home-in-motion

“home is a particular place at a moment in time even as our conceptions of it transcend both time and space; it encompasses desire and nostalgia, brings together memories and longings, our future children and our ancestors long gone, democratic processes of conflict and consensus, the local and the global, inclusion and exclusion, the material and the ghostly, the corporal and the intangible… the very idea of a "return" may be little more than wishful thinking, a wistful dream that we can go back to a place where we once were, but no longer are, and yet desire to be. paradoxically, mobility and constraint exist in tandem; it's entirely possible to be homeward bound and yet bound by a peculiar sense of home.”

debra thompson. the long road home: on blackness and belonging, 2022. 

i have now lived in over 16 homes and counting. born and raised in west london, with a black american mother and an english/jamaican father, the concept of “home” has always felt somewhat intangible. i like to call myself a “child of the diaspora” - my ancestors survivors of the transatlantic slave trade on both sides, violently displaced from africa, to the americas, eventually choosing to land in england. “where is home?” is a question central to the diaspora experience, a tender negotiation of pain and privilege, displacement and belonging, inclusion and exclusion, forgetting and remembering.

“home” has always been a place constructed through attachments, expectations, and definitions outside of myself. is it my mother’s council flat in ladbroke grove? is its comfort nestled in the sofa in my late grandmother’s north london living room, in a home we no longer own, or calling to me from across the pond, where half of my family remains? is it found sitting in a chair at my aunt’s beauty shop, or at my grandmother’s stove? is home in the jamaican countryside that my grandfather rejected? is it in the bosom of the american south, made fertile by my ancestor’s blood? home is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, complicated further by the restrictions, borders and boundaries of ill constructed nation states and settler colonialism.  i cannot go back to an exact moment, nor can i return to a particular home, but through food, i find a way to reclaim a piece of it. the act of cooking becomes both a declaration of belonging and a reflection of displacement. through displacement, okro soup becomes gumbo, and with that motion comes an assertion of personhood and an acknowledgement of past, present and future. the dish reveals the pain, pleasures, hopes, dreams, and comforts of home, a feeling that can be accessed from lekki to louisiana.

food serves as a medium through which the past is carried forward. in the kitchen, i often find myself revisiting past versions of myself, connecting with those who have come before me, and imagining the future. food is a medium through which we transmit culture, tradition, and memory. w.e.b dubois believed that in order to effectively demonstrate belonging, one must perform proper rituals of food preparation, consumption, and digestion. in the kitchen, i am not simply preparing a meal; i am connecting to a past, to people i will never meet, but who are part of me physically, through genetics, mentally, through the stories that have been passed down, and spiritually, through ancestral connection and veneration. food, in that sense, is a living, breathing thing. it is not only consumed but also passed down, evolving with each new person who prepares it. it holds a paradox: a nostalgic longing for a time that no longer exists, and yet a simultaneous creation of something entirely new in the present. in that way, food is as much about the future as it is about the past. the act of cooking, of preparing a meal, is a form of reconciliation between the mobility of the present and the constraints of the past. 

home is never fixed, but through food, we can make it ours again and again. it is in this constant re-creation, this paradoxical blending of past, present, and future, that food becomes more than sustenance. it becomes a profound reflection of who we are, where we come from, and where we hope to go. in food, we find the boundaries of home blurred and remade with every meal we share. the act of preparing a meal, of sitting down to eat, is both a return and a departure. the place we long for is often unreachable, and yet, through food, we create a small piece of home within ourselves. we nourish our bodies and our spirits in ways that allow us to feel anchored in a world that is often unmoored. the kitchen becomes a space where mobility and constraint coexist, and where the ghosts of the past live alongside the hopes for the future.