Home

            It’s been an exciting Thanksgiving weekend, as my wife’s parents recently moved to the same town where my parents have lived for the past 12 years. After a couple of attempts at retiring up north, my in-laws realized that the Jersey Shore was more their style. So this Thanksgiving, my daughters were able to gather around the turkey with all four grandparents for the first time in their lives. It was wonderful.

            As I’ve aged out of some of the restlessness of youth, I’ve come to see just how much it can mean to feel comfortable and happy with your home. To have that roof and four walls, and to want to be there, is a special feeling. Thanksgiving, and the holidays that follow, are a yearly reminder of this.

            I was thinking about that feeling as I read a poem the other day. It’s titled “Home,” and it was written by Warsan Shire, a writer who was born in Kenya and raised in London to Somali parents. The poem addresses the world’s current refugee crisis, one that sees more people fleeing war and oppression than at any time since World War II, according to The New York Times.

            Shire begins her poem by writing, “no one leaves home unless / home is the mouth of a shark / you only run for the border / when you see the whole city running as well.”

            The next stanza continues, “your neighbors running faster than you / breath bloody in their throats / the boy you went to school with / who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory / is holding a gun bigger than his body / you only leave home / when home won’t let you stay.”

            Since the flurry of recent terrorist attacks in Europe, Asia and Africa, there has been increased conversation about a topic that is as old as history – whether to allow an exodus of people to enter one’s country. There are always complications to this issue, but time has a tendency to align itself with compassion and openness, rather than with resistance and fences. Those who enter a new country, as my great-grandparents did in America, tend to do nothing more than give thanks and start their new life with ambition and devotion to their new home.

            It’s tempting, during times of fear, to think that countless people are out to get us. But in reality, most people just want what my in-laws found this year – a place that feels like home. When we forget this, we run the risk of becoming sharks ourselves.

Perspective

I recently finished reading What is the What with some of my 12th-grade English students. The book, written by Dave Eggers, tells the tortuous life story of a Sudanese refugee. The man, named Valentino Achak Deng, survived unspeakable horrors during the second Sudanese civil war. Valentino fled to Ethiopia by foot, then on foot again to Kenya, before making his way to America after more than a decade in refugee camps. After experiencing so much suffering and pain, Deng still found the strength to tell his story to Eggers, who turned it into a work of both witness and of art.

The courage, perseverance and dignity of Valentino is astounding to any reader, but particularly so to suburban American teen-agers. His is so unlike most of the stories they read or view in today’s news outlets. There are no tabloid romances in here. No tales of steroid use among ballplayers. No billion-dollar bailouts. Valentino’s story also takes us about as far away from our distracting, multi-media world as we can get. There aren’t any iPhones, PlayStations, Blu-ray movies or text messages in this book. It’s a lot simpler, a lot starker, and a lot more sobering.

Time and time again, many of my students talked about how distant this story felt from the lives they have led so far. Yet, they also spoke of the perspective and deeper insight they had gained from reading it. Having read the book twice myself, I can certainly echo my students’ wise words.

Sudan has experienced a nearly unfathomable degree of suffering and injustice in recent decades. My students are aware of Darfur, and they’ve connected the suffering there to that found in the Holocaust literature they’ve read. But they also know that there is plenty of suffering much closer to home, from families who lost their homes in New Orleans, to individuals suffering from loss of jobs, to those who don’t have enough money for food and shelter. As they reflect upon this book, and as they prepare to enter the world beyond high school, I can only hope that my students remember Valentino’s experience when the opportunity to serve others presents itself.