«Even though we had moved into a house that was too small, I felt like I was in an environment that reminded me of my home in Serbia. There was a courtyard shared with other families. They were farmers. We often met, and we talked. Those people were very welcoming to us. But to have a residence permit we had to live in a house that met the criteria for housing suitability. That house, because of its interior, did not meet them. But for me, the most important ‘room’ is precisely that courtyard. There, I met the neighbors and shared with them the day, the things of everyday life. They asked about me, about my life…»
How can you recreate a home away from home? Every possible answer reflects the extraordinary diversity of the stories of those who move from one house to another or from one country to another, of those who experience uprooting or new rooting. And yet, contrary to the widespread belief that to feel good in a new context it is necessary to invest almost exclusively in the interior of one’s home – cleaning it, furnishing it to one’s liking, personalizing its spaces, filling it with objects or habits from one’s tradition – the people interviewed as part of Moj Dom tell us something else: the most decisive elements for feeling at home again are meeting new people and sharing experiences and stories with them. This sharing can give rise to positive relationships that one can count on and for which one becomes important. The ways, spaces, and times of this process depend on many factors at play. This is not to say that the private dimension is useless, quite the opposite. Material things – some spaces, some objects – nurture new relationships and senses of belonging, facilitating the sharing of intimate stories and emotions, which would be difficult to verbalize, especially after the experience of difficult, if not traumatic, events.
The answers to the interviews conducted by Codici and the stories collected during the collection days (participatory research moments through the collection of memories and personal objects directly from the communities or people involved), organized with the association Lapsus, indicate that it is possible to rediscover a sense of belonging even after a dramatic experience, such as displacement, uprooting or war. The specific aspect that we want to highlight is that a fundamental help in building new relationships of sharing and reciprocity can be given by the most private and intimate aspects of one’s history.
In this contribution, we will discuss how memories of the past can help rebuild a sense of home, allowing an emotional bond with the past and making the new environment capable of including the different aspects of identity. To understand how memories facilitate new important relationships, it is necessary to formulate some guiding questions. How is a new sense of home built thanks to memories? How can these give life to new interpersonal or community relationships? What is the role of material objects in this process? How do new social bonds contribute to strengthening memory and bringing positive emotions back to the surface?
Memories
The previous article suggests the centrality of nostalgia, which, in the process of loss and recreation of one’s home, can help to find a balance by allowing a reappropriation of a past that has detached itself too quickly. This aspect is present in many of the stories heard, even if people often follow complex paths to recognize it.
«I would like to spend some time there [in Požarevac, Serbia] and then come back here to Italy. When I’m there, there is a strong energy that I absorb from that place and that’s why I want to go back often. If I go there, I recharge my batteries for I don’t know how long. This thing happens often, but when I retire I would like to take the time to stay there longer. By now I have put down roots here and as the roots sink you can’t detach yourself from here.
It’s often the smells that make me remember the past, the smells of my grandmother’s scarves in the closet. But it’s also the people, the friends. It seems like a different, cleaner air. It’s strange… even the trees that are still there and the roses that my mother planted.»
The houses of the past are material buildings that can no longer accommodate lives. However, they do not stop being bearers of memories. The return to the place, and the object of the house, if relived and retold, allows us to keep alive some dimensions of ourselves that are essential for our identity in the present, which would otherwise risk being lost. These houses, compared to the ones of the present, are places of refreshment and recharging. They are sources of emotional nourishment.
To these stories, others are added, in which the story focuses not so much on reliving memories, but on a process of reconciliation or reconciliation with one’s origins. Many people born in Italy or who arrived when they were very young get closer to their culture of origin in a very complex way.
