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Translated from the Hungarian by Simon Wattson

I have been interested in homemaking, the challenges of material- and place-attachment, my whole life. I was born into the complexities of home and belonging. My childhood home was seemingly very settled and straightforward; a detached house in the centre of a town in the West of Hungary, where three generations lived together (my parents, myself, and my maternal grandparents who looked after me). My parents were often on overnight duty in the hospital or had emergency call-outs, so without the support of my grandparents, our lives would have been unmanageable. My grandparents came to live with us from a village in the south, where their families had lived for many generations, and which was home to them. They often told me about this old home when I was a child. In my imagination I followed the women going out to work in the fields, the children getting lost in the expanse of the pastures, and the men guiding Yugoslav partisans across the borders at the end of the war. From these tales, I could have sketched my grandparents' house in detail, from the roses ringing the porch window to the green-and-white pattern of the hand-woven curtains, all without ever having been there. Their small border village along the river Drava became a homeplace to me too; a space I put together from stories but which felt no less real to me than the town where I grew up.

In the town where we lived, a “western” regional variety of Hungarian was spoken, with its pronounced distinction between the “two kinds of e-s”; one a little more closed (or higher, a bit like the e in bed), the other more open (or lower, like the a in bad). This is often caricatured as a rural, “less-elevated” form of Hungarian. When I hear this pronunciation, I cringe a little, despite many years of linguistic study and work, it still makes me uneasy, but not because of its lack of prestige. This way of speaking meant to me a world beyond the home as a child, my first encounter with the world beyond the home created by my grandparents. Their southern Hungarian ways of speaking were alien in the city where we lived, as the features of their home dialect were preserved, clearly and unmistakably, in every layer from pronunciation and vocabulary to certain grammatical features. Think of the differences between Southern v. Northern British English, for instance, to get an idea of what this experience of feeling at home in language was like. I was able to speak like my grandparents for a long time, although I do remember that when my grandfather came to pick me up from kindergarten or school and started talking to me in his own “southern” way, I felt a bit embarrassed in front of my peers. For a long time, I could switch authentically to this way of speaking when I met my aunt or uncle, or a member of my grandparents’ generation still alive (they were born in the 1910s). My mother didn't talk like that. She left the village along the Drava at a young age to go to grammar school in the nearby city of Pécs, and then to university, so, it was only in her interactions with her parents that any hint of this way of speaking could be detected. My uncle escaped to “the West” after the 1956 Anti-Soviet Uprising, so decades he spent abroad preserved the traditional features of his childhood language, which are still noticeable in the way he speaks.

My grandparents’ house in the south was bought by a Boyash Gypsy family after they moved away. It was this family who showed me around the old house when I first visited the village with my mother sometime in the late 1980s. The women of my generation in that family and I have been good friends on Facebook ever since, even though they don't live there anymore. The population of the village of about 300 people had completely changed by the late 80s. The two or three remaining non-Gypsy families were made up of elderly people, the rest moved away to live with their children in larger cities and more prosperous areas of the country.

Many of the empty houses were bought by Gypsy families moving in from their end of the village (from “Little Street”, as it was called locally, and eventually also officially) and the area adjacent to the dyke holding back the Drava from flooding the village. We did find some old acquaintances among the Roma who my mother knew, and who recognised her, even when we visited in the late 80s. Among them, for example, was Kata (Auntie Kati to me), who charred for my grandmother and helped her with the back pain caused by her crumbling spine. My grandmother missed her for the rest of her life once she moved away.

Now that there are fewer and fewer people around me who speak like my grandparents, I feel that the sounds coming out of my mouth when I try to imitate this “southern dialect” way of speaking, say for the sake of illustration in linguistics lectures, are barely more than an artifice. The main point about the search for a home-place is not merely about the physical world that surrounds one, but rather how we understand our presence in space through our memories and relationships; the people whose proximity and presence confirm to us day by day who we are, why we are there, and how we got to where we are. From these impressions and sensations emerge our plans for the future, what we want to do and what we want for our children or those who we care for.

According to the academic literature on home-making, our relationship to our material environment plays an important role in how we think about ourselves. As we arrange our homes, put things away, add new objects to the ones we already have, we are constantly asking ourselves questions: will it fit in, will it get in the way, will it be accessible, will it look nice? These practical choices are about defining the place of things in our environment and, by extension, defining ourselves in and through the space. The American philosopher Nel Noddings argues that anything can be a home, be it a shack, a mud-brick hut, or a tiny council flat; it doesn't matter how it is made, how big it is, exactly where it is. What matters is whether the occupants have the choice or freedom (in Noddings’ words, “control”) to make the place fully their own. Can we decide where and how we want to live, or are there circumstances beyond our control that override our decisions? Is the past a more homely place than the future, and if so, how can we change this through our existing connections and relationships? The writings on the search for home show that inhabiting new places, circumstances, and life situations involves reflections and connectivity to our past and also the human environment and networks that surround us.

Working together with our fellow researchers in Tiszavasvári on the first issue of the journal Duj Džene, which addresses the topic of home-making, gave us the opportunity to explore the difficulties and challenges of creating a home, at both an individual and societal level in segregated circumstances, but also to look at the common ground which connects us. Although Tiszavasvári is geographically far from both the real and imagined homes of my childhood, the stories I first heard here in the summer of 2021 were recognisably familiar to me. I saw in them parallels to the traits of my own multi-generational past and the connections that shaped the lives of my grandparents and parents. It is in these similarities, I believe, that we can help to shape a better common future.

References

Noddings, Nel. 2006. Critical lessons: what our schools should teach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.