There IsNo Word For Home

In the country where I now live, there is noword for home. You can express the idea at a slant, but you cannot say home. For a long time thisdisconcerted me, and I kept running up against the lack as if it were a rock inmy path, worse than a pothole, worse than nothing. But at last I havehabituated myself and can step around it, using variants such as notre foyer (our hearth) or notre maison (our house) when I mean to say home.More often, I use the concept chez to indicate physical location and theplace where family resides, or the notion of a comfortable domestic space.However, if I wish to speak of “going home to Canada,” I can use mon pays (my country) but I can’t say I amgoing chez moi when I am not: for as long as I residein France -- the rest of my life -- this is where I will be chez moi, making a home in acountry and a language not my own. I am both home and not-home, one of thosetrick syllogisms I must solve by homemaking, at an age when I should havefinished with all that bother.

In the foothills of the Cévennes I live in astone house that was, until only a few decades ago, home to silkworms, hundredsupon hundreds of them, squirming in flat reed baskets laid on layered framesalong the walls in what was then the magnanerie,a place for feeding silkworms, and is now a bedroom. For the duration of theirbrief lives, these slippery dun-coloured creatures munched mulberry leaves,fattening themselves sufficiently to shed their skins four times before they’dstop eating and attach themselves to twigs or sprigs of heather on racks abovethe baskets. With a sense of purpose sprung from genetic necessity, they’d thenspin themselves cocoons in which they’d sleep until they were plucked fromtheir branches and dunked in huge kettles of hot water. Perhaps some luckierones were allowed to waken and complete the magic of metamorphosis -- theremust be moths, after all, to furnish next season’s eggs -- but silkmanufacturers preferred the longer filament, which comes from whole cocoons.There are sacrifices to be made for beauty, and if the life of a lowly and notvery attractive segmented grub has to be that sacrifice, perhaps that is theLord’s will.

The Lord’s will rests heavy on the high bluehills of the Cévennes, for here God has been imagined in Calvinist clothes, amoral master whose plans for man and beast alike are stern. Thislittle-inhabited part of southern France (the mountainous northern corner ofLanguedoc, much of it now a national park) has long been the heart ofProtestant opposition to Roman Catholicism. From the mid-1500s, revolt againstParis and the Church continued with appropriate bloodshed on all sides untilthe Édit de Tolérance in 1787 finally allowed those fewHuguenots who remained the right to practise their religion.

The rugged terrain, hidden valleys and craggycliffs are geologically congenial to the Protestant mind -- in the back reachesof the Cévennes there have always existed stubborn pockets of religious andpolitical resistance. This is an austere landscape where, even now, life is nottaken lightly and where pleasure and ease are distrusted. The puritanicalharshness of Reform doctrine seems also to show itself in the fortress-likearchitecture of Huguenot houses such as mine: angular, stiff-necked buildings,tall and narrow with small windows shuttered against the blasts of winter orthe blaze of summer. Nevertheless, graceless and severe though it may appearfrom outside, the cool, dark interior of the house is a blessing when you stepin from the painful dazzle of an August day. It is not for nothing that thestone walls are well over half a metre thick, or that the floors are laid withglazed clay tiles.

Sometimes I wake in the early morning before itis light, the still, dark hours of silent contemplation: how have I come to behere? But there is nothing mysterious, the reason is mundane–it is not the willof God, but the wish of the Scottish-born man to whom I have been married since1970. The first time we came hiking in these mountains -- more than a decadeago, while we were living in Montpellier -- he said, immediately, that he knewhe was chez lui dans lesCévennes. His experience was profound, affecting him in some deeplyatavistic way I did not understand until later, when I felt the sameinexpressible, magnetic, and nearly hormonal pull the moment I first set footin Tasmania and knew myself to be home.

When ithappens, this carnal knowledge of landscape, it is very like falling in lovewithout knowing why, the plunge into desire and longing made all the moreintense by being so utterly irrational, inexplicable. The feel of the air, thelay of the land, the colour and shape of the horizon, who knows? There areplaces on the planet we belong and they are not necessarily where we are born.If we are lucky -- if the gods are in a good mood -- we find them, for whateverlength of time is necessary for us to know that, yes, we belong to the earthand it to us. Even if we cannot articulate this intense physical sensation,even if language fails us, we know what home is then, in our very bones.

I sometimes say jokingly that I have become aWTGW -- a whither-thou-goest-wife, an almost extinct species, but one with whichI have become intimately familiar in the years we have lived abroad because ofBob’s work in development. I have met many other spouses -- men, as well aswomen -- who have done the same as I: we have weighed the choices, and we havefollowed our partners. Our reasons for doing so are as diverse as our marriagesand our aspirations and the work that we do. In my case, writing is a portableoccupation: I can do what I do anywhere.

And so it follows that I shall learn, as I havelearned in other places, to make this house home. Over time, I shall find outhow to grow in and be nourished by this rocky foreign soil. I early learn thephrase je m’enracine ici,which means “I am putting down roots here,” in order to convince myself -- forthis time, we are not moving on. We are here to stay, définitivement.


From the Hardcover edition. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.

Revue de presse

“She writes with such elegance and grace thatone of her sentences is worth a whole poem, yet she’s gutsy and uncompromising.This is a book you’ll have to give away and buy another and another -- untilfinally you can keep one for yourself to read again in the small hours ourlives are made of.” -- Lorna Crozier, author of Apocrypha of Light

“When you find a writer like Isabel Huggan, you don’t want her to stop.”-- The Washington Post

“From the richness of her experiences Huggan has fashioned a memoir ofsingular beauty.” -- The London Free Press

“Fans of the calm, elegant intelligence of Alice Munro or Carol Shields willfeel right at home.” -- The Vancouver Sun

Praise for Isabel Huggan's last book:
“These flawless, witty, experienced stories remind us what a pleasure it is tobe in the presence of a master.” -- Alberto Manguel --Ce texte fait référence àl'édition kindle_edition.