Essay Sample on Home: A Place and a Condition of Peace and Acceptance

Introduction

Home emerges as a central preoccupation for the characters in Austin Clarke's "Canadian Experience" and Karen Solie's poem "Thanksgiving." This preoccupation forces the reader to ask exactly what is home? To answer this important question, one is forced to examine the environment that the authors and characters find themselves in and the conditions that pressure them into feeling alone or away from home. Born in 1966, Karen Solie was born in Moose Jaw and grew up on the family farm in the southwest of Saskatchewan. In most of her poem, Solie often tracks a journey or sometimes several journeys of the mind at the same time. On the other hand, Clarke was born in Barbados in 1934. He later moved into Canada, a journey that allowed Clarke to write uniquely about the struggles of Caribbean immigrants in Toronto. The central preoccupation of "Home" as emerging from "Thanksgiving" by Karen Solie and "Canadian Experience" by Austin Clarke shows that despite traveling hundreds of miles in search of better prospects, the hearts and minds of the majority of people, particularly immigrants stay in their places of birth.

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Broadly defined, a home is a place that one returns to and escapes from everyday life stresses. Due to its welcoming nature, a home is a source of the powerful feeling of belonging, something that both Clarke and Solie explore. Home is an omnipresent construct in our literary traditions because they are critical to human identity. The concept of a home is a complex blend of desires, myths, experiences and political realities.

It is no wonder that defining a home is such a difficult task because as person's definition of a home will entail their unique experiences, desires, political realities and myths that can be different from another person. In human imagination, the sense of a home can contract into the smallest space or expand to include the entire earth, therefore, the symbol and concept of home can prove to be enormously variable. Hence, the protagonist in Clarke's "Canadian Experience" and the narrator in Solie's "Thanksgiving" are both looking for a home, albeit with different underlying realities.

The home has been associated with a sense of belonging and safety such that some Canadian laws touching on self defense have been forged out of the notion that one's home is his last line of defense. For example, reflected in the law is the legal doctrine that a man's home is his castle. Based on this law, a man has a right to use deadly force to repel or stop another person from attacking him in his home as long as he or she uses a registered gun. There are similar laws across the world. In other words, the law allows one to not have the responsibility to run away and instead gives one the right to use deadly force to defend oneself.

This legal doctrine highlights just how important a home to a person and this importance is highlighted in the attachment that George, the protagonist in Austin Clarke's "Canadian Experience" attaches to his house. George expects his house to be the place where he retires everything where he can feel secure and welcome (Lott 38). The reader gets the feeling that after struggling against racism, immorality and culture clash all day, George wishes to come to a shelter that accepts and welcomes him and makes him feel secure until the next day when he has to struggle against the world all over again.

For George, the protagonist in Austin Clarke's short story, a home represents a place of belonging that is welcoming and gives him a sense of identity. For much of the story, Clarke does not name the man, a signal that the man lacks an identity. It is only near the end of the short story that the readers know that his name is George. George is a Barbadian man who has recently moved to Toronto against his father's wishes in order to look for a fortune (Kannenberg 15).

As it is revealed, George has had to change his life significantly so as to get along with those around him but in the process, he gets lost in the world that is composed of people of another race and another culture. For instance, he finds it wrong for a man and a woman to cohabit as long as they are not yet married. Moreover, he does not believe that boys and girls should attend the same schools. These changes make him bitter and depressed in the new land.

Having a recognizable home would help the protagonist find his identity but sadly, his house has no name, just like himself. The absence of a name for his house as well as the lack of his name at least until this point is a strong symbolism in this story that is based on the search for a home. Without a recognizable house as well as a name on top of other losses, all George would wish for is a welcoming home.

The protagonist, George now listens to rock and roll radio station simply to get to know what time it is despite the fact that he deeply hates this genre of music. Moreover, his fear of failure has driven the protagonist towards some embarrassing lows. For example, as he prepares for an interview in a bank that always has made him impatient and uncomfortable, he plans to lie about his background in education. In addition, he is simply just pursuing a junior position in this bank. His level of education would have been above average and respectable in Barbados but here in Canada, he feels that it is something to be embarrassed about.

