Where is your querencia?

I recently read We Are Displaced by Malala Yousafzai. It shares a short version of Malala’s story and stories from a collection of refugee girls from around the world. It is one of the most impactful books I’ve read, and I’ve recommended it a lot since I read it back in May. The stories themselves are extremely powerful and each of them expanded my perception of the world in a way that I’m very grateful for, and yet it wasn’t until earlier today that I understood why the book resonated within me so strongly.

I’m on vacation with my family visiting Southern California where my wife and I are from, but before we could get inland to our hometown we had a lovely stop in Santa Barbara. It was a great chance to just relax, spend some time at the beach as a family, watch the Euro Cup, write, and visit with a friend, but one surprising find came at a local used bookstore with $2.00 books. I randomly picked up a writing book called Writing Toward Home: Tales and Lessons to Find Your Way, where I came across the word “Querencia.” The book shares that ”In Spanish, querencia describes a place where one feels safe, a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn, a place where one feels at home.” At the end of describing the word more thoroughly, the book presents a writing prompt to “Write about where you feel most at home, where your querencia is.”

I began writing, but as I wrote I realized I had more of a personal connection to We Are Displaced than I had previously acknowledged. I’ve never been forced to leave home because of bombs being dropped on my home and school or had mercenaries tracking me down in the trees that surrounded my village—unmistakable losses for all to see and understand—but I have had parallel ambiguous loss nonetheless. Whether it was my uncle being shot and killed steps outside the first home I remember, feeling like an other in the hometown where I was raised, or (really going back even further) my parents leaving the Caribbean to immigrate to America, these moments hold some loss that in one way or another left me feeling displaced and more recently disjoined from my ancestral home & culture.

With these ambiguous losses, I’ve spent large portions of my life looking for my querencia—a place I feel safe and at home. I wish I could say that search is over as I’ve started feeling at home in Brooklyn, finding my voice, and seeing a connection to home that is not a physical place or reliance on others, but in earnest, I’ve felt at home before and have had that feeling disappear before. It has been a series of peaks and valleys, and though I can say I’m at another peak where I feel at home, I can’t help but ask the question—is part of the human experience just a reoccurring search for home?