The End of Belonging
Untold stories of leaving home and the psychology of global relocation
Why spurn my home when exile is your home?
The Ithaca you want you’ll have in not having.
You’ll walk her shores yet long to tread those very grounds,
kiss Penelope yet wish you held your wife instead,
touch her flesh yet yearn for mine.
Your home’s in the rubblehouse of time now,
and you’re made thus, to yearn for what you lose.
Andre Aciman, Out of Egypt: A Memoir (1994)
View from a Calcutta Roof
This book is based upon individual accounts of leaving home; autobiographies of homelessness by unsettled people who move from place to place, country to country, in search of fulfilment. I am one of those people, both fortunate and unfortunate, as perhaps are you. There are many like us, increasingly many all around the world, who share this deep invisible affinity. We are a community that lurks on the edge of community, without a sense of belonging, a community that denies its own existence. We are an alternative human history, unrecorded and unacknowledged even by ourselves, until now. These are our haunting stories of life, adventure, longing, and loss. Within these stories is an implicit warning to a world that seems on the verge of destroying its capacity to be a home for us, to offer us any sense of belonging.
The existential migrant, as I call us, chooses to leave their homeland, pushed out by deep questions that can’t be answered at home, pulled into the wide world in order to discover what life is. We are living paradoxes. We need to feel at home but have never done so, we need to belong but shun opportunities for belonging, we venture out into the unknown in order to experience the homecoming that will finally settle us, but doesn’t.
The topic of this book was uncovered quite by accident during intensive in-depth interviews with twenty people who had chosen to leave home to live in a foreign country. The results of those interviews have subsequently been confirmed by numerous contacts from other voluntary migrants, some of who are also psychological researchers. Those initial interviews were part of an original research project that took place in London at the turn of the century and culminated in the new term ‘existential migration’ which will be described later. This book and its contents do not come from abstract theories or post-modern speculation. This book is based upon the actual accounts of leaving, arriving, staying, returning, and the better understanding that those people gave me of my own restlessness, wandering and longing. Whether you have left home, are desperate to leave home, never found home, been unexpectedly unsettled by moving to another culture, or have accidentally found yourself lost in the world, I hope that reading these experiences will offer some succour or at least encourage you to speak about your own experiences of leaving and living abroad.
Before I started research into the experience of voluntary migrants I had already spent a year researching the experience of young doctors working in an inner city London hospital. The radical turn in attention, from studying medical staff to exploring voluntary migration, crystallised during a two-week visit to Calcutta and Kathmandu; two weeks which instigated a profound and transformative shift in me. It is worth mentioning some specifics of that trip since it somehow drew to the surface a nascent experience of ‘homelessness’ that had been formulating un-thought within me over years. In retrospect, I realise that the profound issue of not-being-at-home has always been a powerful undercurrent in my life, guiding much more than the research project and this book.
In spring 2001 I took a break from the stressful confines of my hospital project and travelled to Asia at the invitation of a friend who was temporarily living in Calcutta. I was excited to travel to a place that I anticipated would be deeply foreign and unfamiliar compared to the life I was then leading in London. My first glimpse of India shocked and inspired me. Waking early on the first morning after my arrival, I wandered onto the roof terrace to gaze upon the city that I had seen only through the darkness of my arrival the night before. That arrival itself was eventful, my friend and I were threatened at gunpoint by a troop of drunken police officers who had flagged down our taxi on the road from the airport into town. After extricating ourselves from that rather bizarre and quite frightening episode, my friend and I continued along the dark road into Calcutta, past countless open fires dotted along the ditches all the way into the nebulous city centre. The scene created, for me at least, a very atmospheric, opaque dream-like feeling, enhanced by the disorientation of jetlag and adrenaline of having just had a revolver in my face. The next morning on the roof garden, I was half confirming that the evening before had in fact occurred; that I really was waking up in this alien world of Calcutta. As I searched the morning skyline, I was unable to draw upon much in my previous experience that could reference what I observed. There was something in this colourful and chaotic foreignness that enthralled me. I had dreamed that perhaps someplace so utterly alien still existed on earth; it was an unexpected relief to be surveying a city so totally other, not even a Coke sign to betray that it belonged on the same planet as the western world I had left behind; but why relief? At first my responses, being mine, seemed quite unremarkable but after some reflection with my friend, who had similar responses to travel, we both began to wonder why we felt what we felt and we began to realise that not everyone would feel what we felt sat on that Calcutta rooftop.
Thus commenced a two-week contemplative-adventure, deep and authentic travel, characterised by an incessant dialogue with my friend regarding the allure of the foreign, the compulsion to explore the diversity of the world, the strange experience of travelling through liminal spaces like airports and border crossings. These attractions were superimposed upon a distinct undercurrent of repulsion regarding conventional settled life. I returned to London with the conviction that the question of home; the motivations for leaving home to live in foreign places, and the underlying question of being at-home in the world at all, constituted the appropriate topic for my research. I realise now that these questions have imbued most if not all of my major life choices; a phenomenon that with even a little contemplation became totally perplexing. I did not approach the topic with a hypothesis regarding why people chose to leave their homes to live in strange lands, rather I genuinely wanted to discover whether there was anything to investigate at all in this act of leaving. It was possible to me that I, or perhaps my friend and I, were the only ones who floundered upon inscrutability at every attempt to understand our restlessness and our fascination with the unfamiliar. I was somewhat apprehensive that we were overlooking something obvious, yet every obvious explanation, including the elaborate psychological theories, seemed to unravel when compared with our own lived experiences. In discussions with my friend the mystery had deepened, not dissipated, and during our second week in Kathmandu I was already tentatively observing fellow travellers trying to identify which ones were engaged in what I later came to call ‘existential migration’ and which were short-term tourists in the more conventional sense. I felt that somehow I could make speculative judgments about membership of this unacknowledged ‘tribe’ – he or she tended to be the person sitting slightly apart, favouring the ‘authentic experience’ over the beaten track, gazing into an ‘inner distance’ while writing in a diary, unobtrusive and nearly invisible, almost imperceptibly troubled or at least working through something internal in response to the externals around them. Some of these initial intuitions seemed consistent with what later emerged from the research interviews.
The End of Belonging
Part One – Discovering a way of being
Chapter One: View from a Calcutta roof 2
Chapter Two: The missing stories of leaving home 7
Chapter Three: The gap in understanding 9
Chapter Four: The depth of the question 12
Chapter Five: Preparing to listen 16
Chapter Six: The Budapest months 21
Chapter Seven: Themes of existential migration 26
Who am I? 26
Where do I belong? 31
What do I value in life? 41
A worldwide perspective 46
Love of difference and foreignness 49
Origins - early family and home circumstances 58
Main issues of home and homecoming 65
The drama and paradox of leaving 76
Chapter Eight: The poignant predicament 88
Chapter Nine: A tale of existential migration 91
Part Two - A new psychology of leaving home and the advent of global homelessness
Chapter Ten: Self-identity, belonging and home 94
What is a person? 95
Belonging 98
Conceptions of home 102
Chapter Eleven: A philosophy of dwelling and homecoming 113
Homeworld and alienworld 115
World alienation and the unheimlich 118
Dwelling and homecoming 124
Chapter Twelve: Sensitivities in existential migration 134
Practical implications 136
Chapter Thirteen: Leaving and individual psychology 140
Chapter Fourteen: Existential migration and autobiographies of exile 144
Chapter Fifteen: Final cautionary thoughts 151
Bibliography 155