What emerges that in order to fit into the new country with its different cultures and practices, George has been forced to change his entire lifestyle complete with his moral beliefs and cultural expectations. To feel at home, George would have to go back to Barbados where he would fit in with the morality, cultural expectations and educational expectations with his countrymen. As a result, for George, a home would be a place where he would be at ease with his identity and that place is only in his country of Barbados.

For the speaker in Karen Solie's poem "Thanksgiving", the search for a home suggests the search for something more elusive and broad than simply a structure that she can call home. Her perspective of a home suggests the longing for a home even though she is literally at home. This suggests that the home she is looking for is not simply a place but a condition (Carpenter 251). This condition that she is looking for is the ability to feel at home in the world. What the speaker here is looking for is the definition of a home that is much deeper and elusive than the narrator in Clarke's short story.

In fact, one can argue that George would have been happy and at home had he been the speaker in Solie's poem. In the poem, the narrator has just been spending the day with the rest of her family playing around the river and driving around in the afternoon before settling for a nice dinner. However, even after such a seemingly fulfilling time with the family, the speaker concludes that the whole family still does not feel at home.

After this realization, the reader is prompted to seek answers by studying the life of the poet, Karen Solie. Unlike Austin Clarke who is an immigrant, Solie was born and brought up in Canada. Hence, she should be at ease with the cultures and moral practices in her surrounding because having been born and brought up into the Canadian environment and her speaker should, therefore, be at ease in her culture. This is a signal that the speaker, unlike George, is not searching for the security that is provided by the structure called a house.

This elusive search for a home leads the reader to conclude that for the speaker in this poem, her search for a home is different because she is searching for the ability to feel accepted in the world which is a condition rather than a place. One comes to this conclusion because had she been looking for a home in terms of a place, being with her family would have made her settled. In fact, as it turns out, the speaker is not the only one who is not feeling out of place but her entire family.

The opening lines in the poem indicate this broad definition of home. "One afternoon so still it's possible to see how the world can fill the holes we make and complete itself again" may be interpreted to mean that the speaker is searching for a world that is accommodative to accept her and address her shortcomings. Just like "water closed as its tail left the surface" the speaker would be at home in a world that she can immerse herself and blend in together folly with the rest of the world around her (Pollock 95). This is a very broad definition of home, one that the reader is not sure that it exists.

Left without a lot to go on, one can suspect that the speaker is in search of broad and possibly global conditions of accommodation such as better conditions of living, gay rights, women rights and maybe even liberalized trade. By their nature, these broad conditions are elusive to attain just like it has been elusive for the speaker to find the peace she searches for in her physical home. As demonstrated in the ending of the poem, after coming home, the speaker realizes that what she has been searching for is not within the confines of her house or even within the capacity of her family members because they are all looking for this condition.

Home is a complex and often an elusive concept. As revealed by the desires of both the speaker in the poem "Thanksgiving" and the protagonist in "Canadian Experience." The protagonists are preoccupied with finding a home. However, the two are in pursuit of two kinds of homes. The protagonist in Clarke's short story is in search of a place that he can feel welcome and experience a sense of belonging.

If George could get back to Barbados, it is certain that he would feel at home because he would blend into the culture and moral practices that he is used to. On the other hand, the speaker in Solie's poem is in search of a home that is not a place but rather a condition. However, the condition that the speaker is in search of is rather large, global in size because and one that cannot be confined to space or even a country. While both these forms of "home" are geared towards finding a place where one can be welcome and accepted, one is very elusive while that of George can be attained relatively easy.

Conclusion

Home is an elusive but important concept for both protagonists as demonstrated by the discussion. The protagonists in Austin Clarke's "Canadian Experience" and Karen Solie's "Thanksgiving" respectively seem to have a central preoccupation with a home that engulfs the whole of these works. As observed, a home is a place where one can feel secure and welcome. However, that concept of a home can be narrow or expansive. George is in search of a narrow concept of a home because his home is a place but for the Solie's speaker, the concept of a home is a rather elusive condition, the ability to feel welcome in the world.

Works Cited

Carpenter, David. The Literary History of Saskatchewan: Volume 2. Regina, Saskatchewan: Coteau Books, 2014. Print.

Kannenberg, Benjamin. There's No Train to Eden - Austin Clarke's Canadian Experience. Place of publication not identified: Grin Verlag, 2013. Print.

Lott, John R. More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Print.

Pollock, James. You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada. Erin, Ont: Porcupine's Quill, 2012. Print.