Where do we belong?

When the writer, poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou died in 2014, the journalist Bill Moyers screened an episode from his 1982 TV series Creativity as a tribute to her. In it, he returns with Angelou to Stamps, Arkansas, where her paternal grandmother had lived, and where she’d spent much of her childhood.

“Because the truth is you never can leave home, you take it with you everywhere you go,” Angelou says at one point in the documentary as she sits behind the wheel of a car while the landscape flashes past. It’s as if she’s inside a soundstage with the scenery projected onto a screen to create the illusion of driving, the way they used to do in the movies. Amid this stagey motion, Angelou’s inimitable voice — strong, deep, nasal — feels rooted, at home.

As a recent blow-in to America, I’ve been thinking a lot about home recently. When people ask where I’m from, as they often do, I tell them the UK, because that’s where I was born, even though I haven’t lived there for years. The other day I made the calculation: twenty-one years away, many of them in Hong Kong. Still, as T. S. Eliot wrote in his poem ‘East Coker,’ “Home is where one starts from.” Although he was born and spent his first sixteen years in St. Louis, Missouri (the place, incidentally, where Angelou was born), the village of East Coker in southwest England was the poet’s ancestral home.

Or perhaps home is where one ends up? By 1940, when Eliot’s poem was published, he’d been a naturalized British citizen for thirteen years.

Last Saturday, hiking in the snowy hills of northwest Connecticut, I came across an abandoned cabin in the woods, a squat for ghosts with cutlery spewing from open drawers and ragged curtains still clinging to a shattered window. Among the discarded tires and rusted farm implements were the remains of an old maple evaporator. However assiduously the occupants of this collapsing home had worked to belong to the land — splitting logs, planting trees, braving snow and ticks and humidity to cultivate the ground – the hardscrabble land had told them to pack up and get lost.

How long do you need to live in a place before you become part of it? Perhaps too long, which is why the early colonists named their new communities after places in the old country — Great Barrington, Salisbury, Colebrook, Torrington — as a way of fast-tracking their claims to a country that wasn’t theirs to begin with.

Angelou’s assurance as a writer, her confidence in belonging despite the abuse and racial segregation she’d suffered, stands in stark contrast to the present where there is little consensus on what home is, or on the issue of who belongs where. Today, US citizens are being offered two polarized visions of belonging against a backdrop of fraught debate about migration management and border security.

On the one hand, are those promoting an “authentic,” unhyphenated America, where the designation “American” trumps any ethnic or racial modifier. This MAGA homeland is conjured as a nostalgic land of Coca-Cola and drive-through McDonald’s predicated on the ejection of anyone who doesn’t belong. Here, belonging means security, stability and a sense of rootedness; and it involves forsaking any competing, non-national group identity.

Meanwhile, others stress the importance of diversity, calling for legal recognition of communities based on categories of ethnicity, race and gender. However different from Donald Trump’s populism, this emphasis on an identarian politics is similarly framed as integral to American values and to US constitutional principles of freedom and self-determination.

How do we make sense of these incompatible ideas about belonging, with their different scales of affiliation — from class, race, gender and nation to globalist concerns for climate change — that reflect divergent views of the past, as well as the future?

In 2019, during the Democratic Party’s presidential primaries, Peter Buttigieg, one of the candidates who was then mayor of South Bend, Indiana, sat down with David Remnick of the New Yorker and told him, “Right now there are a lot of lines being drawn about who gets to be American. And it speaks to a bigger crisis of belonging in this country.”

It’s a crisis, Buttigieg argues, that originates in global economic and social transformations. Deindustrialization has decimated communities in the Midwest, while agricultural consolidation, another effect of economic restructuring driven by globalization, has hollowed out America’s rural communities. As social networks break down, people feel lost, an estrangement that leads to insecurity, which in turn makes them distrustful of government and susceptible to misinformation. At the same time, insecure borders — from the incursion of “illegals” to the admission of transwomen in women’s sports — have fueled a backlash. As President Trump once declared, rehashing Ronald Reagan: “A nation without borders is not a nation at all.”

Others, like Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, have ascribed the crisis to technology, which is substituting synchronous, physical interactions with virtual ones, in an online world shaped by AI algorithms that personalize and moderate content. Novel, tech-mediated forms of association are eroding real-world networks that produce a grounded sense of belonging, resulting in surging numbers of young people suffering from anxiety and depression.

Are proliferating home renovation shows on TV, then, like all those filtered home décor Insta posts, perhaps less celebrations of the home than symptoms of an underlying disquiet about belonging? And could the same be said about the new emphasis on belonging in corporate speak, which might be less about promoting institutional inclusivity and equity, and more about the increasing ambiguity of a world where work and home are difficult to tell apart; where home has become a new site of work, so work must be recast as a new home.

Besides, this “crisis of belonging” is hardly new. In the 1960s and 1970s, sociologists cited worrying evidence that people were becoming disorientated as societies shifted from industrial production to a networked, information economy. With the increasing secularization of society, religion’s purpose “to provide ultimate certainty amid the exigencies of the human condition” was also undermined, giving rise to “a migratory experience of society and of self, of what might be called a metaphysical loss of home.”

If all ages have had their crisis of belonging, can we infer that anxiety about belonging is a permanent human condition? That our need to belong creates a counteracting fear of not-belonging? Or perhaps, as the literary and art critic Mary Jacobus has suggested, embroiled in this need to belong is a repudiation of belonging, an unacknowledged acceptance that to be free — to be ourselves — we must hold out against assimilation.

And yet, as I came upon that ruined cabin in the Litchfield Hills, I felt the pull of some unlocatable home, which wasn’t here or there, but somewhere in between. It was that “ache for home” which, as Angelou wrote a few years after her trip back to Arkansas, “lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”