The Concept Of Home As Imaginary English Literature Essay

Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For focuses on the notions of identity and belonging. The characters in the novel constantly seek to come to terms with themselves and where they live by assigning significance to the things and people around them. The novel follows the different ways in which the characters find meaning in their lives by finding or creating a “home” to which they feel they belong. In their individual works, writers Benedict Anderson, Sura Rath, and Salman Rushdie provide claims that contest Brand’s notion of “home” as depicted in this novel. Brand attempts and fails to define the concept of “home” in her novel through immigrant parents, Canadian-born young adults, the past, and the city of Toronto. The theories of Anderson, Rath, and Rushdie put forward that there is no real definition of “home” and that it is an imagined concept of the mind and a tool that is widely used by diasporic communities around the world.

The parents of the protagonists (Tuyen, Carla, Jackie, and Oku) in Brand’s novel all originate from different cultures and attempt to find and feel at “home” in Toronto through various agencies. These parents are described in the novel as “people born elsewhere” (Brand 20). Tuyen’s Vietnamese parents strive to portray their culture and “home” by means of their family restaurant. “The restaurant became their life. They were being defined by the city. They had come thinking that they would be who they were, or at least who they had managed to remain” (Brand 66). Tuyen’s parents see the restaurant as a place of refuge and a way of preserving the characteristics of the “home” that they once had. Carla’s mother, Angie, commits suicide once she discovers that she will never truly find the happiness that she is looking for in her life. Carla’s father Derek tries to create a “home” with a new family (Nadine) as “his friends, his family, had formed a protective circle around him after the inquest” in an attempt to forget the past incident with Angie (Brand 275). Jackie’s parents find their escape in the Paramount. They see it as a “home” that allows them to find their identities as young people who can express themselves in ways that they cannot do elsewhere. “When the Paramount closed, Jackie’s mother and father were lost…Jackie’s mother and father could take hard time, anyone in the park could. But the thought of hard time without even the relief of the Paramount was unbearable” (Brand 178-179). Oku’s parents build a “home” for themselves through the expectations of their son. Oku’s father, Fitz, longs to access some sort of accomplishment by pushing Oku to attain success by doing things that he is not interested in. “Fitz filled every minute and every space with work. Oku had no desire to do any of the things his father did. They shared little beyond genes…” (Brand 84). The parents of all four friends are immigrants striving to find a “home” in the foreign space of Toronto, Canada. This is significant because they feel that they can attain a “regular Canadian” identity by using the various palpable agencies around them (Brand 47). However, in his article “Home(s) Abroad: Diasporic Identities in Third Space,” Rath argues that:

…spatial identity…constructed from the external territory…has nothing to do with my whatness, my essence or being as a person, until the larger dominant culture readjusts itself to accommodate my presence…the territorial persona, as a mask of my identity, cannot fully represent the subject/object of my person, the material body and the psychic being…the secondary problem of my relationship with the two spaces, two geographic regions, that are externally located on the opposite sides of the globe but overlap each other in the internal space of my body and, even deeper, in my mind (Rath 2).

Rath’s claim proposes that the land in which one lives has nothing to do with the identity of a person, and that it instead can act as a barrier to one’s identity. No matter what region one lives in, the satisfaction that the idea of “home” offers can only be attained in the mind of the seeker . It suggests that the immigrant parents of Tuyen, Carla, Jackie, and Oku look to find that which does not really exist outside the mind. They attempt to re-connect with the “home” that they left behind which included “other houses, other landscapes, other skies, other trees” and try to connect to their new “home” using the things/people within their new spatial territory: a restaurant, a new wife, the Paramount, and a Masters education (Brand 20). Rath’s argument confirms that the “home” that these parents are searching for actually resides “in the internal space” of their body and mind and cannot be found in the physical land they dwell in.

The four main young adults in Brand’s novel consider their birthplace as their “home” and use it to define their identities while breaking free from their parents’ vision of “home”:

They thought that their parents had scales on their eyes. Sometimes they wanted to shout at them, ‘Well, you’re not there!’…Each left home in the morning as if making a long journey, untangling themselves from the seaweed of other shores wrapped around their parents. Breaking their doorways, they left the sleepwalk of their mothers and fathers and ran across the unobserved borders of the city…to arrive at their own birthplace-the city…When it came to their families they could only draw half conclusions, make half inferences, for fear of the real things that lay there (Brand 20-21)

