LECTURER
for TRAUMA Issue in Belgrade 2004. Institute for Menthale Health ,Tavistock Clinic , Chapter in the book
Therapeutic Care for Refugees.
“No Place Like Home”
Edited by
Renos K. Papadopoulos
Tavistock
Clinic Series
London:
Karnac, 2002.
Human Urban
Net-Project with Homeless -2005
Returning to T. E. Lawrence, we may wonder whether
his own turbulent and homeless life was connected with his choice of the word ‘home’ instead of ‘land’.
Lawrence had no land of his own – either in terms of owning a house (at the time of writing this translation) or in
terms of feeling strongly connected with one country. Born in Ireland, grown up in England and committed to Arabia, he did
not have any land but, evidently, had a strong yearning for a home. It may be more of a passing interest to note that T. E.
Lawrence (then called T. E. Shaw [1932]) began translating ‘The Odyssey’ while in military service in Afghanistan
in 1928.
Taking this theme further, we note that Alexander
Pope (1688 - 1744) renders the same verses as follows:
‘To
see the smoke from his loved palace rise,
While
the dear isle in distant prospect rise,
With what
contentment could he close his eyes!’
Pope, settled in his genteel villa in Twickenham,
understands gaia as palace and gives the yearning for home a distinct romantic character, inventing even a ‘contentment’
in Odysseus. Evidently, for Pope, the pursuit of home could not have had the dramatic and gutsy feel that T.E. Lawrence gave
it.
It is interesting to consider three additional translations which are closer to the original Greek
with reference to their rendering of gaia. Rieu (1946) renders these verses as
‘and
Odysseus, who would give anything for the mere sight of the smoke rising up from his own land, can only yearn for death’,
[Fagles (1996)
as]
‘But
he, straining for no more than a glimpse
of hearth-smoke
drifting up from his own land,
Odysseus longs to die …’
[and Lombardo
(2000) as]
‘But
Odysseus,
Longing
to see even the smoke curling up
From his
land, simply wants to die’.
Although all three
translations are closer to the Homeric original in so far as they all use ‘land’ for gaia, still they differ
in the overall feel they give to this important passage. These discrepancies and idiosyncratic renderings of home reflect
the inevitably unique, distinctive and personal approach to the nostalgic yearning for home that the refugees have. Each person
experiences and expresses his or her state of homelessness in a highly personalized way which then is understood and rendered
differently and equally idiosyncratically (i.e. closely related to their own personal, professional, socio-economic and historic-cultural
contexts) by all those who attempt to understand the needs of that particular refugee.
Moreover,
using this Homeric passage, it could be said that home is constituted by two opposites: a most tangible and grounded element,
the earth, the land, and the most tangible image of an intangible form of home – smoke. This powerful combination of
the tangible and intangible, concrete and ethereal, physical and imaginary, inflexible / immovable and flexible / mobile,
substantial and indefinable make the image of home a most potent and resilient cluster of psychological dynamics.
Staying with the Odyssey, it is worth making another relevant observation (Papadopoulos 1987). The logical
sequence of the poem would be that Odysseus arrives home, to the island of Ithaca, at the end of the poem. Yet there is something
very curious in the structure of the poem, which consists of 24 chapters (called ‘books’). Homer has Odysseus
arriving in Ithaca right in the center of the epic. At the very beginning of book 13 Odysseus finally arrives home. Or does
he? He certainly arrives on the shores of Ithaca but he is not even aware where he is. He does not recognize his ‘home’
to begin with. So, whereas objectively, he had reached home, in effect he was not yet at home. This magnificent irony should
not be forgotten. It is as if Homer keeps pressing us with painful questions as to how to define home.