«First, there is the culture at home, which makes you feel part of something and makes you remember your roots. Then, in a country other than your country of origin, there is an uprooting and a sense of inferiority that leads you to detach yourself from that home culture. You want to become like the others. In my case, like Italian children. There is a path of rejection. When these two cultures are so much in conflict then you try to get back on a single track because you feel that by returning there is a community that makes you remember, in this sense, the reappropriation is a relief. Until I was 18 I didn’t want to know about it. I was ashamed of my mother tongue and I didn’t express my origins to the outside world. Then, little by little, I began to love them again calmly by coming into contact with people from the community. I began to feel love towards myself. I wanted to forgive myself and I understood that that hatred was not my fault.»
Becoming aware of the need for reconciliation with one’s culture of origin, and rediscovering and re-evaluating one’s roots, is an outcome that takes time. However, it is an important starting point to feel good even in a new life context. It requires placing the reconstruction of the self at the center of the process.
Objects
During the interviews, people talked about their homes starting from the stories of their favorite rooms and objects. Surprisingly, the answers were very similar: the living room (or dining room) and the courtyard (or garden) were the most mentioned places. The reasons are linked to the fact that they are spaces large enough to bring together members of a family and easily accessible to outsiders. They are also the environments where the beauty of one’s stories is shown, thanks to the mesmerizing objects on display in the living room or the flowers and plants in the garden.
The anthropologist Daniel Miller (2008) wrote that the objects in our homes represent a manifestation of ourselves and our relationships with the outside. Far from being simple symbols of consumerism or private isolation, they acquire value for their role in building and maintaining social, family, and interpersonal relationships.
Objects related to the home are much more than simple memories: they are symbols that help keep intact the links with our past and build our present. The analysis of the stories heard leads to consider four main ways in which an object creates a bridge between past and present, between physical place and places of memory.
Belonging
The object becomes a symbol of belonging, be it to a family, a religious faith, or one’s country of origin. Let us take religious icons as an example, often cited by some people of Serbian origin interviewed. They recall spirituality or belonging to a belief, but they also affirm the existence and unity of a family divided by distance. Carrying that symbol with you allows you to recreate a familiar and spiritual environment wherever you are, keeping the bonds with your home and community alive.
Protection and security
Other objects evoke protection and security because the home is also a safe refuge against external dangers. There are recurring objects – similar to the concept of transitional objects (van der Kolk 2015) – that recall the time of war: a time that still scares and leads to the need for protection. A teddy bear is an example of that sense of protection that people who were children in the 1990s remember having brought in their suitcases. The teddy bear becomes the guardian of the self, it protects from fears and insecurities.
Care
The home is often the result of practices of care of the space and of the people and some objects effectively synthesize concepts such as care and solidarity. The theme of care is, moreover, very central for all the people who welcomed people fleeing wars during the 1990s, even in Italy. Some of the objects most present in their stories are, for example, the games they had when they were children (often it was the youngest who were periodically hosted by Italian families). They bring to mind strong relationships, established between Bosnian children and Italian children. Similarly, the memory of a lemonade offered as soon as they arrived in the host home is emblematic, as an act that refers to a sense of welcome and attention that is remembered even 30 years later. Then, some objects symbolize the ability to get back on one’s feet, to repair wounds within the family context, even when external acceptance has been lacking. They could be the pine cones that the mother of a Sicilian girl, Ena, painted in silver and sold as Christmas decorations to new fellow countrymen in Sicily. The money from that craft was used to support the family’s expenses.
Reintegration or reconciliation of the self
Finally, objects facilitate the union of parts of the self that risk being dispersed due to geographical or temporal distance. Photo albums, records, and music cassettes of the time were cited or shown by several of the people met, intending to affirm the importance of recovering fragments of a past life, functioning as anchors of memory that keep the pieces of the self together.
An object alone does not necessarily facilitate the production of a new sense of home. It can happen if there are people to do it with. According to Paolo Jedlowski (2009), an experience (i.e. a reworked memory) also takes on value in itself when it can be narrated and is narrated to an audience. Narration allows the telling of a story to take on a different form for the audience to which it is addressed and this also allows experimenting with different ways to tell the same fact.
