Haunting Homes and Emerging Dilemmas of Being in the World: A Commentary.

Home 'haunts' in much fiction literature, as the contributors to this volume of ZAA reveal by engaging in fruitful conversation with the scholarship on migration, displacement, exile, settler colonialism, and human/non-human relations, on all scales from local to global. This commentary underlines the promise of more extended exchanges between art, humanities, and social sciences in home studies. This is critical to make sense of the myriad imaginaries, emotions, and moralities associated with home, while being alert to the underlying ideological interests and subtexts. Writing on home and displacement, at the intersection between multiple disciplines, yields unique insights into long-term historical processes and biographical developments that shape our perception of home as a natural state of things, and our unequal opportunities to make ourselves at home. I eventually outline three research pathways that would benefit from a more systematic transition from the 'haunting' to the 'emergence' of home. These concern the ways of using home as a discursive category, the sensorial embeddedness of home, and the intimately political significance of home.

Keywords: home; fiction; multi-scalarity; imaginary; homing; interdisciplinarity

How is home 'haunting' in the writings of scholars such as the contributors to this Special Issue, in the lives of the men and women they write about, and possibly in the lives of authors and readers themselves?

Home has always been a major topic in a wealth of novels and poems worldwide, whatever the words in use to account for it across languages. It is also a constitutive background, and possibly a looming presence, in much more fiction and poetry, just as it is in the everyday lives it depicts. Conditions of large-scale migration, displacement, and diasporic living make it only more salient, if elusive and hard to grasp. Nonetheless, the multiple meanings and functions of home in literature still call for a systematic exploration, particularly in relation to migration, displacement, and diaspora, albeit with a number of exceptions in recent comparative, post-colonial, and historical studies ([9]; [10]; [15]; [17]; [19]).

Against this background, there is a special promise in addressing questions of home in an overt, dedicated, and reflexive way, rather than leaving them 'haunting' behind the scene. By grappling with home in critical and fruitful ways, the contributors to this Special Issue are in a position to better understand the writings they are engaging with, but also to generate insights of larger reach and ambition. This may have to do with life in displacement or exile, as much as with the aftermath of war, the legacy of settler colonialism, or our embattled relationship with the natural environment and planet Earth at large.

On each of these questions, a burgeoning scholarship is available in social sciences, at the intersection of different disciplinary domains ([4]; [21]). There is, however, a distinctive potential in fiction writing about them as well as in their treatment by literary scholars. This has not to do only with stylistic quality – poetry and narrative fiction, as much as the essays about them, generally deploy a far more fluent, powerful, and pleasurable way of writing, but the difference has also to do with substance. Well-done writing in fiction, or about fiction, has deeper scope (at least in generating unsystematic insights) and more extended reach (i.e. ability to touch the chords of an extended and diverse lay audience) than academic writing in the social sciences. More often than not, the two writing domains stay separate from each other, with a degree of mutual indifference (the main exception being probably [3], 64] beautiful reflections on home as "no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived"). These are all reasons, however, to invest in more communication. Home is a matter of imaginaries, emotions, and moralities about place, no less than it is a place (or more specifically, a dwelling) as such ([5]). This intangible repertoire is all the more critical and ambiguous whenever home as an habitual dwelling place is not there, or is no longer there. Both fiction and poetry thus open unique existential but also epistemological avenues into its lived experience. This is not to deny the difference between the prevalent ways of accountability, methodology, and remit in the bulk of social science scholarship and in the broader field of the humanities.

Following these premises, the five essays in this Special Issue approach questions of home, migration, and displacement ([2]; [4]; [7]) by drawing on disparate materials, places, people, and predicaments. What about the commonalities across them, beyond a degree of engagement with the alluring argument of "haunting" (cf. [11])? I will suggest a few directions to address this question and encourage conversation between social research and the humanities (including arts – [16]), whether among mobile and displaced people or their 'mainstream' counterparts. I will subsequently sketch out some notes based on the multiple insights a reader gets from the single papers. This is meant not only as an ongoing dialogue with the authors, but also as a way to build upon their arguments and extend their relevance and resonance.

