You can’t go home again – Thomas Wolfe

I wrote a while ago about what home meant to me. It definitely is not simply a physical structure where you sleep – it’s more like a place where everything feels right.

In recent months, I’ve been involved in several discussions about the role of the diaspora in Haiti’s reconstruction. Sometime while I was a teenager, I started feeling that Haiti was my home. I moved back there less than a week after graduating college and declared the whole country would have to catch on fire to make me leave. Much sooner than I would’ve expected, I realized that while I was more than content living there, I wanted my kids to have more (a little bit of history repeating itself).

Since then, we’ve lived in three different places and I’ve still kept that feeling that all my paths will lead me back to Haiti. The problem is, I’m not sure if I will be greeted with a welcome mat or a “come back soon” sign. I know I’m not the only one in this predicament. I’ve likened the situation of many Haitian-American diaspora to a cultural purgatory where you are always considered foreign in other countries, but Haitians in Haiti feel you’ve changed too much to still be one of them.

I used to read this sentence and thought it meant that once you leave home, you change so much that you are never able to go back and feel at home there. Time (and my experience with Haiti) has taught me that you are changed by leaving, but that can also mean that you have discovered a deeper appreciation for what you left behind. It can also mean that you can’t think of anywhere better to continue learning and improving than where everything feels right in the first place.

My situation makes me wonder where home will be for my kids. In my wildest dreams, they would feel at home in both Haiti and US. They wouldn’t be forced to identify with one or the other and ethnic labels are deemed unnecessary. What’s also great about this dream is that my home will also be their home which would mean out cultural heritage could never be lost or assimilated out of future generations’ lives.

I hope to get out of this purgatory one day. When I do, I know that it will mean that my road back home has been unblocked and there’s a huge “Welcome home” sign waiting for me at the end of it.