What is home? Since I was forced to leave my hometown, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, I have not been able to stop thinking about what home means for people who are trying to survive in exile. After much reading, reflections and discussions with friends on and offline, I have concluded that home is more complex than I’d ever imagined. I have arrived at the point where I doubt whether words could even capture the concept at all. So, what is home? People of different backgrounds have said so many things about home in so many ways. There’s the famous English idiom “home is where the heart is”, which means, per Oxford References Online, “a person’s home is not necessarily where one actually lives but where his affections are directed”. Similarly, Vernon …show more content…
A lot of things could be said in this regard. But for this essay, home should be understood as a concept or idea that is fluid, layered, shifting and relative depending on time, place and conditions of a person whose home is under discussion. Home could be adjustable or could have contrasting meanings such as happiness and sadness; the places and times to be remembered both for its goodness or badness such as joy, celebrations, festivity or oppression, dispossessions or for its savageries & cruelties. Home could also be very subjective reclamation of self and regaining of lost identity. For instance, the escaped former ISIS’s sex slaves in Syria can remember all these contrasting realties about her home after she has got to one of the western cities as refugees. Therefore, it could be changing, relative and …show more content…
For instances, most of the Jewish people, who were scattered all over the world since the destruction of their Temple by Romans in first century A.D (online Jewish Encyclopedia), had been longing to be in Jerusalem for about two thousand years before they established State of Israeli in 1948. Except for the first generation of exiles, it is safe to say that Jerusalem had never been known to generations of Jewish people who were longing, praying, and dreaming to go home which was, of course, Jerusalem. In this specific example, home could be even the spiritual sphere where a person having faith that she will go to by escaping from the injustices and evils that she faces here on