There are days, the occasional days, when my greatest wish is not to spend the next six years in a violent South African city, with a temperamental soul and a fearful imagination. On those few days, these scattered days, I want nothing more than to live in an unheated old house populated with a father and seven chronically healthy children—whose names I have already forgotten—and many books…a home that always smells of fresh bread or lentil soup or tomato sauce made with white wine.

I blame autumn.

I am taking a course about postcolonial belonging. So far, home is:

an ontology
an act of exclusion
a geography
a house
a prison
a smell
a skin
a story
a history
a community
a politics
a nation
a family
an affect
a language