The concept of home
The second part of your essay on “Home at Last” by Dinaw Mengestu should focus on how the writer explores the concept of home. You should note that the whole essay is about finding one’s place in the world and achieving a feeling of belonging. Consequently, the concept of home plays an important role in the essay. In what follows, we discuss this concept in relation to:
- Where we live vs. Where we were born
- Old vs. new generations
- The status of immigrants
- Home as a choice
- Tolerance and acceptance
- Building a feeling of home
Where we live vs. Where we were born
The essay begins by associating the concept of home with the place one lives in and with the “gradual accumulation of time, memory, and possessions” (ll. 4-5) in that place; in the case of the narrator, Brooklyn.
...
Old vs. new generations
The author also presents the idea of home using the contrast between he (and his sister) and his parents. Because he has left Ethiopia at the age of two “losing in the process the language and any direct memory of the family and culture I had been born into” (ll. 13-15) the author never feels like he is from Ethiopia. His parents, however, grew up there and have memories of relatives and life in Ethiopia which makes them still feel like Ethiopia is their home and the US is not: “My parents, for all that they had given up by leaving Ethiopia, at least had the certainty that they had come from some place. They knew the country’s language and culture…” (ll. 36-40)
…my mother sitting by herself on a Sunday afternoon, staring silently out of our living room’s picture window, recalling, perhaps, her father who had died after she left, or her mother, four sisters, and one brother in Ethiopia – or else recalling nothing at all because there was no one to visit her, no one to call or see. (ll. 86-93)
...
Home as a choice
But the author also indicates that home can be what we decide it to be; that being/feeling at home can be a conscious choice, not only a matter of birth and circumstance:
…I had chosen this city as the place to redefine, to ground, to secure my place in the world. If I could bind myself to Kensington physically, if I could memorize and mentally reproduce in accurate detail the various shades of the houses on a particular block, then I could stake my own claim to it, and in doing so, no one could tell me who I was or that I didn’t belong. (ll. 136-145)
...
Tolerance and acceptance
Then the author slowly begins to grow fond of Kensington, which like a home starts to become a place where he feels comfortable and accepted: “The haphazard gathering of immigrants in Kensington had turned it into a place that even someone like me, haunted and conscious of race and identity at every turn, could slip and blend into.” (ll. 223-228)
...
