Home is Not Here Editorial

When COVID-19 first emerged, transmitting rapidly across communities in Wuhan, the city’s residents were the first to encounter the shuddering, brutal reality of a state-implemented lockdown. While a forceful measure to inhibit the virus’s spread, lockdowns also bear the additional consequence of forcing a person to crystallise where exactly they consider to be home. For those returning home from visits to their ancestral villages over Lunar New Year in China, this was made imminently and irreversibly clear.

As the virus continued its outward march, from its epicenter in China to Southeast and Northeast Asia, and eventually to the rest of the world, with Europe and North America following soon behind, the question of where ‘home’ is has become salient for millions of people, intensified by the immobility engendered by restrictive measures.

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For those who had the privilege of working from home, long hours spent in the same room began to create a sense of weirdness, a distortion of that which had become almost too familiar to be familiar. For those who found themselves displaced for one reason or another, whether migrant workers or refugees, the scattering effect of the virus would prove to exacerbate any extant feelings of insecurity or danger. And in the midst of all of this, those who counted themselves fortunate to pursue a university education in a town, city, or country different from where they had grown up would suddenly be faced with the prospect of ‘going home’, continuing with their lessons on Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams, and elsewhere.

It is in the midst of this seismic fallout from the pandemic that our editorial team came together, splintered across continents, eager to make sense of the disorientation that came from returning to our home countries months earlier than anticipated, or locked down in countries we were studying in, places we had yet to call fully our own. Our team found ourselves physically in one place and mentally in another, between the United States, Singapore, the United Kingdom, France, and Tunisia.

It is out of discussions we had about this all-encompassing phenomenon of displacement that we conceived of Home Is (Not) Here, inspired by the poetry project Global Poemic: Kindred Voices on the Era of COVID-19 as well as Home Is Not Here (2020), the memoir of historian Wang Gungwu. Our objective was to provide a platform for university students in particular to begin to articulate their feelings of disorientation and movement through poetry, and to carve out a space for people to converse about the psychological, political, economic, and emotional effects that this has engendered. We sought to anthologise poetry and writing that tackles these questions of belonging, displacement, intimacy, and affection in the fallout from the pandemic.

In the months since our call for submissions, we have received a wonderful variety of poems by writers from across the world, whether currently studying in universities or elsewhere, with poems written in or featuring English, French, Chinese, and Spanish. Our contributors are from a correspondingly diverse array of backgrounds, tracing their national or ethnic heritage to Vietnam, the United States, Singapore, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, China, India, Spain, Germany, and South Korea, among other places.

Some poems reckon with question of ancestral estrangement, how the homes of one’s forbears feel distant to a speaker, such as in the work of Dena Kirpalani or Lucia Deyi. Others deal intentionally with the new forms of life that have emerged under the pandemic: the normalcy of teleconferencing, as with Amy Yang’s ‘Calling Home’, the shifting perception of time that has accompanied staticity, as with F. Jordan Carnice’s ‘Ficus Lyrata Finds a Corner’, and the imminence of reluctant movement, as in Olivia Railton’s ‘White Walls’. Others meditate on what constitutes a feeling of ‘homeliness’, whether through the lens of homesickness, as Jessica Nguyen does, the lens of leaving a place that was once home, as Maddi Jackson does, or the lens of missing an individual who created a sense of home, as Maya Sabatino does.

In reading through these poems and gleaning a sense of the ways in which their authors are actively grappling with and ruminating over the notion of home, what quickly emerges is a recognition of the conditionality one may feel toward a place. What may seem secure or immutable in one moment may quickly turn out not to be; one moment a person may feel settled and completely at ease, the other a crisis may demonstrate how thin the pretentions we hold toward normalcy may be. Many a university student has found their hopes of celebrating the end of exams and enjoying the pleasure of unfettered socialising dashed by more immediate obligations toward public health in the fight against COVID-19; these poems demonstrate the ways in which these acts of sacrifice have taken some toll, however much we may be unwilling to admit it.

As you read through these poems and consider their perspectives, verse forms, and themes, we invite you to join us in contemplating how the notion of ‘home’ has changed for you in the light of the profound effects of the pandemic. While its effects have undoubtedly been unequal and devastating, what it has provided for many across ethnic or socioeconomic difference is a new impetus to weigh and reconsider different priorities, to identify what is that which we hold closest to us, to affirm where it is we feel most at ease, and how to extend these same feelings of ease to those around us, whether in our families, neighbourhoods, or broader communities.

We invite you to join us in this ongoing process of seeing afresh where home is, and where home may not be.

The Home Is (Not) Here Team
Jonathan, Mariam, and Jasdeep

Singapore, Paris, and Berkeley, March 2021