Isabel Huggan - Belonging: Home Away from Home

Praise for B ELONGING

An interesting mix of memoir, short story and travelogue A book about the yearning to belong, family ties, unexpected friendships and how life usually turns out to be quite different from our plans, its a pleasure to read and provides an intimate look at a fascinating and open-minded woman.
The Toronto Sun

The book is part engaging memoir and part intriguing exploration of how the creative mind works.
Winnipeg Free Press

Summer reading, I believe, should either draw you forcefully out of your world, or draw you irresistibly further into it. Belonging may do both. This is not so much a book to read, as to re-read. Huggans stories [are] graced with turns of phrase and pockets of language that, well, make you turn down the page to go back.
The Observer

The best part of this book is her candid and engaging voice. By the time you turn the page on the last memoir in the collection, you feel welcomed as a friend, made privy to confidences, epiphanic insights and intimate memories.
Ottawa Citizen

Belonging is an elegant, gracefully written reminiscence of what it means to leave your home and native land. Its an entrancing journey.
The Sun Times

For Ann,
who sees me through

My primary and most heartfelt thanks go to my family my sister Ruth, my daughter Abbey, and above all, my husband Bob whose love and support is so crucial to my life and work.

I am deeply grateful to Louise Dennys, Bella Pomer and Susan Roxborough for their affectionate loyalty over the years and for their steadfast conviction that this book would be written. Working with Louise to shape Belonging has been wonderful.

I owe a great deal to Joe Kertes and the Humber School for Writers for providing me with an ongoing connection and commitment to Canada. Sincere appreciation goes also to the Tasmanian Writers Centre and the Hobart City Council for my residency in 2001. Without the financial assistance of the Canadian Government when I was first invited to Australia, I would not have discovered Tasmania, where I have enjoyed such warm hospitality. There are too many kind people to thank individually, but an exception must be made for Gillian Johnson and Nicholas Shakespeare who let me use their beach house.

Ever since I left Canada in 1987, Robert and Carol Lovejoy have given me a home in Ottawa each summer, helping to maintain the happy illusion that Ive never really gone away. My love and gratitude for their generous friendship grows with every passing year.

I am indebted to several friends for their thoughtful criticism and sustaining companionship through email. These include Robert Dessaix, the remaining Audreys (Sheila McCook and Elizabeth Hay) and Jon Miller. Special thanks are due Danielle Breton and Sandy Forbes, who supplied this book with its title.

For many years, Carol Shields has encouraged and inspired me: Belonging is my way of saying thank you.

Do you understand the sadness of geography?

M ICHAEL O NDAATJE, The English Patient

So we are caught stumbling
in between, longing for home.
.
Only in fairy tales,
or given freakish luck, does the wind
rise suddenly and set you down where everything
is safe and loved and in its place. The mind
does not expect it. Butthe heart,
the heart
the heart keeps looking for itself.
It knows and does not know
where it belongs.

J AN Z WICKY , Transparence,

Songs for Relinquishing the Earth

Home makes possible the possession of the world.

D ON M C K AY , Baler Twine, Vis Vis

I N THE COUNTRY WHERE I now live, there is no word for home. You can express the idea at a slant, but you cannot say home. For a long time this disconcerted me, and I kept running up against the lack as if it were a rock in my path, worse than a pothole, worse than nothing. But at last I have habituated myself and can step around it, using variants such as notre foyer (our hearth) or notre maison (our house) when I mean to say home. More often, I use the concept chez to indicate physical location and the place where family resides, or the notion of a comfortable domestic space. However, if I wish to speak of going home to Canada, I can use mon pays (my country) but I cant say I am going chez moi when I am not: for as long as I reside in Francethe rest of my lifethis is where I will be chez moi, making a home in a country and a language not my own. I am both home and not-home, one of those trick syllogisms I must solve by homemaking, at an age when I should have finished with all that bother.

In the foothills of the Cvennes I live in a stone house that was, until only a few decades ago, home to silkworms, hundreds upon hundreds of them, squirming in flat reed baskets laid on layered frames along the walls in what was then the magnanerie, a place for feeding silkworms, and is now a bedroom. For the duration of their brief lives, these slippery dun-coloured creatures munched mulberry leaves, fattening themselves sufficiently to shed their skins four times before theyd stop eating and attach themselves to twigs or sprigs of heather on racks above the baskets. With a sense of purpose sprung from genetic necessity, theyd then spin themselves cocoons in which theyd sleep until they were plucked from their branches and dunked in huge kettles of hot water. Perhaps some luckier ones were allowed to waken and complete the magic of metamorphosisthere must be moths, after all, to furnish next seasons eggsbut silk manufacturers preferred the longer filament, which comes from whole cocoons. There are sacrifices to be made for beauty, and if the life of a lowly and not very attractive segmented grub has to be that sacrifice, perhaps that is the Lords will.

The Lords will rests heavy on the high blue hills of the Cvennes, for here God has been imagined in Calvinist clothes, a moral master whose plans for man and beast alike are stern. This little-inhabited part of southern France (the mountainous northern corner of Languedoc, much of it now a national park) has long been the heart of Protestant opposition to Roman Catholicism. From the mid-1500s, revolt against Paris and the Church continued with appropriate bloodshed on all sides until the dit de Tolrance in 1787 finally allowed those few Huguenots who remained the right to practise their religion.

The rugged terrain, hidden valleys and craggy cliffs are geologically congenial to the Protestant mindin the back reaches of the Cvennes there have always existed stubborn pockets of religious and political resistance. This is an austere landscape where, even now, life is not taken lightly and where pleasure and ease are distrusted. The puritanical harshness of Reform doctrine seems also to show itself in the fortress-like architecture of Huguenot houses such as mine: angular, stiff-necked buildings, tall and narrow with small windows shuttered against the blasts of winter or the blaze of summer. Nevertheless, graceless and severe though it may appear from outside, the cool, dark interior of the house is a blessing when you step in from the painful dazzle of an August day. It is not for nothing that the stone walls are well over half a metre thick, or that the floors are laid with glazed clay tiles.