Voiced Heirloom, Sensed Home

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
—James Baldwin

Writing poems can be the articulation of a kind of listening. We listen to the poems we’ve dog-eared in our favorite books to learn new ways to construct images, or we eavesdrop on strangers for turns of phrases that shock their way into our lines. As writers, we train our attention to detect that which might otherwise go unnoticed, to recognize the narrative and emotional throughlines crisscrossing in the periphery—on and off the page.

In my writing, I think a lot about my own family’s history, particularly those moments that happened before I was even born, but that somehow still shape my every day. At first, this might make listening difficult: the people we want to talk to might be gone, textual records to pore over might not exist, and ancestral homes to experience might be locked behind great distances and borders. What if, however, we used our poetic attention to listen to the fragments of long-gone histories and homes that we do have, that have persisted in our lives despite the distancing caused by time and space? Like that shoebox of curiosities stashed away in your closet or that park bench where your parents first kissed. Careful and methodical attention to our personal archive, or our collection of special objects can bring us closer to memories and homes we once had. In this way, our writing is less a process of individual choices and more a collaborative movement unearthed through a relationship of mutual attention. Our objects have spent their lives listening to us—so now we should listen to them.

Nonwestern cosmovisions, or ways of imagining the universe, can help us understand ourselves and objects in different, generative ways. In Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds, scholar Marisol de la Cadena and Nazario Turpo, a Quechua-speaking Indian from the high mountain valleys near Cuzco in Peru write, “Things (mountains, soil, water, and rocks) are not only things; they are earth-beings, and their names speak what they are.” ¹ Visual artist Beatriz Cortez often collaborates with Indigenous collectives like the Maya Comunidad Kaqchikel de Investigación to help her understand, “objects [as] beings: they have wills, they decide when to show themselves, and when to hide, they rebel, they can punish, they can protect.” ² If we unsettle our understanding of objects as things that exist only to be passively described through language, we can imagine them as interlocuters that speak what they are and—if we are attentive—collaborate with us in the drafting of our poems. We can observe objects anchoring explorations of home and personal histories in poems like “The Home Team” by Brenda Shaughnessy, “Home Movies: A Sort of Ode” by Mary Jo Salter, and “Ode to Drinking Water from My Hands” by Ross Gay.

Let’s think of our starting point as a kind of ekphrasis that uses poetry and objects as creative interventions that reimagine home, memory, and our relationships to them both. The term ekphrasis is a borrowing partly from Latin and partly from Greek. Its etymon in Hellenistic Greek, ἔκϕρασις,means to describe, tell, or explain. In ancient Greek ἐκϕράζειν means to recount ³. But what if unlike traditional ekphrasis, we go beyond only looking at our objects and speculating, and instead tend to how they inspire other sensual perceptions like hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling? Through a heightened sensual perceptivity, we can think alongside the objects as collaborators with valuable subjectivities, memories, and worldviews of their own. After all, the objects in our personal archives tell stories, survive through time, and like our own bodies, are porous wells of memory. 

Find a personal object connected to (a) home. This object can be a relic, an image, or a constellation of things. The object should somehow be linked to a literal, spiritual, or metaphorical home of yours. The object can be concrete, like a family heirloom. Or it can be something abstract, like a symbol you encountered yesterday that reminds you of your childhood home. I also want to honor and recognize that some of us may no longer possess anything materially connected with our home(s). If this is the case, I encourage you to find something that inspires memories of home or something that can be imbued with new meaning. Make sure the object has resonance for you today.

Spend the first five minutes taking notes on your object. You may use the following questions to guide your note taking, but you may also write freely in response to the object. If your observations begin as abstract reflections, do your best to bring them toward concrete sensory details or images.

• Touch the object. What does the object’s texture bring to mind? Is it brittle? Soft? Glossy? Do these tactile details tell a story about where it has been?
• Bring the object to your ear. Does the object emit a sound when it moves? Is the object completely silent? Do these sonic details tell a story about who you were, or who you are today?
• Smell or taste the object. What does the object taste or smell like? Is this taste or smell familiar? Is it strange? Is there a physical location, an enclosure, a site to which these details transport you? If so, where? If not, where are you now?

After five minutes, write freely for 15 minutes reflecting on the home to which your object is linked. Incorporate your notes where possible. If you begin in the abstract, remember to return to the concrete image or sensory detail. Try your best to work to the bottom of the page(s).

To long for connection with people, places, and histories is a very human experience. I imagine dialoging with our personal archives as just one way to braid these instincts with language in hopes of better understanding why we tell our stories, mine our personal archives of its objects and memories, and, in the process, reach for home.