The emphasis on the search for home as a physical structure is not to be undermined in Jarrar’s novel. Throughout the novel, Jarrar uses a physical house to symbolize Lebanon. Each of the three tales takes us to the ancient grand village house. With its many rooms, its seductive scented herb-planted garden and its long history on Mount Lebanon, where the history of Lebanon started; it serves as a traditional embodiment of the national homeland. Homes, as physical dwellings, figure over and over in the entire novel and Jarrar goes to lengths in providing descriptions of them. The old village house is, according to both Maysa and Aida, made up of “four pointed arches...and a red brick rooftop slanted evenly upon them” (Somewhere, Home 27-140). In contrast to the village house, all physical dwellings which figure in the novel, save Amou Mohammed’s home in the refugee camp, seem to lack a certain something: clutter. This is how, for example, Maysa views the Beirut apartment when she goes to visit both her husband and daughter upon Yasmeena’s request by saying:
The apartment is uncluttered. I see Wadih’s touch in its spareness, functional pieces outlined in pace. He leads me to a dark green sofa that is pushed against the white living-room wall. There is a glass coffee table in front of it and a squat off-white lamp on the floor by its side. The windows are curtainless and there is no sign of Yasmeena’s happy clutter here (Ibid 76). The apartment’s description, coming at the point of conclusion of the first part of the novel, is that of a still and frozen image, merely functional. This bland description of the Beirut apartment is in contrast to a much warmer description of the village house. It took into account the surrounding mountains and trees (Ibid 4-5) and intertwines the description with family history and tales narrated across generations. Maysa’ description of the village house is one of life; of surrounding pine trees and wild thyme and fig trees and grapevines. Her description of the inside of the house is one that requires the explanation of the family tree in its entirety. In describing the house, Maysa recalls the process of accumulation of the objects inside that belonged to different people; she takes note of the furniture and the way through which they came to the house; such as the Persian carpet and an oak dressing table that belonged to her mother and grandmother. Every object in the house is a memory; real or constructed, and fosters a sense of personal belonging to the place. The house is already one that is personalized in relation to her, with an excessive use of the possessive pronoun: “belonged to my mother Leila”, or “my grandmother’s oak dressing table” (Ibid 5). Such personalization remains lacking in the “uncluttered” (Ibid 76) Beirut apartment.
However, as vital as the house is in nurturing her sense of belonging, Maysa’s lone presence in the house instilled within her a sense of fear, she states:
This house, this old, dilapidated house, was once a castle, alive and spilling over with energy. My grandmother sat in a wooden-backed chair at the southern window, watching for the last of her children running home from school, and now there are shadows where she has been, shadows without sunlight, clouding my vision, filling me with fear (Ibid 10).
Walking around its rooms, where her grandparents and uncle once lived, ate, slept and had a life, Maysa’s resettling in the old family’s home necessitates an imagination of its history. This history oscillates between the three poles of her grandmother, mother and aunt. She imagines and evaluates each of these women’s encounters with this house. Maysa imagines that Alia cared for the house by decorating it and turning it into a home, and she thinks of how her grandmother, in an attempt to make a home of the new house as a new bride, had “placed seashells and coloured stones on window ledges, and embroidered tiny flowers wherever she could: on bed linen and tablecloths, and even on the small cloth sack used for
making yoghurt cheese” (Ibid 16). She imagines, also, her grandmother’s dissatisfaction with raising a family alone in the absence of her husband in Africa. In contrast, her aunt who journeyed between two houses with an absent husband and an absent father encounters the house as a location of dissatisfaction and unfulfilled aspirations. Despite her constant care for the garden and planting scented herbs which lure strangers to the house, Saeeda encounters only disappointments throughout her life in the house. Leila, who lived abroad and who meets her future husband in the house, and, initially, was estranged by the language barrier, instantly contrasts the weight of memories in the old village house to the weightlessness of her home in Virginia. Also, Maysa has Leila noting the forbidding stature of the house from the outside (Ibid 51), whilst, in the inside, the house shows signs of wear and tear through using words such as fading colours, slightly scuffed floors, and settled air beneath the ceilings. These are signs of a long history – totally in contrast to Leila’s home, in Virginia, which is one “without memories, without a stirring weighted past” (Ibid 52). Maysa’s imagination swings between the different experiences these three women had with the old village house. Maysa’ own eventual departure from the old house, packing so little with her and going to the apartment in Beirut, follows her desire to break free from the heavy weight of memories. Jarrar’s reconstruction of the history of the old house, at the hands of Maysa and her notebook, leads to a change in the perception of the house, and, in turn, Lebanon as an ideal home.
