Floating on the wings of a darkness:

in the name of homes, untethered

For the past weeks, I have been waking up with a tear inside of me. With no beginnings or endings—its whims spill to distance the sunlight grazing my skin, the mulberries watching over me. An emotion with amorphous narratives, I sit and wonder if this breaking holds the edgeless destruction of my hometown during last year’s earthquake, my upcoming move that will grow new distances, or the sense of futility as Palestinians are continuing to suffer unfathomable violence. It is a summer of grief. And at the center of these diffused landscapes, tied together in a persistent loss, across insurmountable differences of degree, stands the long-romanticized, deeply craved vision of home.

As an immigrant, I have felt home in the longing. From the porch I wave to my neighbors in the North End, a sudden drift begins a tranquil image of the Bosporus, encased in a grey, kept warm as if fascism has not been brewing around its corners. Memory is a trickster. An idealized image of home descends over the overwhelm of a present, where survival and resistance are ongoing conundrums, offering an escape, someplace else, where the pain could finally settle.

Strung across unrelenting narratives of a diaspora – there, I am an outsider; here, I am incomplete – a friend wonders if their heart will ever settle. We are a different species, another adds, than those who can chart their lineage and tie their purpose, without hesitation, to a place.

What happens when the place that contained a desire of home disappears? When desire’s object – already a ghost – proves itself as unattainable?

Over 50,000 dead in the earthquake that decimated majority of my hometown, Antakya. Antakya diye bir yer yok artık, I’d hear many repeat; Antakya no longer exists.

After a year and a half, those dislocated are stuck in emergency aid containers, suffused under asbestos arising from unregulated demolitions, with no accountability for the thousands murdered in buildings that had been declared up to code [developers and the state, shaking hands] while the city’s future is put into auction for outsiders. A story, not unlike Detroit’s past and present, with billionaire’s downtown reproducing a catalogued boredom of gentrification, billboards in New York declaring ‘Come to Detroit, houses are cheap!’, while the neighbors who had raised generations out of its soil insist:

we will stay; this is home.

The diasporic narratives of migrants, shattered realities of refugees, histories of dislocation that have connected Black people to the depths of Detroit;

I wonder if there is any relation of home in our era scarred in colonialism that can be knowable within a language of boundaries: as if ground would hold, as if a place would stay; as if the future would be construed in the grammar of an existing order... Still there is commitment to land to a city to a people. Detroiters have taught me how such a commitment flourishes radical imagination; how the past in a collectivizing will of survival might source a life beyond capital hegemony.

Can understanding home as a practice, rather than a contained space, help sustain and enact radical imagination?

say, the blue walls, grey fences, a straight couple, and their kids, merrily waving from welcome to united states videos replaying at the border, while the customs officer declares, “we are worried you might be bringing a Syrian migrant with you, so we have to keep you around for a couple hours and check your suitcases;”

a body rolled up in kefen,

wrapped tight to fit through the cracks of the empire

stinking suburban laughter / a home of walls and borders, dream of america loud over tv screens,

projected over Palestinians under ruble; please ignore the mess and continue paying your mortgage ☺ that is the dominant, spillover image of home as a physical space with its materiality entrusted to the police, tied through a constitutional promise of legalized genocide: a family heirloom to be passed down (until the city plans another highway to destroy the Black neighborhoods), a door to lock and sit behind as bombs keep falling someplace else (until..?)…

On the other hand, the villagers gathered before the Amanos mountains of Antakya with their banners, megaphones, and anger yelling we will not let the government eradicate our stories brick by brick we will build our town again

texturize home – not in certainty – but in a language of water.

Water with its perfect memory,

water that conv enes life and death in a ripple,

water that floods syphoned wetlands, beginning again,

still a geography, a land to have nourished flesh, but the home shared, the home fought for, the home that galvanizes bodies in the form of a future not yet seen, is sutured through a poetics, as love that bell hooks inscribes within willfulness. beyond the arrogance of a law to declare eminence over nature and time, as a deed granting rights of property “in perpetuity.”

And if we are the dreamers of a future that won’t reproduce their fictions, if we are seekers of a felt sense of justice, reorienting our desires for what could meet that warmth of home, our understanding of where home takes shape can be vital to radical dreaming.

Let me tell you a story:

“The power to experience the shock of elsewhere is what distinguishes the poet.”

Edouard Glissant

It is the heart of the heatwave. The air, thick as boulders, mesmerizes a sky of red. I hop off my bike at the rising gardens of the Joy Project, where circles of communion are already seeded. It is Juneteenth. Gabby and Amanda are by the brick barbeque, throwing hot ashes over the lamb sprawled to feed a community. Sweat raining off their faces, they still provide a breakdown of the process for the youngsters who are curious about how heat grows, spreads, and settles. This barbeque itself stands as a cross-temporal relation, as Gabby and Josmine carried the method from the South, following the footsteps of migratory currents; a return and redefinition, nourishing bodies, and spirits across geographies. The commitment bespeaks of care; from 8am when the fire is first lit, to 8pm when the food is served, anchoring patience against a culture drawn in promise of efficiency: fast/faster/as quickly as possible (that, of course, cannot create love). On the other side of the garden is another circle, stewarded by Sophiyah E., who invites the neighbors to lay over shaded blankets and descend, together, into marrows of sound. Their sound bowl grasps the vibrous matter of connection and extends its duration into concentric circles: elevating a pitch into heights of breaking, bringing out a personalized sermon for dreaming. From my darkness, the waves of my childhood come into speech; Mediterranean waters play over Detroit’s ground, with my grandmother peeling green beans for the dinner, and my deceased grandfather singing along to Turkish folk music buzzing over the radio. Snippets of a journey in a single body; imagine the worlds coming together in this field of beings being loved upon, held to travel across their scars, mending this land together in fault lines. The trust it takes to surrender attests to an intention seeded in Joy Project’s grounds and how we come together this afternoon. King, who is photographing the event shares often I do not like being looked at – as if othered, as if defined in that gaze – but when someone looks at me here, I feel loved through their gaze, perceived not as an idea, but a being, broken & whole. We speak as we watch a jam circle form in the heart of trees, at the corner of the garden. Strings, bells, bones, shells pass through hands in impromptu iterations, with sound remembering the tectonic hereafter of the African diaspora, shaped again in bodies, as voices, humming, speaking, repeating tilling a landscape of homemaking. Improvisation is a gift of imagination; our bodies, no longer enclosed, change forms, orient longings in response to one another, at each edge meeting something else, something unlike what was, something closer to what could be. over the mic, a community organizer speaks: thank you, to all of you, thank you thank you thank you and soon the circles commune over a steaming dream of food.

How do we long together?

there is no return to lay our shivering backs upon; no memory to cradle the seven generations rising from the horizons. there is no home to own that could swell against the flood of the end times; no walls would hold, no language could contain; the fissure becomes its own reality. walking its center/I am its center/it is my center I let myself be led to the circle. each time, my instinct was to isolate; each time my broken found words among people searching for words for their broken life became possible again. we need to learn to grieve collectively, a friend remembers, as ruins texture the ordinary. willow rains over the stones, dandelions press their adamant fingers, painted brick and cracked marbles shine: the field takes on speech. and just where the story would appear as collapse, what if the hands marked in anger, love, and reminiscence carving a question for you to join; what if the iterative making of futures among us was home?