Home is...
by Tigris
Published: 03/04/2024
Last Updated: 14/04/2024
Lately I've been thinking a lot about what the concept of home means to me in the otherkin sense. I've been thinking about this in terms of my life as Raiden, mostly, so I will focus on that here. In the future I might add on some paragraphs touching on Vergil and my therianthropy, but frankly I don't really see a reason to force anything to bulk up the essay right now.
In particular, I've been thinking of Liberia. I was born in Monrovia and I lived around the north of Liberia for the first twelve years of my life. Quite a number of those years clashed with the civil wars and political instability that ravaged the nation from the latter half of the eighties to the beginnings of the milennium. It, of course, affected me directly. My family were executed early into the conflict and I spent time in a Small Boy Unit as a soldier, up until the 1995 ceasefire. Then, I was relocated to the US by an NGO, where I lived out the next fifteen or so years being moved around several different states.
I never truly thought of the US as home. Despite being 'technically inconspicuous' (my parents were likely white Americans and my mother tongue was English), I was a stranger in an extremely unfamiliar, overwhelming, land that I didn't have much of a choice to be in. The people raising me often seemed to forget that. The organisation gave me an education, an adoptive family, and psychological counselling, they also guaranteed me American citizenship, but I had to put work into assimilating into this new society: I had to train myself to speak differently - as a child I had both a Liberian accent and was much more comfortable using Liberian English - to fit in, I had to familiarise myself with White American culture, I had to forgo the food and customs I grew up with and try and embrace ones that felt alien, all while being battered with fragments of my repressed memories of the horrors of the civil war. What this did was instil a deep feeling of being a permanent outsider, more actor than person. It's funny: at the time in Liberia everyone was aware of the nation's entwined history with the US and many Americo-Liberians thought of themselves as honorary Americans: part of an extra undisclosed state. We felt more important and closer with the US than any other 'foreign' country. In America, I quickly learned that not many people could point to Liberia on a map, were largely ignorant of the hardships that enveloped my life for the last six years, and my entire self was starkly different from them in a way that they would detest. That's one of the reasons I never felt I was American. Living there felt more like it was stripping my soul from me until I was nothing, and I always felt uncomfortable and distant among others, since nobody could truly understand what I was going through. There was very little shared experience to be had.
I didn't particularly think of Liberia as home, either. Liberia to me - in adulthood, at least - was overtaken by very poor associations. It was the hot sun speeding up the decomposition of scavenger-eaten bodies in the streets; it was the nights sleeping in the humid rainforests where I listened to distant shelling and was bitten by untold numbers of mosquitoes; it was me walking the dirt roads between villages with my rifle hitting against my back, pulling at my oversized shirt that was already soaked in sweat like a second skin despite the early hour; it was the horrific withdrawals in my temporary hotel room after years of consuming brown-brown (a drug commonly given to West African child soldiers, made up of cocaine/amphetamine and smokeless gunpowder) laced meals, and it was the backdrop my regular nightmares played out on. I wasn't angry that I'd been taken out of the country and I don't think I ever truly missed it. My memories were too painful, too raw, to miss it. It would have been worse if I had stayed anyhow: things were about to tip into more periods of conflict where I may have had to fight again, and the assistance people received within the country was often rushed, inadequate, and riddled with corruption even if the charities tried their best to reach everyone. I was privileged to be rehabilitated in the US. Otherwise, I would have lived in poverty in the slums where most of the former child soldiers ended up, struggled with unmanaged PTSD and drug addiction, and likely remained illiterate, and that's if I didn't commit suicide.
For a large portion of my life I didn't believe I had a home. I felt nothing for any nation I lived in, I didn't feel patriotic, and I didn't feel nostalgic. Being in the military made my existence in places very transient. I had no living relatives that I knew of and few friends. What I accepted as a home came much later. In my thirties, I emigrated to New Zealand with my wife and son to give them a less dangerous, more out of sight, life. I had a few years where my inhuman form meant I struggled to find non-military work, so during those years I spent a lot of time raising my son and trying to make a home for us all. Something that I had never done before. That was the first time I belonged somewhere. That's what made me happy. It was less the location (although it was a very nice place to live) and more the people I was with; I really cherished living alongside them and seeing them smile. So as cheesy as saying that is, my 'true' home was my family. As far as my memories have gone, that never changed. Another location I would place some sentimental value to was the two years I spent in New York City. At the time, I didn't really think much of it, and again it had negative associations, but nowadays I view it relatively positively. Or at least, I feel a familiarity with it. I joke that if I were dropped into the city in this life my 'instincts' would kick in and I could survive there over anywhere else.
