Dear ones,
It was autumn in California, 1937, at a dinner party full of communist-leaning writers and other rebel artists, where novelist Thomas Wolfe struck up a conversation with Ella Winter about a terrible visit he had recently had to his hometown in North Carolina. “Don’t you know you can’t go home again?” Winter said, perhaps rhetorically, but the story goes that Wolfe asked her immediately if he could use it as a title. She agreed, and a year later, after Wolfe’s untimely death from pneumonia, You Can’t Go Home Again was posthumously published.
Of course Winter meant what she said in a metaphorical sense, that one can never return to a place where one has left for some time and expect to feel like you fit there again. If home is, as Verlyn Klinkenborg suggests “a place you can never see with a stranger’s eyes for more than a moment,” Winter (and by extension Wolfe) were saying that even that inevitable familiarity will be strained, complicated by everything you picked up in all the places you’ve called home since.
The weight of this is heavier, of course, for those who have left home non-consensually: African people stolen from their homelands to be used as property in the US, indigenous tribes whose land was stolen beneath their feet, immigrant families who felt pressure to flee their home, anyone displaced from climate-change-induced disaster (and so on). Some people literally can’t go home again because borders, money, facist governments won’t allow it.
In a speech Toni Morrison gave at Oberlin College in 2009, she begins with the question, “What do we mean when we say ‘home’?”, and continues:
“It is a virtual question because the destiny of the twenty-first century will be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a shareable world. The question of cultural apartheid and/or cultural integration is at the heart of all governments and informs our perception of the ways in which governance and culture compel the exoduses of peoples (voluntarily or driven) and raises complex questions of dispossession, recovery, and the reinforcement of siege mentalities. How do individuals resist or become complicit in the process of alienizing others’ demonization?”
Home, as I noted last week, is a fraught concept for many, often marginalized and historically oppressed people more than others. But as my dear friend B has reminded me, even your most basic white person in the US has been estranged from the homeland of their ancestors. We’re all grasping, whether we’re aware of it or not, for a belonging that isn’t unrelated to the land and the people we connect with the notion of home. Understanding home - what it is, who has access to it, and how we’re all a little bit displaced from the core of it - can better guide our liberation struggle.
I’m thinking about this a lot, reader, because the truth is, I am going home again, by which I mean: I’m moving back to Cleveland. I have said since I left it - in Livejournal poems, ankle tattoos, and, most recently, a published memoir - that I gave my heart to Ohio and never really got it back. So it’s probably not shocking for anyone who knows me (or anyone who has read my book) that, after seventeen years away, I’d find my way back again. And it’s probably not shocking for anyone who knows how close I am to my mom that Covid would be a final straw of sorts that confirmed, without one ounce of doubt, that I needed to be back in the same city as her sooner than later.
It’s certainly true that writing Rust Belt Femme made me nostalgic for Cleveland. My book romanticized the city with rose-colored glasses, but also forced me to face the ugly parts I never looked at before. It was a process of uncovering, what Walter Benjamin explains as an “excavation”; I uncovered my childhood and the land where I ran barefoot, “like a man [sic] digging.” I found there Irish ancestors and first crushes, native caskets and racetrack trophies, horrific trauma and brilliant glowing bugs. In my tilling of the earth of my past, I confronted it, in all its beauty and all its terror.
In a recent article discussing his new co-founded press, Grieveland (a portmanteau of “grief” and “Cleveland”), poet Brendan Joyce described a particular affective reality of the Cleveland area. “I think there’s something inherently grief-stricken about living here. Even if you think about nostalgia -- nostalgia is so tied up in grief,” Joyce went on, “Cleveland’s a deeply nostalgic city.”
I’m not naive about returning home. I know that Winter and Wolfe are right, that I’m not returning to the Ohio I wrote about in my book. Being there will bring up a lot about my past that was difficult - it will certainly bring up grief about the life I’ll never return to (one with grandparents and wanting to stay out past 9pm to go to shows, for example) - but it will also mean building a new life on familiar soil. I’ll make new traditions in old spaces and I will plant new stories there. I will bring all of who I became in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Boston with me, so that I will be a Clevelander, but with the gift of heavier cartography now.
“Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected,” writes Ann Pachett, “how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now.”
If I had ever landed the secure, coveted tenure-track academic position I thought I wanted more than anything, I never would have been able to make a move like this. If I had never left Cleveland, I (probably) never would have written a book about it. It’s humbling to sit with that, and a move back home is pummeling me with this truth of our choices. Life is partly just the aftermath of decisions in a particular set of circumstances. If anything ever went exactly as planned, or if any of us had chosen our Ghost Ship, we probably wouldn’t be here together at all. Reader, I’m so glad we are though. And for however complicated it may be, I’m so glad I’m going home again.
love & solidarity,
raechel
Read, Watch, Listen.
The insufficiency of branded social justice slides on Instagram. An insightful essay from Rust Belt Radio on the three flavors of abolition. We must continue the work to abolish borders, even during Covid. Rinaldo Walcott on online teaching and why academics need to be community-focused now more than ever. It’s from 2018, but definitely check out “Notes on Trap,” an adventurous and compelling essay from Jesse McCarthy. The role of indigenous people in molding the ecological landscape. On loss in Beirut, a harrowing essay from Rima Rantisi: “The blast did not only destroy our city, it destroyed any previous delusions that we could get it back without bloodshed.”
Mutual aid.
In 1950, a Black female mother and entrepreneur from Cambridge, Massachusetts, purchased a grand three-story house and the surrounding six acres. “She became the first and only Black person to own land in the area. She turned the home into a Bed and Breakfast and provided a safe place for traveling Blacks to stay. Her B&B lasted through the 70s and now her great granddaughter wants to buy the home and revive the B&B again, to preserve the legacy of her Martha’s historic home, and to carry on the tradition providing refuge for Black travelers. Consider supporting this powerful project.
Joy.
The kitties. Singing along to the Les Mis soundtrack at full volume on Saturday afternoon. Walks by the lake. New Moon in Leo intentions. Making plans for the move to Cleveland, especially with L’s grounding support. <3 Bike rides. Walks. Good books. A very good bath. Emily Jane Powers EP of summer songs from 2004-2008. House plants. JH.<3 Candle magic. This 15-minute-long Gillian Welch song. Voices notes with M. Voice notes with B. An exciting writer connection. Other people’s newsletters (shout out this week to Sarah Jaffe & Alicia Kennedy). Phone chat with A. Collaging. Signs of autumn (changing leaves, wilting flowers, chilly air<3<3<3). VB’s new show pilot. Rainy days. Hearing Meg Bradbury on Sagittarian Matterstalk about queer elders and how every generation contributes to movements for change. <3
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