54 Home lands.
Maybe a homeland is where childhood happens. It’s where one inhabits their original, diminutive form. It is the space prior to discovering the adult world’s cruelty and hypocrisy. A homeland is a terrain in one’s imagination, and imaginary lands have a way of living forever.
Helene Cixous was eleven when her father died. In her writing, the father is present, he is part of her conversation with the world. He encourages her, and she deprives him of the past tense. Using the present tense when describing the dead is a way of unburying them. The writer pays for this defiance by embracing absence—curling up next to it and sharing stories.
Those of us without parents must build lives inside homes which embrace or reconfigure the immensity of without-ness. There is no language for this. In Cixous’ phrasing:
Everything is lost except words. This is a child’s experience: words are our doors to all other worlds. At a certain moment for the person who has lost everything, whether that is, moreover, a being or country, language becomes the country. One enters the country of languages.
Cixous makes two things happen at once: the country of languages assumes multilingualism, but language also becomes the country. The country of languages is language.
There is no language for this, either.
But there is the child who stands at the threshold between entering a world and becoming a functioning part of it. And there is the country of childhood wherein the self slowly learns to perform its selfhood. And there is the betrayal, namely, the discovery of pain which occurs when the child realizes the world exists independently of the self.
“I am not a tree!” I declared to my first-grade journal.
There is thrill and horror in this discovery of separation. With the distance between myself and the dogwood comes alienation from the fairies who live in its flowers, who leave their skirts on the grass in May… the sparrow continues singing, but this song is no longer for me.
Now the sparrow’s song is a dialogue with the world, and I must learn all its names so that I can remain part of the conversation.