I am also thinking about those who wayfare (in Tim Ingold’s sense of wayfaring)—who have honed their senses and skills to read the terrain wherever they are and to proceed from there; they do not drift but ride the waves: they are, in a sense, always at home because they always know where they are relative to their circumstances, and know how to find their way and keep going. This is, to me, a kind of taking oneself in: and it calls for both an awareness of self and its relations to and in the world, as well as a kindness to oneself.
Perhaps one learns this awareness and this kindness through practice: by relating to others, navigating forms of kinship. Kin / ship: nearby vessels on the seas of human connection ...
Attend the online launch of State of Play on 9 November 2023 and purchase the book here.
All photos courtesy of Out-Spoken Press.
