Dear Reader
I have left home two times in my life and I am about to do so a third time. The first two times were accompanied by their own tumult and turbulence but the quality of this third departure is yet unknown.
The first time I left home was as a teenage bride bidding brave adieu to everything that was familiar and all that was home. It is a long way from Karachi to Nashville, Tennessee and in the ensuing years I was to learn the cost of that distance and isolation seemingly mile by painful mile.
The second time was not insulated by the joy or pomp of a south asian wedding. I was 23 and I left suddenly fleeing the home and hearth that I had created for the momentary safety of an unmarked domestic violence shelter. This time, I had my 2 year old daughter with me. In the following three years we moved five times and ultimately found respite in a university apartment. Those were long years where nearly everyone I knew and or counted on faltered and I had to wrest a new life for myself and my daughter. It was at the end of that period of transformation that I found this house. It is a small cottage on a tiny lake and it is where my second husband and I raised my daughter. It is where I wrote all three of my books.
Now I must leave this place. It is heart wrenching and gut wrenching and feels acutely like a decimation of a past that until now I had cherished. One of the hardest parts of divesting myself of this second life that I had created, is the process of giving away volume by volume the massive collection of books that have wrapped me in their smells and stories for the past two decades. I love the smell of books second only to what is contained within them. Each of them has witnessed some bit of my past and some version of myself, my memories are intertwined with text, when I brush my fingers across spines and titles, they conjure pictures like a reel, this one brings images of a long ago vigil in a hospital room, that one the careless dissolution of some faraway beach or the sounds of children playing softball. Each one carries not only its own story but an imprint of when they were read my story gently colliding with the words of the authors who have written them.
The inward pressure on immigrants, even people who move from one city to another within a country is, our wild eagerness to recreate home, to mimic somehow the stability and constancy of our first homes. For me the loss of permanence when I first left Karachi has been the invisible force directing so many decisions and dreams. When you uproot yourself you have to believe, quite ardently, in the possibility of putting down roots again. The driving delusion of the migrant is that new places can still give you the easy sense of belonging that you once took for granted. In keeping with this tradition, everyplace that I have lived or made home has been a hodge podge of bits and pieces that I believed would equal home. It is this belief that led me to the house I now inhabit. I believed that there would be roots to put dowm here and that the sense of longing that echoes through all immigrant lives would be drowned in the details of a carefully created new life.
I realize that it is a particularly perturbing moment to be setting out The condition of the world around me leaves me aghast every day. How to square with the loss of home while writing article after article about deportations, detentions and even denaturalization. The last piece I wrote for The Nation laid out the legal procedure through which the Trump Administration can take naturalized citizens like myself can be divested of citizenship. Like my faith in the putting down of roots in new places has been my confidence in the process of naturalization…the name itself suggests transformation into something organic…to make natural is to naturalize a suggestion of indistinguishability from the natural. In the sort of ironies that befall writers’ lives, my marriage began to unravel just around the same time that I became aware that denaturalization was a legal possibility, that precedent existed and that the naturalized were not considered-as I had believed-truly natural.
All stories, are judged inevitably on their endings. I believed that I would live in my little house forever surrounded by my books, propelled by my writing and inhabiting the world I had created within. I was wrong and in the course of the next few months, as I attempt my third transformation, the extent of my self-deception will likely become more apparent to me and to you my readers.
Writing has been the only constant thread in my life, I know no other way to make sense of what happens to me. You, as readers are my sustenance, I feel so lucky and grateful to have you. I have no idea where I will go after I leave this place but I would love to have companions in my journey and in choosing to read my words you are just that. Together we have more wisdom and more courage than I do alone and I stand in need of both right now. The future is full of practical questions…writers are not the best equipped to answer and emotional quandaries that may be more familiar to you than they are to me. I hope we can put them all together here. I hope that in having you we will both realize that we are not alone in our search for belonging.
Reading you is like a breeze, makes me feel better. All the best to you and thank you for your writing
Rafia, your writing has sustained me through some hard times as a migrant. Your writing brings clarity. You are such as brilliant writer. You write with such conviction, even when you talk about being unconvinced or stepping into the unknown. I hope you find a new home, a true home - a home that nourishes you. Although as I write this, I don't feel I know what things make a home anymore. There is the forever desire inside me to recreate the sense of belonging I felt in Lahore which leads me to keep looking for it.