Home (Hugo Hamilton)

Is home a good word for home? Perhaps there is no answer to that question. I mean, what word would we used instead of the word home that would make it work any better. Because home is one of those words, like love, and hope, and memory and belonging, which can never be fixed down. They do not have a stable meaning, they keep shifting, like a map shifting underneath the landscape, because these words are so personal and so close to your own imagination. The whole idea of home keeps shifting. And what do we mean by home? Is home still the home that we thought it was, because people are always making younger words out of old words, changing the meaning so you don’t recognize what you thought was your home before. You pick up the word and it has already been used it for somewhere else. It’s a word that people never put back in the same place again once they have used it. And maybe the word home keeps shifting so much for me because we have so many different versions of it in our family, in the countries I have lived in, where my parents came from, so many places which would fit that word and where they want to go back to. Home is the only word I have for where I want to go back to, what I remember, and you can only remember what is gone, what is far away. So perhaps this is why I like the word so much, because it is something left behind, a place that keeps moving and never stands still, a place that I remember, a place that I want to keep and write about and that has become my home now, my writing is my home.

Pour citer cette ressource :

Hugo Hamilton, "Home (Hugo Hamilton)", La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), avril 2014. Consulté le 24/04/2024. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/litterature/entretiens-et-textes-inedits/home-hugo-hamilton-