Home as a Lullaby

I was born in a place of clashing cultures, and yet, like countless others I desperately tried to balance myself between them. Stumbling into a dance that dared to dream itself graceful but was nothing more than unsure steps on a tightrope. 

Cultures are fluid and demand no loyalty - unlike people, flags, and versions of history shaped by dusty old men. And thus, the newspapers you read, the TV channels you watch, the nightclubs you patronise, the friends you make, the language you choose when talking to a waiter - every action becomes a brick in the proverbial building of one's identity. 

In this territory, Home is not a given. 

Searching for a home, both physical and spiritual, becomes a Sisyphean quest. There is no guide or mentor and no roadmap to a hidden treasure. Sometime in the twilight between childhood and adulthood this realisation sneaks up on you. 

Home morphs from a noun into a verb. 

It is a gloriously sunny day in May and I am visiting my hometown of Badalona, just North of Barcelona. It is a proud place shaped by Ibers, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, Franks and many other peoples who ventured these shores over millennia. A home of intricate festivities honouring pirates, reminiscing about giants, burning demons and chanting misogynistic sea shanties once improvised by Catalan, Spanish and Cuban sailors. A place divided between the Catalan, and predominantly middle-class, old town (El Centre, the centre, in Catalan) and the vibrant, brutalist working-class neighbourhoods surrounding it. Known in Spanish as los barrios (‘the hoods’), these urban developments were built to house Spanish families seeking opportunity after the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. Nowadays, they also offer refuge to many migrant communities from the global majority.

I am a xarnega (an old Catalan word for ‘mongrel’), daughter and granddaughter of immigrants from the southern Spanish regions. I am a blend of cultures and urban territories. In the 80s, I lived in the lively but heroin-ridden barrio of Llefià. When I was seven, we moved to a quiet, central, seafront neighbourhood named after a famous Catalan Modernist painter Casagemes, whose family had roots in that district. 

My case is not unique, and humans are contradictory creatures keen to mix and ostracise in almost equal measure. Some of us relocated to the centre with the illusion that moving to a new area would also mean moving up a social notch. Most, however, kept to their side of the rope. Hence a divide so normalised that sometimes you need to squint to see it - prevalent and pervasive enough though, to be exploited by right-wing politicians to win over hearts and ballots. 

Neither Catalan nor Spanish are shy to voice their opinions. 

I always say that I am back at home when I get to the seaside. My feet dig into the sand, my nostrils flare, and my lungs expand to let as much salt-infused air in me as possible. The reality is I know I am really ‘back home’ when I walk around town and catch glimpses of conversations, either idle local gossip or passionate political commentary. 

Though the political tension is palpable, I am letting myself scurry into a brisk and forgetful walk around the old town. I know I am being nostalgic and decadent. Thinking, ever so briefly, that home in itself is a privilege, and my ethnic and cultural binary is safer than some other dichotomies. I can often visit my hometown and search for pieces of my past, a shameless flâneur gloating in memories offered by a birthplace still intact and safe. Despite this bout of self-awareness, it feels so good to be back basking in the joy of those first days, before ancestral and familial trauma kicks in, and I can’t wait to return to Bristol -  the place I chose for myself.

From the corner of my eye, I spy a parent singing my favourite lullaby to a toddler in their arms:

*La lluna, la pruna,

Vestida de dol,

Sa mare la crida,

Son pare no ho vol.

La lluna, la pruna

i el sol matiner,

sa mare la crida,

son pare també.

 

“The moon, the plum,

In her mourning clothes

Her mother scolds her

Her father doesn't want.

The moon, the plum,

And the morning sun

Her mother scolds her

Her father does too.”

I never knew what this song meant, but I loved its surrealism nonetheless. To hear it in passing makes me feel both at home and utterly alienated, a spectator of a culture and a place that is no longer mine. 

Was it ever mine? 

