What is Home?
It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.
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One of the books I read recently was a re-read of Becky Chambers’s novel The Galaxy, and the Ground Within. In it, several strangers are thrown together by circumstances and forced to spend a few days in each other’s company with no outside contact. As it is science fiction, the strangers are all aliens to one another. Each one of them has a problem with their home.
I won’t go into specifics about their appearances or names. I’ll call them by the alphabet letters.
Alien A doesn’t have a planet of her own. Her people are forced to roam the galaxy endlessly because their home planet was destroyed centuries ago by some ruthless invaders. She hankers for home, but she doesn’t really know what it means.
Alien B and his species have a home world, but he was exiled from it decades ago for ‘politically incorrect’ views. He’s nostalgic about his former home, even if he isn’t allowed to return. He has been living in another place, a good place by all accounts, the place that allowed him a happy and successful life, free of political censure. But he doesn’t think of it as home.
Alien C has a home and can return any time she wishes, but she loves a guy from a different species, and interspecies coupling is strongly discouraged in her culture. She meets her lover rarely and in secret. If she is ever discovered, she would probably be shunned by most of her friends and coworkers. So she is torn between her love and her people. She wants to love openly, but she doesn’t want to lose her home, her friends, her family, etc.
I don’t know how it works with aliens, but I do know that I’m an immigrant. I was born in Russia, and immigrated to Canada when I was 36. Unlike Alien B, I wasn’t forced to leave my former home. I just didn’t want to stay there any longer. Unlike Alien A, the place of my birth and childhood still exists. It is horrible, but it is still there, in the same geographic location. But do I miss it?
No. I never missed it, not even the first few years of my immigration, which were not easy. Immigration is never easy, not for anyone. But I like it in Canada, in Vancouver, in my home. I think the best thing I ever did in my life was leaving Russia and taking my children away from there. Building a home in Canada.
This month, March 29th, marks the 30th anniversary of our coming to Canada. Canada has definitely become my home in every sense of the word. I’m proud to be Canadian. Canada has been very good to me (the way Russia never was). Canada accepted me as I am and granted me the warm feeling of home (which Russia never did). I wonder: why do all those aliens in the book miss their homes that either don’t exist or don’t accept them the way they are?
What do you think? What is home? Is it the place you were born? The place you live now? The place you built for your children? Is it a country? A house? The people you love? Would you miss a place that kicked you out? Would you miss a place that doesn’t exist, except in your imagination? And what about your fiction? Do you write about home? What is home for your characters?
