Where is home?

Swiss expatriates held their annual meeting in Fribourg swissinfo.ch

I am in the back of a taxi in New York with my Japanese friend, Chiaki. We chat casually with the Pakistani cab driver from Islamabad.

He asks me that loaded question I find increasingly difficult to answer: “Where are you from?”

After a few glasses of Sake, I take a more original approach:

“Well I was born in Yorkshire. My parents are Swiss. I’m now at home in Spain. My heart beats to the rhythm of a Brazilian drum and in a previous life I was probably Chinese.”

My Japanese friend sniggers and we head out into the night to meet other equally confused cosmopolitan city dwellers. This is the future of a new world which is becoming increasingly jumbled in terms of nationality, identity and race.

Our planet has never been more culturally mixed or accepting of the other. At the same time there have never been more territorial disputes or regional separatist movements.

Heimat

What is home, homeland, motherland or ‘Heimat’, to use the German word with its emotional connotations? According to the Wikipedia definition, a ‘homeland’ (or native land) is the country in which a particular national identity began and to which an ethnic group holds a long history and deep cultural association. The term motherland refers to the country in which you are born and grow up.

I had an early sense of awareness that home, motherland or ‘Heimat’ was a complex matter. My place of birth was Horsforth, Leeds and it is where I spent my first 15 years; the formative years so to speak. But as a child of Swiss parents growing up in the North of England I was always the ‘foreigner’. I felt as a child that Yorkshire wasn’t my homeland because when my family spoke of ‘home’ they didn’t mean the rolling, windy moors they meant the dramatic alpine landscape of Switzerland.

According to the above definitions, I could call England my motherland and Switzerland my homeland. This doesn’t solve the problem of where ‘home’ is. Nor does it answer my questions about where home could be – for my nomadic existence led me to travel the world in search of it.

Home offers a sense of belonging. A host country can provide this just as much as the country of origin. My sense of belonging as a child was always divided. We would spend the long summer holidays in Basel but these trips confirmed I wasn’t 100% Swiss because I had other influences – the Anglo Saxon ones – that formed my sense of identity and made me belong partly elsewhere.

Similarly in the UK, I was never 100% British because of my Swiss heritage and identity. When you live between two cultures there is always something you miss. However, this ‘belonging to various places’ has persisted throughout my adult years and it has in effect made me very adaptable, flexible and able to fit in quickly in a new place.

Mother tongue

If creating a home is directly linked to identity formation then the role of language is also important in finding a place to belong. I was aware of my linguistic out-group status because quite simply as a small child I didn’t speak the language of the other kids.

My mother tongue was Swiss German and this ‘otherness’ set me apart from my fellow playmates. However children learn fast and I soon picked up the local lingo until I spoke it better than my parents – a phenomenon very common amongst the children of immigrants seeking to establish themselves as locals. Nevertheless, possessing perfect English did not eradicate the ascribed association with foreignness.

During trips to the local town, Bradford, with my mother I was often ashamed of her strong Swiss accent. It always prompted the question:”Where are you from, love?” from curious shop assistants.

My mother’s strong accent made me feel foreign and different from the others and I did not want to feel foreign or different. So I would answer for her, anticipating her response in an effort to silence her.

Her initial lack of knowledge of the English language led to some other misunderstandings. For example my first day at the local Church of England primary school at age four and a half resulted in a trip to the headmaster’s office and being sent home before class had finished. A naïve mistake; my liberal minded Swiss mother had read the uniform instructions (albeit badly due to her basic grasp of English), understood the navy blue concept and decided to sew some smart navy blue trousers. But in early 1970s Britain not even little boys wore trousers. It was shorts for the boys (even in the chilly Yorkshire winter) and knee-length skirts for the little girls.

My rebel status was soon ironed out and by second year I was already a popular source of entertainment. I would bring into class my Swiss children’s books – ones like ‘Joggeli goht goh Birre schüttle’ (Jacob goes to shake the pear trees) – stand at the front of class, showing the pictures and translating the text; at least as far as my reading skills allowed. These story-telling sessions lasted well into Middle School and you could say they were the early signs of my later becoming a writer and journalist.

Scent of home

I do have fond memories of a rural, idyllic childhood and the rugged, windy moors and it still fills my heart with pangs of ‘homesickness’ when I see a photograph or hear an accent from northern England. But you could say my identity is very much that of an ‘Auslandschweizerin’ – a Swiss abroad.

Despite living in Switzerland for a total of 13 years, I have lived abroad for most of my life and will probably continue to do so. Every time I land on Swiss soil, I smell the scent of a ‘home’ that is familiar and comforting. I don’t know whether it’s my character or has to do with growing up straddling different worlds but I am rather restless and nomadic.

Since age 20 I have moved house and country over 20 times – that’s about once a year. I have lived in South America, Asia and in various European countries. I now reside seasonally in Spain – between Ibiza with its eclectic mix of 85 different nationalities – and Asia in the winter.

Next generation

The subject of home could be even more complex for our new-born son. As I write this text – between breast-feeding and singing lullabies (in Sanskrit) – I look over to see him sleeping peacefully in his crib.

As a three week old citizen of planet earth he is still oblivious to the world’s politics with its borders, nationalities (some more desirable than others) and religious disputes. Thanks to his parents, he has by birthright three nationalities: Swiss, Spanish and British.

When he was only five days old we issued his first passport. His father speaks to him in Spanish, I speak to him in Swiss German and together we aim to speak English.

So our little Santiago is already a multilingual global citizen with various homes or at least quite nice places to spend his holidays.

Claudia Spahr

Claudia Spahr was born in Yorkshire to Swiss parents and educated at Bradford Girls’ Grammar School. When she was 15, her family moved back to Switzerland where she passed her Baccalaureate in German.

She began her studies at Bern University and then moved back to Britain, where she completed a BA in Writing and Publishing with Film and Literary Studies.

She worked for the BBC German Service, Swiss Radio International (now swissinfo) and Swiss public television, later as a foreign correspondent in London.

For the past four years she has been working as a freelancer for various publications, writing a novel and works of non-fiction.

Her nomadic tendencies led her to Cambodia, New York and Brazil. She now lives mainly in Ibiza and Goa, India with her Spanish partner.

She is bilingual in English and German and fluent in French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.