Home, Sweet Home? Community and the Dilemma of Belonging

Abstract

ABSTRACT Inspired by Kei Iwaki’s observation about migration and language discussed in her book, Farewell, My Orange (2013), this article examines migrants’ relationship to the host community’s language in parallel to their ambivalent sense of belonging. Migrants are eager to master the host community’s language and be part of the community. At the same time, they are suspicious of their own eagerness to do so. Rather than asking, ‘How can the acquisition of the local language facilitate better integration of migrants?’, the question that animates this article is: what kind of image of home is communicated by the narrative which assumes language to be a critical tool for integration? How might we start thinking about home differently if we are to address migrants’ desire to be part of the community and, at the same time, their refusal to be part of it? To investigate these questions, I will draw on Bonnie Honig’s concept of dilemmatic space. I will argue that home, which emerges in migrants’ paradoxical emotional terrain, is a place of untranslatability where foreignness remains incomprehensible.