SONG OF THE DAY: Igrawahi Assouf

Homesickness or a longing for a home, as expressed through the guitar at hands of guitarist from historically nomadic people. The arguments of whiteness and nation-state in context of America sometimes miss me completely, because I don’t always feel at home, or there’s an aching in my legs to move, not even fly not get away, just to walk and make a pilgrimage to somewhere, try to find home. I often think this is what motivated hunter/gatherers to expand where they were, but out of a sense of something missing, not any colonial notion of ownership. The Earth is owned now, for the most part, at least all the parts if I have handy foot access to in my current lot in this only life I’ll get. And yet something is missing. I lived in a place for 20 years previous to my current tenancy, and hardly had just begun to feel at home there, and in less than a year that sense is completely gone. That’s the longest I’ve lived any one place in my life. Before that, I grew up in a vague geographic area, mostly entirely in the same county, so that part of the state sort of feels like home; but my relationship with the blood I came from is so fractured beyond repair, and the area has developed in ways that don’t feel the same to how it felt decades ago, that it doesn’t feel like home either. 

A sense of homelessness, different than houselessness, because being houseless is considered being homeless in America, because our notions of property ownership are so firmly ingrained that this is what it has to mean, and that once you have a place to live, you have reached a sort of material paradise where you couldn’t possibly be “homeless”. But I don’t know, a lot of the transitions with my kids in the past year in dealing with how their lives have changed is definitely a sense of no longer knowing where you live, and feeling homeless in my apartment, that’s it’s not home. I’ve felt that too. Shit I’ve been there almost a year and still feel like I’m just visiting the place. How many people think this way in our American culture? I’d bet plenty. Occupying spaces – leases and jobs – yet feeling completely homeless in any heartfelt way. And yet we mostly ignore it, or medicate ourselves with materialism, increasingly with digital materialism where the abundance is stored in the clouds which we’ll one day lose access to, and not only have the emptiness of spiritualism, but we won’t even have the clutter of physical materialism to continue pretending. 

I’ve done two loops around this nation, three summers ago by bus and train, and this past fall by train alone. I’d love to do it by foot, even if I didn’t make the entire continent. Or walk south, until I find a home, whether that means back to southside Virginia, or North Carolina, or the mountains of north Alabama, or the border of Texas and Mexico, or fuck it maybe I walk all the way through Central America and end up somewhere entirely different on these conjoined twin American land masses, and finally find a place I feel myself with, completely, because I don’t think I’ve gotten there yet.