People favor close relatives over others: offspring over extended family, and extended family over people outside the family. Universal Love demands another approach. Families have a sense of kinship that no four strangers would ever have as a team. [attributed to Bradley Walsh] Enslaved people worked hard to preserve family ties and maintain kinship networks. They married, even as the…
Read More
Value for Wednesday of Week 41 in the season of Assessing
Returning Home – Reuniting – Reconciling – Reclaiming
Coming home gives us a chance to take another look at people and places we once saw through different eyes.
- If you go back to your home town or you’re reunited with school friends, its always slightly bittersweet because as much as there’s nice things in terms of seeing them again, the town has changed without you, and you’re no longer a part of it. [attributed to Edgar Wright]
“Homecoming is about coming home and feeling loved again (if not for the first time).” It allows us to reconnect with and thereby re-evaluate our past.
However, homecoming after a forced absence, such as military service, may not be sunny. “Reunion with family often is idealized as a quick, smooth return to ‘normalcy.’ The reality may fall short of that ideal.” Homecoming after incarceration can also be challenging.
Real
True Narratives
Poet Maya Angelou was molested as a child. After she told a relative what had happened, the perpetrator was beaten to death. Blaming herself for the man’s death, Angelou refused to speak for several years. Yet this woman, who chose a prolonged silence, become one of our greatest writers, reclaiming her voice and in a sense her soul. To date she has authored seven autobiographies.
- Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).
- Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name (1974).
- Maya Angelou, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976).
- Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman (1981).
- Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986).
- Maya Angelou, A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002).
- Maya Angelou, Mom & Me & Mom (Random House, 2013).
Works by other authors:
- Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me To Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (The University of North Carolina Press, 2012): a “revelation of the bonds forged by the collective grief and resilient love of a people finding themselves.”
- Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Small Fry: A Memoir (Grove Press , 2018): Steve Jobs’ daughter forgives him for loutish behavior and mistreatment.
- Noé Álvarez, Spirit Run: A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land (Catapult, 2020): “By the run’s end, he is eager to go home, to see his parents, to rest and restart his life. The run, it seems, has absolved him of his need to flee.”
- Edward Hoagland, Sex and the River Styx (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011): “Hoagland . . . describes growing up in Connecticut and the ‘concentrated happiness of listening by a lake to the lap and hiss of rustling water’”.
- Morgan Jerkins, Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots (Harper/HarperCollins, 2020): “Morgan Jerkins Heads Down South in Search of Her Black Identity”.
- Alex Halberstadt, Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning (Random House, 2020): “Writing a Family Memoir When Your Grandfather Was Stalin’s Bodyguard”.
- Ashley C. Ford, Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir (Flatiron, 2021): “ Ford powerfully captures the complicated mix of meanness, frustration and obsessive mothering familiar to so many Black daughters”.
- Kiese Laymon, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays (Scribner, 2020): “Kiese Laymon Revisits Some Early Essays, and Reclaims His Voice”.
- Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (Ecco Press, 2022): “. . . the South is America, and its history and influence cannot be dismissed as an embarrassing relative at the nation’s holiday dinner table.” (National Book Award Prize winner, 2022)
- Casey Parks, Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery (Knopf, 2022): “. . . her mother kept on crying. That is, until her mother, Parks’s grandmother, barged into the bathroom where this tearful exchange was taking place and admonished her daughter: 'Some people eat hot dogs, and some people eat fish.' The message was: Get over it.”
- Yunte Huang, Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous With American History (Liveright, 2023) “is intended as a form of reclamation and subversion.”
- Rosalind Lauer, An Amish Homecoming (Joyful River) (Thorndike Press, 2022): “Author Rosalind Lauer weaves a patchwork quilt of life and love in the Pennsylvania Amish community of Joyful River, where new beginnings and old ways meet with faith, hope, and compassion . . .”
Technical and Analytical Readings
- Thema Bryant, Homecoming: Overcome Fear and Trauma to Reclaim Your Whole, Authentic Self (TarcherPerigree, 2022): “There comes a time in our lives when we must silence the lies of unworthiness and unpack the traumas that have disconnected us from the truth of who we are.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh, Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child (Parallax Press, 2010).
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
- Fighter: two concertration camp survivors return to Europe together
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Novels and stories:
- Kate Walbert, His Favorites: A Novel (Scribner, 2018): “. . . ‘His Favorites’ isn’t a simple narrative of trauma and survival, but something more challenging, and potentially more valuable — a reckoning not just with the reality of abuse, but with the pernicious ways it can shape and inform everything, even the stories you tell yourself.”
- Leif Enger, Virgil Wander: A Novel (Grove Atlantic, 2018) “What a wondrous miracle, to wake up, memory muddled, slightly unmoored, with just the task of relearning yourself, your friends, your hometown nestled along the ruggedly beautiful shores of Lake Superior.”
- Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels: A Novel (Little, Brown & Company, 2018): “ . . . there is much to appreciate in Urrea’s highly entertaining story of Big Angel, the de La Cruz family’s patriarch, who buries his mother even as he himself is dying and as his family gathers to celebrate his 70th, and last, birthday.”
- Beck Dorey-Stein, Rock the Boat: A Novel (The Dial Press, 2021): “A Humbled Millennial Goes Home to New Jersey to Find Herself”.
- Safia Elhillo, Home Is Not a Country: A Novel-in-verse (Make Me a World, 2021) “felt like a love letter to anyone who has ever been an outsider, or searched to understand their history, no matter where they come from.”
- Violaine Huisman, The Book of Mother: A Novel (Scribner, 2021): “Violaine Huisman’s mission is to return her mother to earth, 'become the narrator of her story in order to give her back her humanity.' To do so is to confront the fog of legend that obscured her mother in life and plagues the daughter still, long after her mother’s death.”
- Sasa Stanisic, Where You Come From: A Novel (Tin House Books, 2021): “. . . a wry, inventive and ultimately devastating attempt to recover a personal history that war has put forever out of reach”.
- Vigdis Hjorth, Is Mother Dead? A Novel (Verso Fiction, 2022), “features a middle-aged painter desperate to reconcile with the parent from whom she has long been estranged.”
- Jennifer Maritza McCauley, When Trying to Return Home: Stories (Counterpoint, 2023): “Drawing on her own Puerto Rican and Black American identity, McCauley introduces a diverse cast of characters who collectively struggle with a desperate need to belong, both to the world around them and to one another.”
- Adam Haslett, Mothers and Sons: A Novel (Little, Brown and Company, 2025), is about a woman and her estranged adult son. “. . . the novel is really about the ways that our self-explanations — so often self-justifications — fail to encompass our lives. How misleading they can be, and confining. How they can distance and divide us, as much as provide common ground.”
Poetry
I won the prize essay at school
Here in the village,
And published a novel before I was twenty-five.
I went to the city for themes and to enrich my art;
There married the banker’s daughter,
And later became president of the bank—
Always looking forward to some leisure
To write an epic novel of the war.
Meanwhile friend of the great, and lover of letters,
And host to Matthew Arnold and to Emerson.
An after dinner speaker, writing essays
For local clubs. At last brought here—
My boyhood home, you know—
Not even a little tablet in Chicago
To keep my name alive.
How great it is to write the single line:
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll!”
[Edgar Lee Masters, “John Horace Burleson”]
Books of poetry:
- Maya Angelou, The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (Random House, 1994).
From the dark side:
- Edgar Lee Masters, “Henry Layton”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Antonin Dvořák, Symphony No. 8 in G Major, Op. 88, B. 163 (1889) (approx. 33-37’) (list of recorded performances): “After the crisis of the mid-1880s, represented above all by the sombre Seventh Symphony and the Piano Trio in F minor, the period during which Dvorak produced his Eighth Symphony was now a time of equilibrium, when the composer sought the answers to fundamental issues of human existence. The work was written during the summer and early autumn of 1889, mainly at his summer residence in Vysoka. This environment, in which Dvorak was most at ease, seemed to be reflected in the overall atmosphere of his new symphony. Here he created a work filled with the joys of life and his admiration for natural beauty and, once again, the piece reveals the composer’s fondness for Czech and Slavonic folk music.” The central idea, expressed as “bucolic euphoria”, seems to be that the composer has returned home spiritually. Top recorded performances are conducted by Talich in 1935, Walter in 1948; Doráti in 1959, Munch in 1961, Kertész in 1963, Karajan in 1965; Kubelik in 1966, Rowicki in 1969, Ančerl in 1970, Abbado in 1995, Harnoncourt in 1998, Colin Davis in 1999 (mvt 1; mvt 2; mvt 3; mvt 4), Mackerras in 2009, and Bychkov in 2024.
Dvořák, Slavonic Dances, Op. 46 (1878) (approx. 34’) (list of recorded performances) & Op. 72 (1886) (approx. 31’) (list of recorded performances): “These sublime Bohemian miniatures were published in two sets (Op. 46 and 72) in 1878 and 1886. In a letter to Brahms, the Berlin-based publisher Fritz Simrock was enchanted by the ‘strange folk-like quality, national poetic sensibility and sensual attraction” of Dvořák’s newly published Moravian Duets. On March 6, 1878, Simrock wrote to the composer asking for “Bohemian and Moravian dances for piano four-hands.’ This kind of salon music, played by amateurs at home, was the nineteenth century equivalent of a chart-topping pop song. The initial collection of eight dances was so successful that Simrock threatened to cancel publication of Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony unless the composer wrote a second set.” Top recordings of both sets are conducted by Talich in 1935 (Op. 46; Op. 72), Talich in 1939, Szell in 1962-1965, Kubelik in 1974, Mackerras in 2010, Bělohlávek in 2016, and Rattle in 2025.