Tuyen, Carla, Oku, and Jackie seem unable or unwilling to comprehend their parents’ notion of “home” and attempt to find their own “home” in the land they were born in. Tuyen makes an effort to find her identity in her artwork, which is comprised of the many different aspects and longings of the city, and is consequently very attached to the structure she has created for. Her “lubaio” is made up of “bits of wood…photographs…longings” which she uses “to create alternate, unexpected realities, exquisite corpses”-in other words, she takes bits and pieces from the city in which she was born to construct a meaningful “home” that she could fit in to (Brand 224). In his work titled “Imaginary Homelands”, Rushdie explains that “meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely” (Rushdie 430). Tuyen’s structure is significant in this sense because it is made up of all the longings of the city, which in turn is made up of all the things listed by Rushdie. Rath’s argument explains why structures that provide meaning, such as the “lubaio,” are constructed in the first place: “Yet to satisfy its hunger for complete self-knowledge, the Self seeks to supplement its self-image, to fill the absence(s), the missing pieces, by constructing an ideal Other against which it can articulate its identity, see its own mirror image, an image confirming the subjective view already projected into the consciousness” (Rath 15). Tuyen uses her “lubaio” as the “Other” to validate and supplement her own identity in the city which she assumes is her “home”. However, both Rushdie and Rath confirm that Tuyen cannot define her “home” through this artwork, but that she is instead forming an “imagined community” without realizing it. “Yet, place as a reservoir of collective memories provides instruments of nativism and sameness (identity). These memories are collected in the books, newspapers, and other printed texts, which contribute to the formation of the ‘imaginary community'” (Rath 20). In Tuyen’s case, she is collecting the memories of the city in her “lubaio” and therefore is unconsciously placing herself within this “imaginary community” which she considers “home.”

Furthermore, Brand continues to illustrate how characters in her novel find meaning and their “home” by means of examining and drawing from their pasts. Tuyen’s parents’ whole lives are shaped around an incident of the past: losing their son Quy as they were leaving from Vietnam. They live the rest of their lives reliving that exact moment and trying to make up for the incident by endlessly searching for him and letting it continuously haunt them in their daily lives. Carla on the other hand, grasps on to the memory of her dead mother Angie. She forms her entire life around this incident and consequently feels an unremitting connection to Angie and feels deeply responsible for her younger brother Jamal. Brand exemplifies how the past alters these characters’ perception of identity as they look to the past to discover their “home” in the present. Rushdie makes clear how looking at the past to find one’s “home” results in generating an “imaginary homeland” because one ends up being

…haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back…but if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation…almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands (Rushdie 428).

In this case, Tuyen’s parents and Carla create a fictionary “home” for themselves to come to terms with what they have lost and use it as a tool to go forward in their lives with less guilt.

Finally, Brand attempts to show how Toronto can be considered “home” by presenting it as a city that is capable of accommodating all types of communities and one that can provide a sense of belonging to its inhabitants. Throughout the entirety of the novel, Brand explicitly portrays Toronto as a “home” in which both majority and minority groups are given a voice and a place to fit in within the city. It seems as if she goes out of her way to list the different national communities that can be noticed in the city to prove her point: Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Ukrainian, Pakistani, Korean, African, Bulgarian, Eritrean, Colombian, Latvian, Welsh, Afghani, Iranian, Tamil, Thai, Calabrese, Jamaican, Fushen, Filipina-Saudi, Russian, Romanian, Cape Croker, Japanese, French, German, Haitian, Bengali, and Irish. “Name a region on the planet and there’s someone from there, here” (Brand 4-5). She then somewhat contradicts herself by writing: “It’s like this with the city, you can stand on a simple corner and get taken away in all directions. … No matter who you are, no matter how certain you are of it, you can’t help but feel the thrill of being someone else” (Brand 154). Here it seems as if Brand is presenting the city as a place where one does not find him/herself but instead becomes “someone else” and therefore, is unable to find a “home” that is unique to that individual’s needs anymore. In his book Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, Anderson presents the argument of an “imagined community” which in turn refutes Brand’s notion of the city as “home” in her novel. He states:

It is quite possible to conceive of the emergence of the new imagined national communities without any one, perhaps all, of them being present. What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations, a technology of communications, and the fatality of human linguistic diversity (Anderson 42-3).

In his claim, Anderson is proving that what Brand is really portraying in her novel are “imagined national communities.” Examining the different cultures in the city of Toronto and the multi-faceted relations between these cultures causes one to imagine the city as “home” even though it does not really exist and will only be real in the mind.

To conclude, the idea of “home” is just that-it’s an idea that is conceived in the mind and remains an imagined concept. Through her novel What We All Long For, Brand makes an impressive effort to define this idea of “home” using the subjects of immigrant parents, their Canadian-born children, the past lives of these families, and the city of Toronto. However, the works of Anderson, Rath, and Rushdie provide significant evidence and support to counter the belief that “home” is indeed something real and an entity that can be sought after. These writers illustrate that it is more of a constructed idea of the mind than a thing that really exists in the world. Additionally, they also exemplify how creating an idea of “home” helps people, especially those that are part of diasporic communities, to find a sense of identity and belonging in foreign territories. It provides these communities, including the characters in Brand’s novel, a tool to cope with their past and a way of finding their true identities in the places they live. The claims of these writers imply that Brand is just another author who has very idealistic views on the concept of “home” and clearly shows it in her work.