If you asked me about it now, I'd have a different answer. Those things about my childhood still bother me, and I still find great comfort in my family, of course, but I've discovered that distance from the former along with an interest in learning about my past in an objective manner has given me the ability to look at things so much differently. Less clouded by apprehension. It's why I can even write about this somewhat comfortably in the first place.
Nowadays, I hold a strong interest in and respect for Liberia. I've taken time to read books on the country, its culture, its history, and of course the civil wars. I've read the personal accounts of former child soldiers in a variety of African conflicts, including Liberia; I've sought out information on the political and economic contexts that started the civil wars and how things have changed in the modern day, and I've read archived news articles written during the war. I've written out my own memories of things in the fictionkind context in a private document, rather than resigning to keeping it all locked up in my head. Liberia is actually the only foreign country I regularly dream about - these dreams tend to be neutral or positive, nightmares happening extremely rarely, for a change. When I think of that period of my life now, now that I've put this work in, I feel less repulsion, less fear, and more... just sad. Sad at circumstance. I wonder sometimes, if things had been different, if I could have grown up in Liberia happily. If I could live in Monrovia my whole life with my parents, among the people I belonged with, start my own family there, and never have to see war firsthand as a child. Within the context of my fictionkinity, I do actually think of myself as Liberian. Something that I never fully got around to accepting then. I mourn the loss of childhood and my removal from the country, as essentially I had my home and my culture robbed from me completely for reasons I could neither control nor escape. Back then, I would have never handled returning to visit Liberia as an adult well, or even reconnecting at a distance, but I wish I did get that chance.
Early Metal Gear Solid games included heavy references to real contemporary locations and conflicts before it began to speak of them much more vaguely. This is why my own backstory is so closely linked with Liberia's history instead of something indistinct. My fictional past involving non-fictional places and events is both a blessing and a curse, really. I have found it easy to uncover details through reading of the real happenings, or other fictionalised versions based on them (Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala is a beautifully written novel about a child soldier in a fictional West African civil war, something that has been very creatively inspiring for my own personal writings. There's also a decent movie adaption). I have been able to look at photographs, explore Liberian music, access books on a variety of relevant topics, watch documentaries, try traditional West African food, research Liberian wildlife, listen to local radio and read local newspapers. I have begun to draw significant events in my memory and I have accurate references to do so, and I use what I learn to better understand my in-universe version of Liberia alongside the real location. Not many fictionfolk are afforded such rich resources on events of their life as that.
Then, on the other hand, I've battled a great deal of shame around it. If I grew up in a nondescript country with a completely fictional civil war that involved child soldiers, or even if I fought in a historical war with few currently-living veterans, I may not have felt so strange about expressing these things. But I've read the experiences of real, tangible, child soldiers who fought in this very conflict. Their suffering is current. Many of them are still alive today. They have had their lives turned upside down, lost their families and friends, been forced to commit horrific acts, and they pay for it still. So who am I to talk about experiencing the same thing, to feel a connection with the same period of their lives, to their nation, even through fiction? I, in reality, have never visited Liberia, never been a child soldier, I have had a peaceful childhood in a relatively rich country and never even seen a firearm in person. Both the trauma and the homesickness I experience is within the lens of a fictional character and, comparatively, less real - perhaps even laughable. I have never claimed otherwise, I will never claim I suffer the same way, and I will never claim myself to be Liberian nor an expert on these topics in the historical source sense, and yet I still feel weird about it. It feels like a form of stolen valour... though valour is a pretty inappropriate descriptor.
A lot of fictionfolk hail from heavily fictional universes, ones with worlds and/or timelines very different to ours. So I wonder how many are similar to me: coming from a fictional universe that in its history is very similar to our own, especially when it comes to specific, recent, events such as wars. I wonder how many people understand the complex feelings coming from being personally affected by those in that life which still crops up in their current one. There exists a term called a hearthome: a location that you do not live in yet feel a strong connection to as if you should, similar to a hearttype. Many alterhumans with a hearthome describe existing biomes or they describe completely fictional lands. The more I think of it, the more I realise I have similar feelings for Liberia. Yet it feels somewhat wrong for me to say so. I feel as if there's extra weight on narrowing these things down to a real country, especially an unexpected one, that makes it 'cringe' or even downright offensive. Too much space to be misconstrued when real people can see you speak of it in such a way. I have never actually seen another person with a hearthome of an existing country, also. Though, out of all of my lives as kintypes and everywhere I have visited or inhabited within them, Liberia is the one that left the strongest impression on my heart. It shall remain so, in a better light this time around.