“You can't go home again”: reading the shifting idea of “home” in Rupert Isaacson's The healing land: a Kalahari journey

Abstract

The concept of “home” is inextricably linked with identity – be it personal, cultural, ethnic or national identity. The fact that numerous significations (notably homeland, home language, or home ground) accrue to the idea of home points to the concept’s shifting nature, particularly in a world typified by all manner of migrations, displacements and diasporas. “Home” is often associated with “a sense of place or belonging” (Sarup 1994: 94), and thus gestures towards links with one’s birth place, roots, rootedness and boundaries. Nevertheless, current conceptualisations of home have shown it be an open concept, an immensely tenuous and open category that gravitates between a centre (associated with and characterised by notions of birth, love, nourishment and security) and the margins where liminal identity may play out. This article examines the shifting notion of “home” in Rupert Isaacson's The healing land: a Kalahari journey, a text in which the scattered and shifting nature of the idea of home is writ large. I argue that, over and above conventional meanings associated with “home”, the concept now references a whole range of competing meanings, including one’s memory of one’s past life or tradition, a sentimental idea of imaginary space, or a dark abyss of desire, all of which point to an abstraction which springs up from time to time to sound like truth.