I started this quarter assuming that I would write about music as my “home” in our final essay; it seemed so logical considering the huge role that it’s played in my life and the way it can flavor any of life’s myriad seasons and circumstances, helping me to catalog my experiences. I switched to writing about father figures because it felt like something I could dive into deeper in my rhetoric rather than having to rely solely on writing about something (music) that had to be listened to in order to be understood. Since then I’ve been realizing that even though my father is a huge part of what home is to me, home is not so simply described.

Home is something that for me changes with the passing years and what feels comfortable, safe, and familiar in this season might not in the next; I can only imagine what someone who’s been displaced from their geographical home goes through in that respect. The texts that we’ve been analyzing over the course of this quarter almost all deal with characters that have been displaced from their countries and homes and who struggle with defining themselves because their origins are complicated and hard to sum up in any way that is neat and tidy. Home is a hard topic to write about for this very reason, because it is so fluid and nostalgia leaves such a different taste in each of our mouths.

All this being said I think that I made the right decision sticking with family for my topic because even if we aren’t all connected with our fathers almost all of us have a family whether biological or out of close ties that are beyond blood. Home can be our connections to people as well as a physical place, I think that most of us would say that we feel more at home with our closest friends than with some of our own blood relatives. Many of the characters in our texts also struggle with this aspect of home as well, being unable to relate to the people in the new country that they’ve arrived in because they share no common history and having no close friends or family in their new environment.  Reading their stories just makes me more grateful for the deep roots that I have and the relationships that give me balance no matter how removed I become from my starting place.