By and large, the five articles disclose the multi-scalarity of home in conceptual and discursive terms, no less than in spatial, temporal, and relational ones ([14]). Home as a word has a malleable and versatile use, albeit a typically indocile and unruly one. This may be perceived as a limit or even a threat for an epistemology that relies on well-knit and mutually exclusive definitions and conceptual categories. It may be seen as a less than desirable development for a transformative-oriented politics whenever the discourse of home is disjointed from the vast field of ambiguities, ideological subtexts, and power manipulations that go along with it (which is certainly not the case here). All this being said, home as a discursive category holds a unique generative and heuristic potential to interconnect different life realms and scales of human life, as well as apparently remote topics and questions, by illuminating their fine-grained interdependence. Discussing home among refugees or exiles is as revealing and insightful as the home-related meanings, practices, and privileges of the non-refugees or non-exiled. Discussing home as a special relationship with place can hardly be done without looking at different scales of place attachment and appropriation and at the tangible, sensorial, and atmospheric qualities of place, from the minimum threshold of one's body to, potentially, a global scale. Approaching home as domestic is soon conducive to critical reflection on other forms, levels, and plans of domestication, such as those that can be traced back to settler colonialism and its long-term aftermath. All the essays in this Special Issue bear witness to this conceptual and discursive multi-scalarity.

Furthermore, the imaginaries, desires, and quandaries about home, across the five articles, are part and parcel of more fundamental yearnings and dilemmas. On the one hand, they invite us to acknowledge the weight of the historical processes and the structural conditions that account for nowadays' configurations of home – all that temporally lies behind and shapes the naive appearance of home as a natural state of things or place of origin. On the other hand, they require us to investigate the contentious biographical fields in which people negotiate their ways of being in the world and struggle to find a suitable place for themselves, often encountering only pushback, marginalization, or protracted deprivation. Both processes are relevant on both domestic and more extended scales. They also call for an engagement with the larger natural environment, as a part of an ethics of care and responsibility for the future of planet Earth – an example of the moral subtext that home conveys, albeit often in contrasting directions ([7]). Likewise, reflecting on home is instrumental to stress the role of human-non-human relations beyond anthropocentrism, thereby evoking intimate connections with land, nature, and the Earth, or at least the desire and need for them.

In "Homes Unbound," Fatameh Shams engages with the lived experience of forced displacement and home through the writings of contemporary Iranian poets that are also first-generation migrants. So-called diasporic writing articulates in multiple ways one's lived and embodied experience, from forced exile to the reproduction of memory and identity across generations. While the exilic condition can only magnify the "unshakeable complexity of home," Shams's analysis reveals an intriguing diversity of stances among the selected poets, and between the latter and those who remained in Iran. While all these writers acknowledge the haunting of home, they provide remarkably different accounts on what and where home is by now, and how it can be regained, if at all. Meaningful fragments of home, as this paper shows in resonance with a burgeoning literature, can ultimately be found or recreated in language and in the possibility to retain, use, and circulate it (as the most portable home, along with one's body, mind and spirit) Such fragments also attain significance in writing, as a way to accomplish one's life projects and ideals. Furthermore, and more pragmatically and sensorially, they figure in whatever aspect of one's life condition that is portable – reproducible, or suitable to be made home again – including the aftermath and the memories of past critical events. Home, however, is also an orientation toward a potential life condition ahead of us – a fundamental, elusive, and lifelong question of homing ([6]). In sum, rather than seeing home and exile as a binary divide or an "unhealable rift" in [18], p. 137) famous phrase, Shams invites us to problematize the conflation between home and homeland or native land. Being at home cannot be neatly separated from estrangement, and the ascriptive home may already be a place of "estrangement," as [1] pointed out. Rather than indulging in desires of a permanent and bounded home that is no more, and perhaps has never been, acknowledging in-betweenness and ambivalence can open up to thrive again "by inhabiting the rift rather than trying to heal or overcome it." Throughout, the poetry discussed by Shams articulates emotions, moralities, and existential dilemmas that are not fundamentally different from those of so many forcibly displaced people worldwide ([8]; [20]). It does so, however, with a uniquely powerful, deep, and alluring voice, as is typical of art works.

