Home is a Place I Left Behind
Text by Hicham Gardaf

Published in Al Mahal, Atonal Editions, 2022

***
When all paths leading home
were eclipsed by the missing sun,
I stumbled

In the midst of tenebrosity,
I followed the scents of
orange blossoms
mint
and cinnamon,
the scents of early summer
figs
and tangerines

I comforted myself by reliving
memories of protection,
memories of my childhood home.

 ***

The Arabic word الغربة, pronounced Al-Ghorba can be translated as being ‘away from home’. It is often used by Moroccan immigrants to express their feeling of estrangement mixed with nostalgia. 

I grew up listening to stories of departures, stories of people leaving home in search of a better future. This was Tangier in the early noughties, a period in which the future of the city still looked grim. Outlandish, a hip-hop group formed in Denmark by a trio of Cuban, Moroccan and Pakistani immigrants, had just released their song ‘Walou’. Set in Tangier, the music video depicts one of the many stories I was familiar with — the struggles and the risks youngsters had to endure when trying to leave the country. “When you fail, you try again, and when you succeed, there is no immediate return,” a friend told me once. In Morocco and North Africa, people who reached Europe by the sea are referred to as Harraga — as ‘those who burn’ the borders. The term Harraga, which translates as ‘to burn’, alludes to the migrants' practice of burning their identity papers, personal documents and fingertips in order to prevent identification by authorities in Europe. “One must be like a phoenix,” my friend concluded, “you need to burn first in order to rise again.”

As the person in exile starts building their new identity, stretching their first roots into the ground, along with this metamorphosis the displaced often experience a sense of alienation and, at times, loss. They are constantly reminded in their newly settled environment — be it by the sounds, the scents or the images — that they are elsewhere, not at home. “Elsa Triolet expressed this exilic sentiment when she wrote: ‘It must be accepted that it is natural for a human being to be born and to die in the same place or, at least, in the same locality; that everyone should be an organic part of all he calls his native land, his country.’ Triolet likens humans to plants and animals, arguing that ‘certain species’ can never achieve ‘successful acclimatisation’. The exile, in this formulation, suffers from a ‘terrible malady: homesickness’”[1]. How to cure homesickness when one can not return home? And if one can be in exile in their own country, what is home then? Is home a physical place? Is it a feeling? Can home be inhabited in one’s imagination?

On Diasporic Intimacy: The Magnetic Letter

In August 1963, Philips introduced the first compact cassette recorder, a year after the end of the Algerian Revolution — a war which lasted almost eight years and led to Algeria gaining its independence from France in 1962. In this historic moment, France was still a prosperous country, undergoing cultural and economic changes; a period known in France as Les Trente Glorieuses (The Glorious Thirty). However, due to the War of Independence, Algeria was no longer an alternative for employment. This led to a decline in labour for the fields of industry, mining and construction, which, at the time, was mostly Algerian. France would then sign an agreement with Morocco to fill the shortages. The first Moroccans to take part in this scheme were mainly men from Northern Morocco and the Rif region. “By the eighties, more than 70% of people from Al Hoceima went to work in Europe”, Badr El Hammami told me, over a phone call we had recently to discuss his work Thabrate. Badr is a Moroccan artist whose work deals primarily with the concept of borders. He and I met for the first time in 2017, during the exhibition Noss Noss at Mahal Art Space in Tangier. This was when I first discovered his project Thabrate. I remember feeling very emotional after visiting the show, maybe because it was my first visit to Morocco since I moved to the UK. Or maybe because I too was exchanging letters with my mother while I was away from home. Badr’s project Thabrate — which, in Tamazight, means ‘the letter’  — takes as its starting point the audio cassettes that were exchanged between his parents in the sixties — a popular method of communication among the wave of Moroccan immigrants who went to France during this period. Badr explains that “most of those who used ‘the magnetic letter’ belonged to cultures of orality, or were illiterate. They used it as an alternative to writing letters, prior to the democratisation of the telephone.” The straightforward design of the Phillips compact cassette recorder made this new technology accessible to this generation of immigrants — a practice that was rapidly appropriated among other diasporas, usually between the west and its former colonies. 

Before using mail to send the cassettes, due to fears they would be inspected or confiscated, the first ones were hand-delivered by people returning from Europe to visit their families in Morocco. Badr attempted to borrow these cassettes from other families for his project, but soon abandoned the idea: “I realised that they contained very intimate messages. All the social problems that families encountered at that time were told in these tapes: the financial struggles, droughts, family problems, etc. You don’t want a stranger to listen to them. Some family members preferred to destroy the cassettes than to listen to the conversations. It was their way of protecting themselves and their families.” Voice is unlike the written word: it contains vibrations and emotions. You can hear the sadness and the joy of the person speaking. Texts, on the other hand, are interpretable. 

Alongside archival documents, newspapers and everyday objects, Badr’s project at Mahal Art Space also included a correspondence with his friend Fadma using a tape recorder. “We wanted to reproduce this method of communication in similar conditions as our parents, without consideration for the possibilities offered thirty years later.” Together, they exchanged five audio cassettes. 

Letter Writing as an Act of Resistance 

The advance of technology — and, in particular, the democratisation of the internet — made communication and access to information easier, faster and cheaper. Former ways of communicating ideas and communicating with each other are becoming obsolete. Take a look at telephone booths and you will realise how most are no longer in use. Why then would anyone bother to post a letter when they can send an email within minutes (and for free)? Will letter writing survive in the digital age? Will our society still use paper in twenty years? These were the questions I asked some of my friends and family to respond to in 2016. I asked each of them to use a pen and paper to answer the question, and then post the letter to me. I can’t remember how many letters I received in total, it might have been fifteen or twenty by the end of the project. Each letter I received brought a smile to my face. Each letter was unique, bearing the sender’s handwriting, their signature, their choice of paper, the strikethrough sentences. The letters reflected people’s personalities. My friend Bertan and I continued our correspondence for the next several months. This was the year I moved to the UK, the year of the EU referendum, which divided Britons into ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ — with the former wanting to reduce migrant numbers and regain full control of their borders, and the latter defending the free movement of EU migrants and access to the Single Market. This was also the beginning of the refugee crisis, anti-migrant rhetoric, and the rise of nationalism across Europe. 

My letter writing project was sparked by a conversation I had with a solicitor while applying for my UK residence card, six years ago. He advised me to collect all the mail I received in case I should need it to support my application. For eight months, at the peak of the worst recession this country had seen in decades, my documents were in the hands of the Home Office, meaning I couldn’t open a bank account or sign a contract in my name.

I lived in a former warehouse behind the Royal London Hospital that was due for demolition. I was a property guardian, which meant I benefited from an affordable rent and got to live in unconventional buildings in central London. The caveat was my tenancy agreement was renewed every month, and the guardians company could ask me to leave at any given moment, without warning. Of course, this was not an ideal situation for someone like me, whose right to stay in the UK also depended on their place of residence. All I prayed for while I waited for the Home Office’s decision, was to not get the notice to quit. The subject of my project — the disappearance of letter writing — and the subject of my residence in the UK — a permanent address threatened by the disappearance of the building — became one. I tried to persuade myself that as long as the letters came, the building would not be demolished. That the building’s meaning, its very existence, depended on the letters I was getting. The act of writing letters became itself an act of resistance, of belief in the impossible. 

—

[1]  Quoted in Carol Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (1996), 33.