The poem, “Alien Suite,” was fire. Like all good poetry, there were lines that resonated, that haunted, that chilled you like a sweat-cold bottle as its contents spilled into you. Safia Elhillo’s claim that “home is a place in time” did that. It stood me erect like the second syllable of my Chinese name: lì. But it gave me pause as well. Was my home really just a “a place in time,” or had home accompanied me into these moments? If home was 1989, then where am I today? Am I dispossessed, an orphan in an imaginary homeland?
I have been contending with Salman Rushdie’s collection of essays by the same name, Imaginary Homelands, for better than a year now, no closer to a resolution on that issue now than when I first picked the book up. Rushdie says that it is his “present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in the mists of lost time.” But I struggle with this as both an unsatisfactory state of being—perpetually belonging to the past, unrooted in the present—a perpetual displacement, but also as a truncated understanding of time. We often treat time as a snapshot standing still on an ever-retreating timeline. A dot, a mark, a past tense. Theorists from Edward Said to Miranda Lambert have claimed this.
Said gave us that the Orient “was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over,” but then allows three-hundred and fifty-two pages of exposition on the durable knowledges that emerged from it, that persist from the Orient as both a place and an understanding. Even Miranda sung of knowing “you can’t go home again” even as she “had to come back one last time.” Is home, then, really just “a place in time”?
Home is more than Safia’s “place in time.” Home, and its attendant experiences, I suspect, are more like a ghost story. One of those Eastern ghost stories where the entity refuses to stay bound in time and locale—like The Ring or The Grudge. In those stories, the entity follows you; it is unmoored from its roots, crossing both space and time, irrupting past place and bringing with it the history—sometimes fraught and anguished, often beautiful and majestic—that informs the way it reaches for us today. Even today. Yesterday is place to draw strength from for today; any decent postcolonial theorist will tell you that. They will also tell you that history (time), echoes forward.
But if it is reaching, and we can draw strength from it, then it cannot be static. And maybe that is a new, or different understanding. Time is not a thing that happened but, instead, an informative agent; a guide both behind and ahead of us. It harries us, yes; but it also fosters. Rushdie, too, sensed his precarious relationship to time when, looking at a faded picture of the home he grew up in “felt as if [he] were being claimed, or informed that the facts of [that] faraway life were illusions, and that this continuity was the reality.” Rushdie is no more 1947 than I am 1989 or you are 1999 or 2001 or whatever signpost marks your beginning. Perhaps, then, home is less “a place in time” than it is a time in place.
Safia’s poem was still fire, though.