Letter from the Editor
& Poetic Engineering of ‘The Home’

1.

“Driving Home for Christmas” singer Chris Rea died since I last sat down to write. It happened on the 22nd of December, tragically at the time of the month millions of people the world over were themselves travelling home for the holidays. Perhaps the success of this song in popular culture might tell us  something about home. Something solid from which we can initiate a disintegration. In Rea’s paradigm, ‘home’ is the family home, not just where you happen to be living at any given time. Here, home is personal (it could be a house, a village, a country), yet fixed (the thing that the metonym of “home” replaces is of a specific place and time, from which specific memories arise). It is usually nostalgic, always dying, and in various ways waiting to be inherited.

2.

Gloria Anzaldúa writes in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, “I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry ‘home’ on my back”. Anzaldúa projects a home that is dislocated from place and superimposed onto the subject. The suggestions of ‘home’ (culture, community, language) become portable. They are dependent on the body of the subject, and the subject’s willingness to carry (though in the metaphor of the turtle, the subject doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter). Here, home is unfixed. It avoids the possibility of erosion present in static conceptions of ‘the home’: worn brickwork, fallen roof tiles, eviction, foreclosure, dereliction. But the unfixed home is also a burden, a literal weight. ‘Home’ presents as an extension (or contingent part) of the individual’s body. That is to say, the viability of the community as a whole is dependent on the individual, and vice versa. This reciprocal ‘home’ is not inevitable, and cannot be freely abandoned and returned to. We might imagine Anzaldúa’s Chicana feminism and queerness as the ongoing work of sustaining an dislocated home. We might also have questions about the turtle, or at least want to decipher some of its connotations. The shell as a ‘home’ embosses onto soft flesh the hardness of an engineered structure or shelter. This arrangement mimics housedness. Positing the shell as a ‘home’ turns a living, skeletal appendage into a location or environment. It behaves as an architectural reference, one that creates a dynamic between interior and exterior. But Anzaldúa’s liminal subject of the borderlands (the one between nations, bifurcating both land and language) is situated neither on the inside nor the outside. They are the subject of in-betweenness and as such the shell itself is their terrain, the space of negotiation between home and homelessness, the faultline between personal and public property. This uniquely liquid borderland of indefinites and uncertainties (the point of spill from inner-world to outer-space) is depicted not as a permeable screen, but rather a firm, opaque shell. Here we have the ‘home’ expressed as a single closed unit in which the porous social relations of an entire community reside. 

3.

In his 2019 collection Our Death, written shortly before his own passing, poet and activist Sean Booney wrote the following in an untitled poem from the sequence ‘A Riot is a Haunt’: ‘Our houses are packed so close / They are no longer houses. Get that.’ What can we say about the houses of Bonney’s poem? Crucially, they are houses rather than homes. This distinction often arises when we talk about the conditions of living, of childhood, of domesticity and family. But here ‘house’ strikes me as a practical, materialist term, referring to buildings of a particular function, judged on their ability to fulfil said function. And in fact, ‘house’ always suggests a rich dialectic. It is an expression of living that reduces fundamental human needs into simple instances of brick and mortar. We lose the meanings abundant in ‘home’ and instead return to a (temporarily) useful hardness, in which the nature of our economic conditions is most apparent. In other words, the language of property commercialisation might help to expose commercialisation’s unfulfilled promise. Where ‘home’ can be flexible, abstract and conditional, ‘house’ is or it isn’t, does or does not. Bonney writes of the moment houses become not-houses. In registering this moment (of being packed so close together), there is a potential protest against the privatised ‘unit’, a likely reinvigoration of public space, and almost certainly a suspension of the house’s ‘hardness’. The not-houses once were houses, or were intended to be so. Their non-houseness suggests their dimensions and distances from another—and even the capacity of the word ‘house’—are not fixed. The usual hardness of ‘house’ has become pliable. We sense the potential for the terms of their ownership to change under pressure. The rows of terraces breathe with and against the conditions of the market, poverty and rentier capitalism. And with this symbiotic—yet asymmetric—breathing (between market and community, between landlord and tenant), comes the likelihood for strain, then recovery, for arrhythmia, then collapse.  

4.

Roland Barthes would have been 110 years old in November. He made this link between home, country, and language in Empire of Signs. 

Hence, in foreign countries, what a respite! Here I am protected against stupidity, vulgarity, vanity, worldliness, nationality, normality. The unknown language, of which I nonetheless grasp the respiration, the emotive aeration, in a word the pure significance, forms around me, as I move, a faint vertigo, sweeping me into its artificial emptiness, which is consummated only for me: I live in the interstice, delivered from any fulfilled meaning. 

Barthes complicates ‘home’. The unknown language surely cannot be a home. It is the escape from ‘fulfilled meaning’. It is soft and light. It becomes air, from which we can only “grasp the respiration”. And yet the looseness (the un-hardness!) of incomprehension results in an apprehension of ‘pure significance’. We are not told directly to what this pure significance is attributed, whether the unknown language has an essence that even the non-fluent subject is capable of grasping, or whether the subject themselves converts incomprehension into significance. But still we are “protected” by the unknown language. Room is made available; I presume from the space where the referents of language would be if Barthes could read the signifiers. This space, which Barthes notes is artificial (only for him), is a living quarter. And we are told that it is one devoid of nationality and normality. In other words, the typical foundations of ‘home’ are subverted and exchanged for the unique pleasure of non-fluency. 

5.

The collection of these strands itself performs a hardening (even as ‘home’ melts). As if by destabilising the conditions of living, I might clarify (and calcify) the reason for doing so. As if I might find ‘poetry’ by leaving ‘home’. But perhaps it is poetry that is unstable. And it is the conditions of living that are ‘vulgar’, to borrow from Barthes. 

6.

The Borderlands are by no means an abstraction of Anzaldúa’s making. They are a real dislocation of place, nation, community, and language. And they are the sites of mobilisation against individualism. Poems written out of (and without) the ‘home’, hardened by the weight of the social relations they try to carry, become brittle. Any softness (the slightest instance of style) in this realist poetry begins as the aeration of unfamiliar language and syntax; the respiration of delivery and prosody. Until eventually the poem has gone so far as to rearrange walls and unbalance the load-bearers. It cannot support the entire concept, all the implications of ‘the home’ it had tried to hold. And in materialising homeness so relentlessly, the poem itself must dematerialise —must stop being poetry!—to let the contradictions (which were always right there) flood in.