“Home” without roots? On being an academic nomad
“Home is where the heart is” goes that old adage. Having left my “home” fifteen years ago and having carried my heart to four other countries since, I can easily say that this is a false premise. Home is not a “where”, it is rather a “what — what makes you feel you belong — , a “who” — who helps you lay roots. But what if you are not allowed to lay roots, what if, as an academic nomad, you are forced to uproot yourself, demolishing every few years the “home in progress” you put so much effort in building from scratch, leaving behind the “what”s and “who”s that helped you along the way? What becomes of “home” then?
“Why do we live in Germany, when all our family members are in Turkey?” my 7-year-old asked me recently. I was taken aback. Here he was, asking me the question I have been asking myself at least few times a year. It was the most random setting: We were with friends, sitting at a café around lunch time. Not a suitable environment for philosophical musings about “home” or life choices. Pushing my tears back, I managed to utter something about “the bad political and economic situation in Turkey.” “Will we ever go back?” he continued. “We might in the future, if/when things get any better,” I said. Born in the Netherlands, raised in Germany, he was questioning why we were not living in a country he has never lived in. A country he has only seen during holidays. A country he has not spent more than two months a year in total. A country that is “home” for his beloved uncle, aunt, cousins, grandparents, but not for him (or is it?). I knew it was our recent move within Germany (yet another academia-induced move) that was making him question our current situation. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder “where” home is for him. Is it Germany, where he spent almost all of his life? Is it the Netherlands, where he was born? Is it Turkey, where he gets to spend his holidays and meets his loved ones? “Who” is home? Is it his parents? His friends? His relatives? “What” is home? His toys? His books? His native Turkish, which he has an accent in, or German, which he navigates comfortably?
I have been doing research on migration and belonging for years. I have conducted in-depth interviews with refugees, voluntary emigrants, and return migrants. I have asked numerous people the same exact question my son asked me. I have gotten numerous different answers. I have contemplated on the multiple meanings of home, the many layers of effort that goes into home-making, the myriad ways in which migrants feel hopeful, disappointed, content, dissatisfied about their homes past and present. I have written articles on belonging and the cultural and structural components of “home.” Yet, I was still unable to answer my son’s question in a comprehensive manner. “It is not necessarily because I am an incompetent researcher, it is because the topic is complicated,” I reassured myself.
And complicated it is. It feels exciting at the beginning, privileged even; being able to move to different countries, meet with people from different backgrounds, get to know different cultures… It is all shiny and bright, until it is not. After a certain time, one starts craving for stability and roots; roots to keep one grounded, roots to provide one with the feeling of “home.” However, the financial precarity, the short-term contracts, the exploitation the academic market is built on never let one plan ahead, let alone lay roots. Recently, I met an academic who has had to drag herself all over the United States, following short-term academic positions. She jokingly mentioned how she planned to set up an altar for all the things she had to sacrifice throughout the way: family members and close friends, favorite cities and locations, the romantic relationships that had to be cut short, the ones that could never start… I thought about how eerily similar the different altars by academics all around the world would look like; the transnational academic altar of sacrifice.
Add to that the migratory grief that comes with the lack of a “home” to return to, the economic and political turmoil one’s “home” is in, the slow but sure destruction of academic freedom in one’s homeland (that leaves one academically homeless). One is then left wondering: Is “home” without roots possible?
Hydrangeas are among my favorite flowers, not least because they remind me of spring time in Turkey. When we moved to our new city in March 2022, the seventh one since leaving İstanbul in 2007, we got three hydrangeas for the balcony. Two died immediately. They couldn’t acclimate, it was too cold for them. The third one miraculously survived and is still blossoming. When I lose all my hope in our ability to create a new “home” in this never-ending academic journey of ours, I look at that hydrangea and remind myself that one could lay roots despite all odds. Better yet, I think of something my son said, when watching a music video: “Look mom, a flying house, like ours!” Maybe, “home” without roots is possible after all.