What then happens in the second half of ‘The Odyssey’ if Odysseus is already home? Evidently,
his physical arrival in Ithaca does not end his odyssey, and does not amount to homecoming because not only does he not recognize
his homeland but also nobody recognizes him, either. Home, therefore, cannot be experienced without mutual recognition. Moreover,
most importantly, once physically at home, Odysseus had to feel at home. Even after he understood that he had finally landed
on his beloved homeland, he still did not arrive home. He had to re-encounter and re-connect with all members of his family,
enter his palace, fight the suitors, and regain his royal position. ‘Homecoming is not only about external arrivals
and the creation of established homes defined by legal contracts and delineated by geographical boundaries’ (Papadopoulos
1987, p.15). Homecoming is also about the re-establishment of all meaningful connections within one’s own family and
own self. These re-connections cannot be taken for granted and are, by no means, easy. Homer makes this point very clearly
in so far as it takes another odyssey for Odysseus to re-establish himself in his own home. Odysseus does not slip back into
the position, place, role and identity he had left behind, but he has to fight ferociously if not even more so than when on
his way to Ithaca. Homecoming is not just a retrospective exercise but also includes a prospective direction. Thus, Homer
demonstrates most eloquently that the complete odyssey is not about regression, a passive return to the past, but it includes
the totality of the duality of meanings of home - the return and a reintegration, the going back and arrival as well as the
achievement of future goals. Moreover, he leads us to experience that the second phase of homecoming can be even more hazardous
than the first one. Psychologically, it is subtler and trickier to re-connect with one’s own family members and to risk
losing everything, after all the heroic efforts to arrive home in the first place.
Following Homer, it could be argued that we could distinguish two kinds of successive moments in the homecoming
process: the first is about external dimensions, about the physical arrival where navigation skills, diplomacy, strength,
persistence are required to negotiate the external dangers and obstacles. The second moment is of a more internal and psychological
nature, requiring more internal resources, stamina, containment, insightfulness and resilience. If the first is about arriving
home, the second is about reconnecting with one’s sense of self and accessing the dismembered parts of one’s personality.
Refugees,
home and trauma1, Reno’s K. Papadopoulos
Choose
and Cutting by Human Urban Net:
Analysis of Suffering for ‘Home’,
NOSTALGIA
Approximately
750 000 to one million Internally replaces people in Serbia live a difficult lifes . They are called sometimes Serbian refugees
from Bosnia, refugees from Croatia and refugees from Kosovo and Metohia .
Is any refugee was leaving the home
voluntary or involuntary. Is One left Home by free will or not?
Renos Papandopoulos
calls the feeling ‘Nostalgic disorientation’ and ‘mosaic substratum of identity’. Why?
Where and when we, you, they feel nostalgic?
Is it possible
to confirm ethnic or national identity without claiming a recoverable history, which supports a fixed identity?
What alternatives
are there to cementing identity in essential certainty? Is identity fluid or changing and can such an understanding of them
sustain political commitment?
These questions
address the tensions between social constructionist and essentialist conception of identity.
Wars, crises
of former Yugoslavia can be observed through the power of representation and how and why some meanings are preferred?
All signifying
practices that produce meaning involve relations of power, including the power to define who is included and
who is excluded. Who is good gay, who is bad gay ? Bias?
Culture shapes
identity though giving meaning to psychological experience.
Nostalgia,
in fact, may depend precisely on the irrecoverable nature of the past for its emotional impact and appeal. It is the
very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a large part of nostalgia's power--for both conservatives
and radicals alike. This is rarely the past as actually experienced, of course; it is the past as imagined, as idealized through
memory and desire. The simple, pure, ordered, easy, beautiful, or harmonious past is constructed and then experienced emotionally
in conjunction with the present--which, in turn, is constructed as complicated, contaminated, anarchic, difficult, ugly, and
confrontational.
Nostalgic
distancing sanitizes as it selects, making the past feel complete, stable, coherent, safe from "the unexpected and the untoward,
from accident or betrayal" in other words, making it so very unlike the present.
The aesthetics
of nostalgia might, therefore, be less a matter of simple memory than of complex projection; the invocation of a partial,
idealized history merges with dissatisfaction with the present. And it can do so with great force!