Therefore, the sense of displacement felt by those who have recovered from traumatic experiences can be perpetuated over time not only due to the lack of words to tell but also due to the lack of people able to listen.
Consequently, the deep bond that people have with objects becomes a useful means: they make the story accessible and tangible, encouraging the active participation of the people in the audience. Objects become builders of relationships and forms of identification with the stories of others. An example comes from the stories of those Italians who organized forms of hospitality in the 1990s: those who open the doors of their home also experience a transformation. The home they once knew will no longer be the same: it is enriched by new relationships and contact with different cultures.
The sharing of objects and stories enriches our experience and amplifies their meaning, creating bonds. This process promotes self-integration and personal growth, extending from the individual level to the family level and larger communities. For those who emigrated to Italy, the concept of narrative community extends especially beyond blood ties. People have talked about the importance of telling their stories in new relationships created through a mutual sharing of memories (and objects). These are elective communities (for example the community of compatriots), but above all they reflect bonds that are created even casually in everyday routines (for example through chatter in the workplace) and that become disinterested reciprocity.
«When you avoid telling someone that you are Bosnian […] you start to lose your identity, you don’t know what you belong to. A sense of belonging to something must be there, in the sense that you must be useful to the part of society you are part of. […] For example, since I was 18 I have been on the board of the Pro Loco of my village and maybe I have brought in both Italian and Bosnian kids.»
Interviews with members of organizations and communities that welcomed people who emigrated from the former Yugoslavia during the wars highlight the importance of having a community that listens to and shares each person’s stories. This process makes the community stronger, as happened for the Vicenza community around the Insieme per Sarajevo association, but also for the community of Valsassina, where solidarity and hospitality are the fundamental values around which people still recognize themselves today. The fact of hosting at home created positive memories that led to long-lasting relationships and deep interpersonal relations, key elements for building communities and producing collective narratives. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the approach to welcoming was based on the creation of community bonds between those who welcomed and those who were welcomed: those who responded to immediate needs – such as food, clothing, and a place to sleep – also had to respond to social needs. The heterogeneity of experiences, not only in family hospitality but also in other intervention contexts, was fundamental, making the experience similar to a vacation and allowing the possibility of change in the long term. On the contrary, in several interviews, the problem of not remembering emerged: it is that of not wanting to remember, but also that of not being able to remember. You don’t say anything when there is too much suffering. Or when you have no holds and memories can be lost.
«I believe that very few have managed to recover everything that was in the houses. When my wife entered for the first time, immediately after the war, she was brave. She found nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Only later did we recover some photo albums, and a few books, but the rest disappeared. This – I also reworked it in one or two stories I wrote – means that there was a tendency of those who hated to strike deep, throwing away people’s photo albums. Today you can find various online forums where people rightly complain about being left without photos from that past. It seems like nothing, but if you have a photo it feels like you are somehow recovering a part of your life. […] Therefore, I say, art remains, and so do films, literature, and theater. They remain as a means to enter the so-called cracks in the facades that seem smooth. […] Well, I believe that people fleeing other conflicts can certainly testify to this in a very, very similar way.»
Conclusion
Through sharing and mutual support, and the provision of common spaces and tools, such as photographs, even those who have difficulty remembering or narrating can contribute and benefit from a narrative community.
If feeling at home comes from sharing and mutual understanding of experiences, it may happen that a new definition of ‘home’ is born, where identity and a sense of security are redefined together. Thus, reconstruction is not only about overcoming the past but also about creating a new future. For this reason, in the collected stories there is no sense of home described with words like ‘ethnicity’, ‘nation’, or ‘religion’. Furthermore, the new home is less and less rooted in a single place and is created from the experiences of others, ubiquitously. As if the home were a suitcase.
Giulia Loda is an aspiring social researcher, collaborating with Codici and exploring topics such as migration, memory, activism, and community storytelling.
Lorenzo Scalchi is a social researcher at Codici who studies various topics, including international migrations, memories, and social inequalities.
