Where is Home?

words and design by: LAFAN HASAN

Where is home? I feel like this is one of those trick questions, like asking a parent who their favourite child is. What makes these two questions so similar is the fact that you end up choosing between things that are both a part of you and that you are a part of. There is one thing in life that I think all of us dislike: discomfort. We constantly try to understand complex things to take away the discomfort of not knowing and as a result, we often end up creating generic labels for things that mean so much more. An example of this is home. Before asking yourself where home is, I ask you, what is home? Is it a physical place you can inhabit; is it a feeling; is it people; is it culture? Or is it more than that? To me, I think home is all of that jumbled up together in weird yet beautiful ways.

I am Palestinian by blood and Jordanian by nationality. I was born and raised in Qatar and I now live in Cardiff as an undergrad. I’ve been privileged enough to have been able to experience all of these places in so many different ways. As children, we innocently associate home as either where we’re from, the house that we live in, or where our family lives. I’ve lived my whole life as an expat in Qatar, so as a child I was always led to believe that I had two homes: the one I slept in every night in Qatar, and the many different apartments that I stayed in every summer in Jordan, to visit family.

As I grew up, I started to become more aware of the significance of the people around me. I reached that clichéd stage of life where I thought home wasn’t just an inhabitable place, my friends and family were everything that defined the concept of home. In the summer of 2014, I visited Palestine for the first time in my life and that was a monumental moment to my understanding of what home was. Even though I had never been there before, I felt truly connected to the land because of its importance to me. Throughout my whole life my parents instilled in me this idea of Palestine as a home that was birthed through my loyalty and admiration of the lost homeland. I had found another home within Palestinian culture through the connection to my heritage and the importance of maintaining it in the eye of our world today.

Cardiff has played a big role in helping me decode home: what does it mean to me? Where is it? Should I even ask myself those questions? Leaving for Cardiff was the first time I had ever left my family to live somewhere apart from them, it was the first time that I had ever left the Middle East and it was also the first time I had a chance to start fresh —but with a head start from all the experiences life had to offer prior. Funnily enough, the first two months of being here I felt so excited that I literally had no time to be thinking about the home that once was. I was too focused on trying to make Cardiff a home for me, and finding a home within the people around me. Afterwards, I found myself starting to become homesick, as if I was giving up some of my home back then for my home now. This is where the label of home started to dawn as something that isn’t that important for me to define anymore, because it essentially embraces so many different types of feelings.

To go back to the beginning of this article, the one thing we all dislike is discomfort. Home to me is just a synonym to our sense of belonging. It’s about feeling comfortable and being a part of a whole. That sense of belonging can come from physical means such as knowing the directions to your house, or knowing where your mom hides the sweets or even recognising the particular scent of your uncle’s house. That sense of belonging can come from the incomparable, unconditional love that radiates from your family such as every cooked meal your mom makes, to every time your dad has dropped you off to a friend’s house, to playing Fifa for three hours straight with your brothers. That sense of belonging can come from a simple feeling that is triggered by a song you heard when you were young, or a place that was part of an anecdote you once heard. Home is where I belong, and I’m glad that I don’t just have one.