We regret the passing, on April 11, 2024, of the distinguished Romanian author and critic Dan Cristea, who served as the editor in chief of the Luceafărul de Dimineață cultural monthly. In addition to being an alum of the 1985 Fall Residency, Cristea received his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa.
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"Home/Land"
Paros, May 16-20, 2008
Like "love," "home" is above all tested in the terrain of emotion. In order to be the real thing, "home" must make itself known viscerally.
Yet this time-tested core is at odds with the most pervasive social rearrangement of our era, that of globalization. The right to leave one's home/land when it has become a trap, a dead-end, or a prison is matched by the right to have one's home/land sheltered from a free-for-all. Emigrants abandon their home/land; immigrants enter another country's household. What if they later wish to return? Is there such a thing as not wishing to have a home, to remain homeless? And must departure always be rooted in despair? What are the membranes, gateways, border fences, smokescreens, and bureaucratic protocols through which the shape-shifting inherent to migration happens?
In this new mobile world, perhaps there can be a home different from that which shelters -- an @home site of some virtual sort.....
Ancient traditions of hospitality and universal human rights abut against the equally fundamental rights of private property as well as against the leveling force of Law that regulates belonging without undue sentiment.
Our conversation might start from such questions and interrogate or refine some of these ground rules for uprootedness or transplantation.
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