Chapter 2: Homemaking from the Margins: Towards a New Conversation on Home on the Move¹

There is much of the debate on home and migration, articulated through the ebb and flow of one's life experience, in the self-presentation of Aisha, a Somali-Swedish participant of HOMInG's research in Rinkeby, north-western Stockholm. To Aisha, home seems to be made out of everyday practices in the suburb where she has long been living, and out of a range of connections with kin and friends in Somalia and elsewhere in the ‘diaspora’. However, what she thinks and feels like home does not rest on any one of these locations only. It is rather distributed, indeed stretched, and possibly dispersed, all over the continuum between ancestral homeland and long-term settlement country. The ambivalent relation between the former and the latter, in her life trajectory, is parallelled with a number of tensions that are equally illuminated through the lens of home: the past vs the present, the ascriptive side of her life and the one made anew out of her achievements, the pull of group-related obligations and the promise of personal opportunities and aspirations. On closer scrutiny, there are still more lines of contradictions within Aisha's biographical field: the relatively good life conditions she enjoys in Sweden, and her persistent estrangement towards the country of settlement; perhaps more ironically, the irremediable de-territorialization of home after (forced) migration, and the resilient vision of its ultimate roots in that same ancestral territory. Each pole of these opposites has something to do with home, while none of them fully covers the meanings and the weight of this notion.