Why did I automatically agree with the American author Thomas Wolfe, who was from North Carolina, when I read the title of his classic book, You Can’t Go Home Again?  Being African-American and having grown up in Savannah, Georgia, it might have made more sense to take my biographical and literary clues from Zora Neale Hurston’s memoir, Dust Tracks On A Road, or Langston Hughes’ I Wonder As I Wander.

What would have been even more understandable is if I had known something about the life of fellow Savannah native James Alan McPherson, who in 1978 became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction when he got it for a collection of short stories entitled Elbow Room. But as far as I could tell, once McPherson’s talent and career placed him on the road leading out of his hometown, he was not often inclined to take public paths leading back to it.

Therefore, it was Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again that stuck, and that made me wonder why this might be true , why one could not go home again. Then I became aware of another title by the same author, Look Homeward Angel, not realizing at the time that it had been written before You Can’t Go Home Again. What I did understand was that the notion of “Home” for Wolfe as an author and individual was simultaneously painful, healing, damning, and inspiring. How could I not, after learning the first book had actually been published eleven years before the second, how could I not wonder what had happened between the bright promise of Look Homeward Angel, and Wolfe’s later dim realization that You Can’t Go Home Again?

The thought was a scary one because it forced me to consider what might happen if you reached the conclusion that you could not go home again while also discovering that you had no choice except to go home again. Aside from those that we bring with us while squeezing and squealing our way into the world, the traits and experiences that shape our basic character develop in those places we call home. Those who leave that environment to travel all about the global village and sample its various offerings––whether to their great joy or to their endless regret––often grow into personalities that no longer reflect with detailed precision the place from which they came.

Such an individual need not be considered superior or inferior, only evolved to such a point that he or she takes on the uniqueness of their own being––apart from their native community’s. Sometimes, the price of that uniqueness is unexpectedly high and can cause you to sacrifice many things in order to pay it. That sacrifice may, as Wolfe discovered, take the form of estrangement from what once was home. It might take the form of a marriage, a family, a career, your sanity, or even your life.

(continues with part 2)

by Aberjhani

ELEMENTAL The Power of Illuminated Love