Reflections of an Itinerant Transnational Feminist

As prodigal daughter in search of home,

I have been guided by the indents of my mother’s footsteps, stories from the depths of my grandmother’s heart-memory of love un-allowed, of her own travel and transgression.

In memory and imagination I have followed stories of heartbreak, love, life, and spirit.

Resistance and Rebellion.

As traveller in search of home,

I have touched ground in fifty-five countries.

I have been lost and I have found.

I have laughed with and cried with.

I have broken bread on kitchen tables and bedroom floors.

I have crossed gutters and gullies by foot.

I have soared and sunk.

I have floated in oceans and swum in rivers.

I have laid in fields of green and painted purple sky.

I have found freedom, autonomy, possibility.

As multicultural migrant in search of home,

I have searched for home in the in-between-ness of nation states, constructed borders, political boundaries.

I have spoken in mother-tongues of colonial queens.

In absence of word-speak I have communicated through touch, sound, smiles and sparkles in eyes.

I have found heart language – in common.

As transnational feminist in search of home,

I have thought through the multiple contradictions; the underside of history, the volatile narratives of herstory.

I have considered contested identities, culture and difference.

I have shared individual experience and questioned collectivities of sameness.

I have found solidarity, togetherness, and continuity.

I have felt motherhood outside of my own womb.

I have felt sisterhood outside of blood relation.

I have learned.

I have felt.

I have observed.

I have become.

And in all of this, I have learned that ‘home’ is not just a physical place to which we return; home is the transformation; home is the journey.

I have learned that ‘home’ is the known story and that which we are yet to know.

I have learned that home is not a ‘them over there’ but a creation of ‘us over here’; home is where ‘me’ becomes ‘we,’ it is where community becomes part of self.

I have learned that discovering this ‘home’ is part of a process of our own decolonisation; it is recognising how the wounds of our ancestors live deep in our bodies but it is a reclaiming of new systems of healing.

I have learned that ‘home’ is about honestly asking ourselves what and who we need to be to show up powHERful.

I have learned that ‘home’ is recognising that our spirits cannot live in bodies that have no integrity; it is about understanding our body-wisdom and stepping into that wisdom.

I have learned that home is the connection, it is the networks, it is the energy of the lands, it is the sustenance of the foods, it is in the bravery and the warmness of embrace – as we hold the line and each other.

I have learned that ‘home’ is in the stories, tastes, colours, textures and the fullness of hearts; it is in massaging the cracks and in the re-building.

Home is our resistance; home is in fact in us.