triveni spotlight: 5th July 2025

triveni spotlight A FEATURE EVERY ALTERNATE DAY hosts: Anju Kishore and Mohua Maulik GUEST EDITOR: Priya Narayanan

5th July 2025

triveni spotlight July 2025

home for Christmas:

my childhood desk drawer

empty

Michael Dylan Welch, The Haiku Anthology, 1999

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What is home? Who is home? Where is home?

For James Baldwin, an expatriate American writer living in France, home is both an absence and a presence. While on the one hand, he says, "You don't have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back," he writes in his biography that "You never leave home, you take your home with you… You better. Otherwise, you’re homeless."

But home is not only a notion, it is a real physical place. When Gaston Bachelard talks about home as ‘the non-I that protects the I’ or Martin Heidegger talks about home as a place where man dwells, they refer to the physical structure that protects and provides the stage for one to perform acts of dwelling and homemaking. Home is also the objects that surround us. As George Carlin remarks, the feeling of home comes from being surrounded by 'our stuff' and how we are never quite comfortable in someone else's house because there's no space for 'our stuff'.

Home is family for Robert Frost, who looks upon it as a place where, 'when you have to go there, they have to take you in’. Contrastingly, home for naturalist John Muir is in the lap of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, not the ranch where he raised his family. For bell hooks, home symbolises safety for, 'it is when I’m at home, facing my body that I’m most free of race… As soon as I walk out the door, race is waiting… to grab me’. But home can also be dangerous—a site of abuse, violence, oppression, and alienation. Yet, as June Jordan says, ‘everybody needs a home, so at least you have someplace to leave’.

And so, home encompasses a mélange of meanings. Be it migrant labourers who seasonally leave and return to home, nomads who create and re-create home at every pit-stop in their life journey or the jet-setting uber rich who might have multiple homes in multiple cities, home is an enduring idea where one invests both material and emotions.

What does home mean to you?

Priya Narayanan

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Our thanks to Priya Narayanan, this month’s guest editor for her selection on a theme that is at once emotional and practical. We hope you will enjoy in your own ways, both the journeys these haiku take you on as well as the home-coming. Don't forget to share your thoughts in the comments section.

_()_ triveni spotlight team