The view of home and movement as mutually co-productive rather than exclusive stances is also foregrounded in "Homes: A Quartet" by Lisa Marchi. While the poetry analyzed by the author is diverse in many respects, it shares an orientation to question and undermine, sometimes out of necessity, the master narrative of home as a safe, protective, and fixed place. Home, understood as Kashmir, can hardly ever be again a place of returning desire for a poet with an immigrant and multicultural background like Agha Ali. Nor is it a welcoming or warm site as it takes the shape of a dilapidated room for restless, precarious, and racially discriminated dwellers in a poem by Richard Wright. At the same time, home can be something of a liberating place for women, in spite of the traditionally gendered ways of domestic socialization, as already captured by Emily Dickinson in a poem that reveals the nurturing of exotic and exciting imaginaries from within one's domestic space. However, home is also a family house and an ancestral land that is subject to violence and destruction, as in a poem by Jennifer Foerster. "Leaving Tulsa," here, means having to cope with the protracted consequences of the forced loss of deep-rooted ways of inhabiting the built and natural environment. All across these forms of poetry, evoking home means reckoning with "a history and geography of violence and loss," as widely discussed in the scholarship on settler colonialism ([12]). There is no necessarily romantic or warm account of home, thus, in the selected poems. There is rather an emphasis on its connection with the natural environment, or a view of home itself as "a threatened living organism" in Marchi's words, which further resounds in the subsequent papers.

The natural environment as a potential space for homemaking, as much as for home destruction, is taken up again in "Home is Where the Bees Are!" by Amina ElHalawani. Here the refugees' search for a new and more welcoming home is revisited as more than a future-oriented yearning to be accomplished or not. Home, as ElHalawani's reading of The Beekeeper of Aleppo reminds us, has also to do with concrete, habitual practices that separate some portion of one's space and time from the rest and endow it with a special, intimate meaning. This is what beekeeping – a symbolically charged practice in itself – does in this novel, as well as in the documentary Honeyland. Bees themselves are engaged, metaphorically, in a fundamental form of homemaking. And caring after bees as a social practice is also a way for refugees to carve out and protect an archive of meaning, reward, and connectedness with what used to be or feel like home, as opposed to adhering fully to the narrative and predicament of suffering people that are stuck in waiting.

As some hints across the previous articles already suggest, home can also be perceived, understood, and analyzed as (home) land – as the ancestral land in "Hawaiki According to Tupaia" by Lars Eckstein. As the author illustrates, the Oceanic notion of hawaiki translates as home, but not in the sense of a fixed and bounded territory. It is rather a diasporic ideal location or a "primordial matrix" that intermingles spatial, genealogical, natural, and spiritual dimensions of home. This is of interest far beyond area studies, as it enables the conceptual opening of "a very different ontology and epistemology of home" relative to Western canons. The idea of homing is reframed in this perspective as an open question of "wayfinding" rather than an abstract and pre-defined pattern of "navigation" and "world-making." In turn, this can lead to an epistemic shift in conceptualizing human mobility itself, as a co-created practice that rests upon the agency of natural elements and 'inanimate' infrastructures as much as of travelers themselves. Revisiting hawaiki, Eckstein concludes, is also an invitation to a more "portable," "iterable," and "plural" understanding of home.

