Night time's delirious notes (which don't make much sense and of which I had absolutely forgotten in the morning)

INTRODUCTION: THE CONTEXT

My project focuses on multiculturalism, hybridity, crossing borders, both physically and metaphorically. It is a picture of foreignness of the here and now, a spaceless and timeless shot, an irriverent question: where is home. 

I always found it interesting to ask to the foreigners I met, after making sure they spent a reasonable amount of time far from their "worlds", stupid questions like "in what language do you think?". Thankfully, I never got to the point of asking (though I heard it many times) "in what language do you dream". How would I remember? I remember feelings in my dreams, words do not exist, they only, altogether, give flavor and mood to the dream, but I have no idea in what language I dream. Never did. 

This were the questions that I used to ask. After a while abroad (and here I feel Northern Exposure a lot) I began instead asking "Where is home for you?". I was still in the rejection phase of my re-entry, so I was convinced that for most people, once they go through the path of foreignness and they make it to the end, home became the host country, as if, after months, perhaps years, of struggling to integrate and to make locals acknowledge us as "one of them", the least one could do was to feel at home. It was the mean to an end and it was the ultimate end itself. 

Some more experience abroad deconstructed this first policy I had stuck to and made me see that foreignness is composed by different layers of consciousness. 

One does not necessarily choose between here and there. Between host country and home country. And still, does host country imply that you will always feel like a guest? And does home country mean home? The aim of my paper is to offer an additional insight in the phenomenon of belonging, and try to demonstrate that foreignness builds a spaceless and timeless space which blurs our eternal concepts of home and gives a brand new meaning to belonging. In doing so, it works on one's identity, keeping the core safe and depriving us of some external layers, and once naked, we rebuild ourselves and our identities and we become what we are here, now, today. Because we cannot say who we are if we do not look back at who we were. True, we cannot say who we are, but we can feel what we have become.

I. FOREIGNNESS VS HOME

Stating that there is such a thing as foreignness implies that there is something as a quintessential "foreignness" and "home-y". 

What is home? Why we feel "at home" when at home? Related to this: why being a foreigner is initially a hardship?

*CRAIG STORTI - THE ART OF COMING HOME

II. WHEN HOME DOES NO LONGER EQUATE WITH HOME-COUNTRY

*IN-BETWEENNESS 

*THIRD-SPACE

*COMMUNITY OF-THE-LIKE