Being here: emplacement and displacement in the life stories of two Somali-Australians

Our age is often described in terms of movement, instability and uncertainty, leading to the sense of homelessness or uprootedness that John Berger once described to be the 'quintessential experience' of our time. Struck by this fluidity, many Western intellectuals came to long for a means of replacing the rigid and suffocating narrowness of national belonging with the lightness and ease of the vagabond, the nomad, the traveller, who, owning nothing but her own life, slips in and out of different worlds. Displacement came to be seen as paradigmatic of a time of deterritorialisation and refugees came to be the symbolic figures of this age of movement and fluctuation, challenging established notions of a 'national order of things' (Malkki 1995b), of a world that can be neatly mapped and of cultures that are deeply rooted in places that belong to them. But these sentiments often left unanswered the question of how being-at-home or being-without-home is actually lived. Do important existential categories such as home, territoriality and belonging cease to exist in the face of displacement? How do people shape and re-shape them? How is displacement made sense of in everyday life and in relation to a wider place-world? Using these questions as a starting point, this thesis focuses on the life stories of Halima and Omar, two Somalis in their mid-fifties living in Melbourne, and discusses the interrelated meanings of emplacement and displacement. It also works with a series of photographs taken by Mohamed, who, upon returning to war-torn Mogadishu after thirty years abroad, began depicting his relationship to lost, ruined and imagined places. Mirroring the particularities of Mohamed's, Omar's and Halima's experiences of place, displacement and home-building with fragments of the author's own story of movement and emplacement, the thesis takes a critical look at the use of the figure of the refugee as a metaphor for alienation and estrangement from society. Halima's and Omar's stories and Mohamed's photographs give an insight into the struggles and violent forces that at times crushed their hopes, and the strengths and capabilities that allowed them to regain a sense of balance. Their stories stand in stark contrast to 'refugee stories' as mere documents of trauma, instability and victimhood and speak for a more complex understanding of displacement. The contrast between the metaphorical use of the figure of the refugee as nomadic, rhizomic, or deterritorialised and Omar's and Halima's lived experience suggests that much of the contemporary reading of displacement as a placeless phenomenon is built on an uncritical and confused understanding of space and movement. While roots have come to stand for the postmodern 'horror of being bound and fixed' (Bauman 1995: 91), this horror doesn't seem to be shared by Halima, Mohamed or Omar, who fear remaining in transit forever, never arriving anywhere, never again becoming someone in relation to somewhere. Rather than focusing on the metaphorical treatment of space as boundless and open-ended, the particularities of Halima's and Omar's stories demonstrate the need for a more complex and nuanced view of displacement, one that takes the material and geographical location of social life more seriously and attempts to 'get back into place' (Casey 1993).