Homesickness

Today's headline on the Toronto Star reads DEATH IN LEBANON with a superheadding (that is a caption over top of the headline) "it's as though a bomb hit Montreal." These headlines are about 7 montrealers who were killed in the current Isreali assult against Hezbollah in Lebanon. A friend of mine just contacted me because he is afraid for his grandmother who just returned to lebanon a week and bit ago. I didn't know really how to respond to his fears, but I am just now working on one of the chapters for a forthcoming a book on Youth identity that focuses greatly on immigrant, and african immigrant youth. I asked my friend why his grandmother returned surely she knew of the coming assualt. And he said something about returning to her homeland. Isn't that something, in this world of compounded and complex migration where almost any citizen of any country can move and live in many different nations throughout the course of their lives, there is a special kind of 'returning' to the point of origin. I wonder as immigration/emmigration become a more normative in life history, and as global conflict and the destruction of cultures becomes more common if this sense of urgency to return to the places we know and grew up with will deepen. Or has this always been the case, we want home, but move nations because we want an easier life (without oppression, with good jobs and education, with the freedom to make our own homes); and yet, when the prospect of watching our first homes dying is made real to us, we want nothing more that to return to that place of conflict and strife. hmm. i will have to read Hardwick. *** appended July 18 and another thing My cousin was recently telling me about his newfound love and respect for St lucia after visiting his "homeland" that was never his in the first place. It was his first trip there, and it is hardly even an ancestral home for us given our colonial heritage, and yet that desire for homeland was/is so strong for him, that he would desire and adopt that little island as his own. hmm.