At Home

“If our public lives are so often coloured by whiteness, how might this affect our experience in private?

“Snipped rose stems and a lit stick. Resins, gums, spices and flowers burn with the familiar aroma of seeds and lentils. These walls contain a cultural memory of my parents’ homeland: portraits of gods, small statues, a brass bell, the heat. When I was five years old, we moved west of Toronto to the sprawling houses inching the Southern Ontario greenbelt. Before its influx of immigrants, the whiteness of a growing town established an interiority within. Our home was an outpost—seemingly remote yet offering a feeling of security.

When discussing race, phenomen-ological theorists use the concept of a 'second skin' to describe the performative quality of non-white existence. Second skins protect and deflect, producing emotional labour for non-white bodies as they maintain an external layer in society. Sara Ahmed writes, 'If the world is made white, then the body-athome is one that can inhabit whiteness.' The body, before it becomes subjected to a white gaze, is contextualized as 'athome'. Reflecting on my own perception of home and the melancholy surrounding race, I question the experience of home-space for diaspora and people of colour. If our public lives are so often coloured by whiteness, how might this affect our experience in private? Does the home function as an outpost for a white world—a place with no external gaze? What might we expose if we take Ahmed’s 'body-at-home' literally?

On a summer night in Harlem about two years ago, I attended a school production of Lorraine Hansberry’s ‘A Raisin in the Sun’. The set did not move much; the drama transpired almost entirely within the home. The story follows an African-American family who are about to receive a hefty insurance cheque but are beset with conflict over competing dreams of what to do with the money. Vying for a new house, the mother claims that it will make a difference when the family can walk on floors that belong to them. Her desire echoes the family’s need for a home-space of their own. This idea is reiterated throughout [the performance] as the house becomes a place to reflect on the whiteness of the outside world in 1950s Chicago.

If public space is made white, the experience of private space for diaspora and people of colour becomes something very different. The term 'diaspora', historically describing the forcible expulsion of the Jewish from Babylon, carries with it a sense of loss and longing for the homeland. As such, the interiority accompanying race relations manifests at home; the lack of need for a second skin creates a strong attachment to homespace.”