What Does Home Mean To Me: Wading Through The Tangible Intangibleness Of "Home"

I woke up with sleep still in my eyes to an unfamiliar bedroom. Blinking my eyes open, I looked around and remembered that I was in my bedroom in Antananarivo where I was now living. I reach to my makeshift nightstand and let out a grunt to grab my iPhone from where it was charging. It was 9am, a Tuesday, and Christmas Eve. I woke up to a barrage of texts from my mom from the US. Updates on what the family back home was doing, what meals they were preparing for the post church with carols in-between midnight mass at my Bebe’s Catholic church. Questions about what mine and my brother’s plans were for Christmas since we would be spending it for the first time apart from our immediate family.

I really hadn’t thought too much about it. I was just lucky that my brother was here in Madagascar to spend Christmas and New Years and get a little vacation in, but life was so busy up until this point that I hadn’t put too much thought into it. Or maybe because we weren’t home for Christmas that I didn’t want to reflect too deeply or else I would get a little too sad and a little too homesick. I’m an adult for Christ’s sake. It shouldn’t be a big deal that I wasn’t home for Christmas. I was doing big adult things, working for an important corporate job, trying to maintain a new social life, upkeep an apartment that seemed to attract all the bugs and dust from all corners of the earth, and nurturing my support system around me to keep me sane.

Flash forward 2 years later, a global pandemic, I am now living at my parent’s house in the US, and it’s 1 week before Christmas Eve. My life is still in disarray but we’re trying to thrive and adult and find normal, whatever that is.

What was home? It’s a funny question because for the longest time, it was a place I yearned to escape. My teenage angsty self was eager to run away to far away places that were tangible and intangible. My now kinda mature adult brain will now understand that when I want to give into this feeling of escaping, it’s when I most need to ground myself. To reflect on who, where, why, and what I wanted to escape from.

But going back to this idea of home, what is this and why did I ____ (insert a better word for hanker, yearn, or desire) for it so badly? Lately, I have been going through a lot of big feelings and challenging myself to express the things that are incommunicable. The things that we sometimes don’t have the language to explain, and sometimes they are better off to be felt and unsaid. Home means so many things to so many different people. It’s a place, a feeling, a moment, a photograph, a smell, and so much more than that.

For Christian Sanna, home is more than a concept. I had reached out to Sanna earlier this month to see if he would oblige to submit a photo (or photos) for our December art submission on “Home”. It led to an impromptu video call and sharing how incommunicable home was for each other. Growing up on the island of Nosy-Be, Sanna felt at home there. Although looking different from his fellow peers and Malagasy family and neighbors, Nosy-Be would be home to him for some time. This period of Covid forced him to reflect on how people could always go back to something. A home, a place they could seek refuge to wade out the pandemic. But that wasn’t the case for many, including Sanna.

I learned a lot about Nosy-Be from our conversation. More than from the 1-week vacation I had been on with my friends in October 2019. Nosy-Be has such a multicultural history, more than what meets the eye and a mixture of energies: one that is mixed and multi-cultural and one that is Malagasy and holy.

Before me was a light-skinned métisse Malagasy-Italian man, peeling back these layers of his identity. The ease that Sanna was able to come to terms with the difficulty of this subject of home may have come from how real these conversations were to him growing up in Nosy-Be.

"I can't control how people perceive me and what they think of me. [I had to] decide where is my house. Where do I feel at home? Time was destroying a lot of things that were important to me."

Sanna continued:

"Time and home are a concept. A place where you go back. Where you don't have to explain "why". Photography is my home."

It was understood that photography provided this inescapable link. One that was cathartic and held strong feelings. Photographs for Sanna could explain stories that he didn't have the language or energy to explain. It helped to repair and recreate a connection to Madagascar that he craved. A connection where he felt powerful and not powerless and his art was a byproduct of that.

Sanna's chosen medium of photography is 35mm film, a tactile yet forgiving contraption not yet lost to time and digital cameras. As our conversation progressed, Sanna went on to explain:

[I wanted to] create this idea that I have many homes and that they are in my photography. Approaching the feeling of wanting a home, where to return to. An object which you can "trap" moments of life.

He went on to clarify that he hated the use of capture in terms of photography because it wasn't the same as recording and was too aggressive . A better word he decided was trapping: as in to catch (an animal) in a trap -- the animal is found alive and in a humane place.

As our conversation wrapped up, our hearts collectively felt for those who left Madagascar especially our diaspora and hoping anyone could relate to the idea of having 2 homes. We concluded that it is possible to have multiple places you can call home where you can relate in your body and mind.

So we invite you to ask yourself, what does home mean to you? 

Let’s continue the conversation! Comment your thoughts on our social media platforms Instagram and Facebook or email us at madaliving@outlook.com!

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