Home, in sum, can be experienced, claimed, and investigated on very dissimilar scales. Underlying all of them, at a deeper philosophical gaze, are fundamental questions of being at home in the world, as Russell West-Pavlov remarks in "Transcendental Homelessness, Planetary Homes (In a Time of War) – Perspectives From North and South." While taking the contours of a conceptually-thick meditation with multiple empirical references, this article bears interesting resonances with recent scholarship in phenomenological and existential anthropology. The need to challenge common sense dichotomous accounts of social reality, such as home versus exile, involves also the problematic distinction between home and outside natural/extant environment, writes West-Pavlov. How frail the distinction may be is bitterly revealed upon notions of physical destruction of the home as a space for private existence, as exemplified by the recent war in Ukraine. This, however, is also a source of critical reflection on the promise of alternative modes of dwelling, ideally more open to the external environment. The author revisits the scholarship on dwelling and homelessness accordingly, gathering insights from authors as diverse as Lukacs, Rilke, and Adorno. There is also an "antipodean" side to homelessness, West-Pavlov suggests, which is embedded in the history of Australia as a "post-settler nation that is collectively obsessed with suburban home ownership." In fact, the fetishism of home goes along with a remarkable detachment from the natural environment and with poor acknowledgement of the historical forms of violent domestication, as Hage would put it, that underpin contemporary Australian society. There is, however, a promise for the author in "imagining new modes of home(li)ness" that should not rely on the boundaries that separate home, and purportedly protect it, from the world. This imaginary should follow a range of "Southern" and native perspectives that share a less exclusionary imaginary about home itself. Again, and consistent with the recent scholarship of authors like [13], this leads us to a view of dwelling as a sentient and dynamic co-creation between human and non-human actants. Far from being only an alluring meditation, the argument can open up to a number of strategies to contrast the "broader destruction of our collective planetary home."

Overall, the articles in this Special Issue show the merit of a more systematic conversation between social science and literary criticism on all that has to do with home, with particular respect to the lived experience and the aftermath of migration and displacement. While any form of artwork matters in itself, and while the contribution of literary studies has its own ways and reasons of being, brought together they both hold a potential added value for the expansion of home studies ([4]; [7]), and hence for an analytical transition from the haunting to the emerging of home. Three research pathways are especially promising in this respect.

The first aims to explore the work home does as a word in use, both in artistic work and in everyday life discourse. The ways of using home across languages, as an experientially meaningful category for a number of meanings, aims, and interests, are still awaiting a systematic and transdisciplinary investigation. Humanities at large are an invaluable and inexhaustible source of insights about the emergence, diffusion, and impact of resonances, analogies, and metaphors about home. These are only more salient, if problematic, within the life and dwelling conditions of minoritized, displaced, and 'otherized' individuals and social groups.

At a different level, in close connection with in-depth ethnographic fieldwork across the spectrum of social sciences, fiction and art-based accounts illuminate the sensorial embeddedness of home in objects, sites, practices, and atmospheres as a constellation of ways of engaging between one's body and the surrounding world. This takes place, of course, in highly diverse and unequal ways. It is primarily shaped by the freedom of movement available to each body as well as by the resources and opportunities accessible for its material, emotional, and spiritual nourishment – or the lack thereof.

Finally, the ways of representing and engaging with home in the arts and humanities, particularly in relation to displaced and diasporic people, lead us back to appreciate the intimate political significance of home, or the ways in which micro (i.e. apparently menial or intimate) issues anticipate and envision macro (i.e. collective and societal) ones. Dealing with home, particularly where it is not legally, culturally, or sensorially at reach, is also a way to reclaim and reproduce people's individual and collective memories and biographies. In an aggregate perspective, reclaiming home, on all scales from the dwelling to the planet Earth, feeds into people's claims-making for the fundamental right to have a place in the world. It also pushes toward suitable recognition of the historical forms of violence, whereby today's being at home for some may be less a natural state of things than a privilege and long-term outcome of home dispossession, and possibly domicide, for less powerful others.