Writing a way home

Abstract

This article discusses my (impossible) attempt to find a way home by writing a play — Home. Home is constructed by weaving together fragments from my grandmother’s memoirs and my own writing (Thorp 1945, 2016). My grandmother, born and brought up in Myanmar, had never visited Britain until her family moved ‘home’ when she was sixteen, while I moved to Singapore in my thirties. As a child, my grandmother could not return home to Myanmar, while the COVID-19 pandemic meant that I was unable to leave Singapore. By comparing our experiences of being at home, and of not being able to go home, I aim tell a wider story about identity and belonging in migrant experiences that reach beyond our own intimate recollections. In Home, the page becomes a playground where I explore notions of home, identity, belonging, non-belonging, and the trickster nature of memory. This autoethnographic investigation combines my experience of writing Home with theoretical and methodological reflections on it. Through this process, the concept of home reveals itself as embodied, liminal, shifting, and troubles notions of identity and belonging for both my grandmother and me. Extending Sara Ahmed’s notion of home as skin (1999), I suggest that not only can home permeate the skin, but that there is a connection between home and sickness. In attempting to understand my grandmother’s experience of home in her cultural and ethnographic context, I expose my own post-colonial discomfort about her claim that Myanmar was her home. These feelings affect how I select and reuse text from her memoirs, so that I reveal myself to be an unreliable narrator, biographer, and even an unreliable playwright. Ultimately, playwriting becomes a method that allows identity and belonging for my grandmother and I to exist in a third space (Bhabha 1994), both on the page and embodied in a character that is both of us and neither of us.