I continue my walk, now determined to get to the beach and perform my little breathing ceremony. Every step marks a new thought; lullabies are not dissimilar from homes in their most symbolic sense. They are both passed on, highly allegorical, challenging yet comforting. They shelter us and send us to sleep. Yet their nooks and crannies are full of unspoken meanings and, sometimes, unsettling turns. We want to go back. 

Strolling down a short and narrow street peppered with new restaurants, I recognise the flat where Alba used to live. Carol and I were house-sitting for her when I found out I got a job in the UK; I was doing the cleaning and she the laundry and I got the call. “We got the job!” I howled out the kitchen window and up the lightwell towards the rooftop terrace where she was hanging up clothes. In my excitement, I had forgotten that there was no ‘we’. I alone applied for and got the job, and I alone was going to move to a new country. 

Carol came running down, joining my celebration. “A job! In the arts! An opportunity! The UK! The land of your favourite books! Yay!”. In our excitement, we both forgot to acknowledge that I might not be coming back. I was not going on a manic, anecdote-generating, temporary adventure. This time, I was relocating, searching for a new home. 

In our excitement, we forgot to grieve.

I am getting closer to La Rambla, a long stretch flanked by palm trees parallel to the coastline, and I remember Gardel’s old tango ‘Volver’ (Return):

Volver

con la frente marchita

las nieves del tiempo

platearon mi sien. 

Sentir

que es un soplo la vida

que veinte años no es nada

que febril la mirada

errante en las sombras

te busca y te nombra.

 

** “Return… with my forehead all wrinkled,

My temples turned silver by time’s falling snow…

To feel… that one’s life is a twinkle,

Twenty years hardly reckon,

And two fevered eyes beckon,

In shadows forestall you

And seek you”

 

I hum the melody while sidestepping passers-by. When I am back, I often forget to walk on the right side of the street. 

Settling in Bristol wasn’t easy. Painfully, I was forced into a newfound space of adulthood. It took time. Homes were wrecked, and I often followed paths that led nowhere. With years, patience and luck, a life that finally felt mine took shape within and around me, with a son who became my compass and led me to start a family and new traditions. Together, we built dwellings and wove relationships by choice, bound by love, good food, kindness, shared stories and inside jokes. 

Everything is so bright, washed by piercing yellow undertones. In contrast, I spot a line of cool blue beyond the train tracks: I am arriving at the underpass that will take me to the seafront. 

Along the way, ‘homemaking’ became a practice instead of an impossible destination. I started to embrace that old familiar feeling of belonginglessness, and I learned to transmute its burdensome nature into the joy of connection and new perspectives. 

I get to the beach, and I walk over the wobbliness of tiny dunes until I am close to the shore. 

Bristol is both a real place and a constructed mythology formed by every person who has made it their home. A dream built on change, creativity, and compassion that is now threatened by those political tensions and impossible living standards festering everywhere. 

Would I be able to stay? 

Without looking away from the sea, I take off my shoes, socks and fold my jacket into a blanket. I sit cross-legged, and inhale and exhale a few times but my breathing is neither as mindful nor glamorous as I would like it to be. Hurried, awkward attempts to perform a ritual for a ritual's sake, to force myself into this feeling of returning. I try again a few times and end up coughing. I finally stop trying and turn my attention to the waves; their endless efforts to reach out to dry land, only to die in foam before sliding back to their source. Up and down, a waltz of a sound, the background to so many of my memories. In Bristol, I long for these waves and their tunes, and only in the windy woods, with their rattling leaves and swaying branches, can I find solace in an almost-analog sound.

My mind finally adrift. I mentally wave at the sea like an old friend. I give up on the idea of an all-encompassing mother that can wash away my pain. I plop back, not caring at all about the grains of sand working their way into my hair. Closing my eyes, warmth on my face, feet in the sand. 

I smile to myself at the paradox: I am both at home and not at home, and it is okay not to know.

It is okay not to know.

It is okay not to know.

It is okay not to know…

 

*Text and translation: https://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=292

**Translation: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/volver-volver.html-0

---