When Home Is More Than One Place

For Caribbean women living between islands, countries, cultures and versions of ourselves, “Where’s home?” isn’t always a simple question.

 

“Where are you from?”

 

To be honest, this should be a pretty easy question to answer. Sometimes it is. And sometimes you find yourself mentally deciding how much of the story the person asking actually wants.

 

Do they mean where you were born? Where your parents are from? Where you live now? Where you grew up? The island you return to every year to visit your grandparents? The country on your passport? Or the place that still feels familiar the moment you step outside the airport?

 

For many Caribbean women, home doesn’t fit neatly into one answer.

 

It can be London and Kingston.

Toronto and Port of Spain.

New York and Georgetown.

St. Kitts and somewhere you lived before it.

 

It can even be an island you have never actually lived on, but somehow know through your mother’s cooking, your grandmother’s stories, the music played too loudly at family gatherings and all the little things you grew up believing were completely normal until you realised other families didn’t do them.

 

Maybe that’s why the word home carries so much.

 

The home you came from

There is the home that made you.

 

The one attached to childhood memories, Sunday lunches, familiar voices and the smell of something cooking before you even make it through the front door.

 

Sometimes that home is a physical place. Sometimes it isn’t.

 

For Caribbean women in the diaspora, there can be a strange intimacy with places we didn’t necessarily grow up in. You know the food. You know the sayings. You know exactly what a certain look from an auntie means. You know which topics absolutely should not be brought up at the family function.

 

The culture is yours, even when somebody else decides you don’t sound Caribbean enough, weren’t born there, left too long ago or don’t know the “right” version of a tradition.

 

And perhaps that’s the difficult part. We often talk about belonging as though someone else gets to approve the application.

 

Then there’s the home you build

Sometimes life takes us somewhere else. For work. For university. For love. For opportunity. For family. Sometimes because staying no longer feels possible. Sometimes simply because we wanted to see what else was out there. And slowly, the unfamiliar becomes ordinary.

 

You learn where to buy the food you like. You find your people. You develop routines. You build friendships. You create a home that looks nothing like the one you imagined when you were younger.

 

Years pass.

 

Then somebody asks where home is and suddenly you hesitate, because this place is home too. You have memories here now. You have people you love here. There are streets you could drive without thinking and places where they already know your order. You’ve built a life. Does accepting that mean loving where you came from any less?

 

Of course not. But sometimes it can feel as though we’re expected to choose.

 

Going back can feel strange too

There is also something nobody really warns you about. You can miss a place desperately and then return to it… only to realise that it doesn’t feel exactly the way you remembered. Perhaps the place changed. Perhaps you did. Most likely, both.

 

You might recognise every road and still feel slightly out of step. The things you romanticised while you were away suddenly irritate you again within three days. 

 

People expect you to slip straight back into an old version of yourself, but that woman doesn’t quite exist anymore.

 

And then comes the guilt, because aren’t you supposed to be happy to be home? This is what you missed. Isn’t it? But belonging can be complicated like that. You can love somewhere deeply without wanting to live there. You can miss somewhere while being happier somewhere else. You can return home and still miss the home you left behind.

 

Two things can be true at once.

 

And then people start measuring your Caribbean-ness

There are plenty of unofficial tests.

 

The accent. The food you cook. Whether you know a particular song. How often you visit. Whether you left. Whether you came back. Whether your parents were born there. Whether you were born there. Whether you’re “really” from the Caribbean or just happen to have Caribbean parents.

 

It’s exhausting when you think about it. Identity shouldn’t require this much paperwork. Caribbean womanhood is already incredibly varied. We come from different islands, languages, races, religions, histories, classes and experiences. Some of us have never left home. Some left decades ago. Some returned. Some are trying to return. Some have no desire to. And none of those experiences automatically makes one woman more Caribbean than another. There should be room for all of us.

 

Maybe home doesn’t need one postcode

Perhaps that’s the part we don’t say enough. Home doesn’t always have to be one place. It can be the country where your career finally took off and the island where everybody still calls you by your childhood nickname. It can be the family house you haven’t lived in for twenty years. It can be your mother’s kitchen. Your husband’s country. The neighbourhood where you’re raising your children. The airport where you inexplicably feel emotional every time you land.

 

It can even change.

 

The place that felt like home at 25 may not be the place that feels like home at 40. Maybe we don’t need to keep forcing ourselves to pick one. Because sometimes home isn’t really geography at all. It’s the people who know us without explanation. The food we crave when we’re tired. The accent that slips back into our voice without us noticing. The music that somehow changes our mood within three seconds. The places that hold versions of us we don’t want to lose. And the life we’ve chosen to build now.

 

Maybe home is allowed to be all of it.