Fragments of Belonging: Where Is Home?

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Month 4 - The Inspiration Behind The Poem

I’ve recently returned from a trip to Ghana where the question of home came up again in a quiet but powerful way. I travelled from Accra  to Cape Coast and stopped briefly at Biriwa, my ancestral village. Even though I was not born there and have never lived there, I feel I can call it home because I know it to be the home of my ancestors, a place carried through family stories and memory, passed down long before I ever stood there.

The warmth of that brief stop at Biriwa stayed with me throughout the journey. Standing on land my
ancestors once walked stirred a sense of familiarity that is difficult to explain. It reminded me how
places can hold us, even from a distance, and how belonging sometimes comes from knowing where your story began rather than where your life has been lived.

While I was in Ghana, I found myself thinking again about a young Afghan man I met in Whitehaven
during Refugee Week in June 2024. His words have stayed with me ever since and were the spark for
the poem Where Is Home? He spoke so tenderly about the home he had been forced to leave behind.

He described families living closely together and spending warm evenings on the flat roof of their
house, eating, chatting and simply being with one another. He told me how his mother was always the first person you saw when you entered the home, a detail that seemed to hold everything together. And he spoke about the children playing between the quince and apple trees, as if the trees themselves were part of their daily rhythm.
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Listening to him paint such a gentle and idyllic picture of belonging made me wonder what must happen to push someone away from a life like that. What compels a person to leave a place they love so deeply and travel to a country where they might not be welcomed, where they must learn a new language and often take work far below their qualifications simply to survive. It reminded me that migration is not always a choice. Some people move in hope, some in fear, and some because they are forced.

​In the history of places like Cape Coast and Elmina, many were taken from the land of their ancestors and enslaved, carried across seas to live far from everything they knew. That reality, woven into the stones and shoreline of those coastal landscapes, sits heavily beneath the question of home.

Walking through Biriwa and Cape Coast brought those thoughts back into focus. I carried the Afghan
young man’s memory alongside my own experience of reconnecting with ancestral ground. His story of home lived beside the landscapes I was seeing, and I realised that both held something essential about belonging. One was a memory of a place lost, full of love and longing. The other was a place my family came from, a place I recognised instinctively even though I had not lived there myself. Between these two was Whitehaven, the town I chose, the place where this project began, and where I now live and create.

It made me think about how home is rarely a single place. It might be the land you inherit, the land you leave, the land you return to or the land where you build a new version of your life. Sometimes it shifts. Sometimes it lives inside you rather than around you.

Fragments of Belonging is, at its heart, a project about migration and the many reasons people move
from one place to another. In exploring that question, I also find myself asking what home is or was,
and what it truly means to belong. Some people move voluntarily. Others are forced by war or famine.

And many, including those whose stories shape the history of Cape Coast and Elmina, were forced by slavery to leave the land of their ancestors and rebuild their lives in places they never chose. My
upcoming trip to Antigua will help me understand more deeply the lives of those who were taken across the Atlantic, so that their experiences can speak through this project as I continue to explore the shifting idea of home and the stories that shape us.

As this chapter closes, I find myself looking ahead to Month 5 with a sense of curiosity and creative energy. I want to depict this unfolding journey visually, as a painter who has discovered a new devotion to poetry and filmmaking. It feels like the right time to return to what I once learned at art school about imaginative composition and allow the narrative of Fragments of Belonging to move into paint. I am not entirely sure what the outcome will be, and perhaps that uncertainty is part of the process. What I do know is that I will film the making of these pieces, record my thoughts along the way, and invite you to walk with me through the next stage of this journey as the story begins to take visual form.
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Where Is Home?

Where is home? 
Is it the place we’re born 
the land we leave behind 
when tides of hunger, war, or hope 
carry us elsewhere?

Is it the place we rebuild 
where our hands learn new work, 
our tongues learn new sounds, 
and we stitch pieces of ourselves 
into unfamiliar streets? 

Or is it the life we remember 
families living side by side. 
Breaking bread together. 
A mother’s smile 
the first light of morning. 
Children playing 
amongst quince and apple trees.

Or does it live far away, 
in the land of our ancestors, 
whose names are woven into our blood, 
whose stories reach for us across oceans, 
reminding us we belong to more 
than one shore?

Is home given or chosen? 
Or can it be lost and remade? 
Or is it a key we still carry, 
the only memory 
of the door it once opened? 

Copyright © Anne Blankson-Hemans 2025

I would like to end by asking the same question I ask everyone. What does home mean to you?
Please may I ask you to share your thoughts with us in the comments section below. I would love to hear your what you have to say and commenting here helps others find and support this project.