The second part of Jarrar’s novel stresses, also, the same heavy weight of memories which make Aida return to Lebanon in search of resolution, peace and fulfilment. In the old unoccupied village house, Aida believes that she may have achieved the aims which she came back from Europe looking for. Jarrar paints a picture of how Aida comes upon the house during an unplanned visit to Mount Lebanon by saying:
She walked, her arms swinging, her feet crushing the dirt and pebbles underneath, and became aware of the sound of crickets. The road eventually veered to the right, towards the village main street. Aida turned left onto an unpaved road that led her further up and away from the centre of the town. When she began to feel the heat, the sun beating down on her head and shoulders, she decided to find some shade to rest in. She found herself standing in the dusty courtyard of an old stone house. It had a red brick roof and four pointed arches that lined the edges of its porch. The front door, windows and shutters were painted a rich green, as was the balustrade, which was rusty in places (Ibid 140).
Aida perceives the old village house as her shelter after a tiring journey to the village. It is described as a refuge from the heat where she can rest her weary soul. The description of the house is presented, also, as a contrast to the apartment in Europe of which we know only that it is “furnished” (Ibid 101), with no mention of any investment to make it a home.
Maysa’s description of the old house though is strikingly similar to Amou Mohammed’s refugee home. Thinking of the visit to the man who “had the ability to turn hell into heaven just by being there” (Ibid 98), Aida recalls her childhood visit:
They stepped into a small courtyard where leafy plants grew out of large tins filled with dirt, the ground had been swept clean and a sudden stillness filled the air. To the right of a low dividing wall Aida noticed a sink and a toilet behind a wooden door that had been left slightly ajar. The confusion they had encountered when they first entered the camp seemed very far away...[His]room was crowded with things and people....There were large embroidered cushions on the carpeted floor and what was clearly bedding for half a dozen people piled high in one corner. A curtain separated one end of the room from the rest. Although Aida had felt a sudden shaft of light when she first entered, she realised that only one bare light bulb hung from the ceiling (Ibid 96).
It could be that Jarrar was trying to paint Aida’s character as one for whom home was a refuge from hardships and, therefore, she was fond of both the old house in the village, which she encountered after a tiring journey in the heat, as well as Amou Mohammed’s house in the refugee camp where, over the years, Palestinians escaped from neighbouring Palestine. Both houses/homes represent an attraction on the basis of the security they offer from an outside world – however ill-suited and unfitting the description might be in the case of the refugee camp. It is more likely that Jarrar is indicating the false promise of such havens. Palestinian refugee camps have some of the poorest conditions in the world, even today, some of them remain in Beirut and are constant reminders of a people betrayed, forgotten and sacrificed by surrounding neighbouring countries.
It remains that, upon finding the old village house, Aida lost interest in her apartment in Beirut and looked for a home which resembled and embodied what she remembered in her childhood. Quickly, she developed the idea of turning the house into a nursery school where she could work and educate children in the village. Her dream of fulfilment was thwarted by Kameel who reminded her of a distinction between insiders to Lebanon and outsiders. Having left during the civil war at 17 years of age, Aida was reminded that she could not lay the same claim to Lebanon as home. Eventually, Aida decided to leave Lebanon and to seek a home
somewhere else where she could find Amou Mohammed once again. In this, Jarrar presents us with a contrasting image to that of Maysa’s.
Of all three women, it is Salwa who has the most memories in the old house in the village as a child born and raised in the village in Mount Lebanon. Salwa calls homes most places in which she lived; she is saddened equally when she leaves any of them and misses the people she left behind. Nearing the end of her life, in the Australian nursing home in Australia, Salwa describes Australia as a refuge by saying:
Beyond this window and the tree that stands outside it, beyond the city that surrounds us, out where sky and earth appear to meet, this country reaches out, measureless and extraordinary, a refuge in a far flung world (Ibid 196).
Although she left Lebanon against her will, she has been able to find homes in new cities which she visited with her family. What frustrates Salwa is not the illusive search for home but the constant separation from loved ones. As she rests as an old woman on her bed in the nursing home, Salwa’s declaration that she feels a “sense that life has better places to go” indicates her dissatisfaction at the way her life had gone. She insists that her grandson does not stay in Australia and goes back to Lebanon to be reunited with his family, where he belongs, since she believes “mothers and children must never be made to part” (Ibid 200). It is for this reason that when Salwa comes upon the photo at the end of part three and recognizes the old house, she remains uncertain whether or not it is the same house from her childhood. As a result of Salwa’s attitude towards homes, an attitude which places more weight on being surrounded by loved ones rather than presence in one place or another, Salwa sees the old house in a less alluring light than both Maysa and Aida.