You return home after a long absence. Your family and friends cannot fully understand what you have learned, and you can no longer see them in quite the same way as before. Try as you might, the details of your time away cannot be fully conveyed. Only you, who have known your experiences firsthand, can see them in all their depth. So it is with Arthur Schoonderwoerd’s recordings of Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano concerti. He plays on a fortepiano of Beethoven’s time, accompanied by a small orchestra that sounds like a chamber ensemble. Since Beethoven composed these works, great performers and conductors have brought new techniques to their performance, adding richness and detail but changing the music from what Beethoven’s audiences heard. Perhaps Beethoven would not have liked this evolution, or perhaps he would have been ecstatic that his music could now more fully express what he had intended. The return to roots Schoonderwoerd has provided to us adds a dimension to the understanding and appreciation of these works, and as in life the return to our evolved life is more meaningful for it.
- Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Op. 15 (1795, rev. 1800);
- Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 19 (1789);
- Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37 (1803);
- Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58 (1806);
- Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73 (1809);
- Piano Concerto “No. 6” in D Major, Op. 61a (1807) – this is the violin concerto, performed on fortepiano.
Gordon Jacob’s chamber music with recorder displays an instrument that has fallen out of favor returning in chamber ensemble in the 20th century; nothing fits as it did long ago.
- Suite for recorder and string quartet (1957) (approx. 19’)
- Sonatina for treble recorder and harpsichord (1985) (approx. 10’)
- A Consort of Recorders (1972) (approx. 11’)
- Variations for treble recorder and piano (1962) (approx. 13’)
- Trifles, for treble recorder, violin, cello and harpsichord (1971) (approx. 9’)
Other compositions:
- Henryk Górecki, Szeroka Woda (Broad Waters), Op. 39 (1972) (approx. 15-16’): the title piece is especially exquisite.
- James Willey, String Quartet No. 8 (2009) (approx. 24’): the quartet employs folk themes from Poland and China throughout. This work concludes with as resolved a conclusion as can be found in modern chamber music.
- Of his Symphony No. 5, Africa: A Tone Poem (2014) (approx. 47’), composer Hayden Wayne writes: “. . . Jazz subsequently begot Rhythm and Blues which begot Rock ‘n’ Roll. These folk idioms are so deeply entrenched in my psyche, that I was moved to write my symphonic trilogy: #2 REGGAE, #3 HEAVY METAL and #4 FUNK. This led me finally to my roots . . . AFRICA.”
- Frederick Delius, Brigg Fair (1907) (approx. 16’) (list of recorded performances)
- Vagn Holmboe, Viola Concerto, M357, Op. 189 (1992) (approx. 21’): we hear the composer returning to his youthful home in the Balkans
- Mozart Camargo Guarnieri, Piano Concerto No. 6 (1987) (approx. 12’): the composer returns to previous styles of composition in this “personal summation, a tribute to his own creative life” (James Melo, from the notes to this album).
- Lukas Foss, Symphony No. 4, "Window to the Past" (1995) (approx. 36-42’)
- Fred Frith, String Quartet No. 1, “Lelekovice” (1990) (approx. 28’) (Lelekovice is a Czechoslovakian municipality)
- Leo Fall, Der fidele Bauer (The Merry Farmer) (1907) (approx. 86-110’): the son of an Austrian peasant disrespects his father after becoming a professor through the father’s hard work and sacrifice, but later learns to appreciate him. “The complex plot essentially concerns an Austrian peasant who ensures that his son has a good education only to find him ashamed of his father’s status when he becomes a Professor. In the final Act they are reconciled.”
- Andy Akiho, LIgNEouS – suite for marimba and string quartet (2016) (approx. 35-36’). Akiho explains: “'LIgNEouS' means, 'made, consisting of, or resembling wood.' This title was chosen because the marimba, violin, viola, and cello are all primarily made of wood. Also, the marimbist is often required to play with dowel rod bundles (rutes) and mallet shafts, without typical yarn mallet heads, in order to enhance the extremely wooden sounds and to articulate the highest overtones of the marimba. I also wanted to use industrial timbres in addition to the melodic marimba bars, accomplished through glissandos and strikes to the metallic resonators.” The work explores how the different applications of wood interact.
- Dmitri Klebanov, String Quartet No. 4 (1946) (approx. 17’)
- Ross Edwards, Symphony No. 2, “Earth Spirit Songs” (1997) (approx. 21-22’): Edwards explains this symphony’s genesis, arising out of “. . . the inevitable split, for a non-indigenous Australian, between cultural origins and birthplace. I can recognise now that it is finished, that this symphony represents, in part, an attempt to reconcile these opposites as well as the ones implicit in the subtitle.”
- George Enescu, Impressions d’enfance, Op. 28 (1940) (approx. 21-22’) (recordings) “takes us back to the very first occasion when three year old George heard a street fiddler for the very first time. Impressions is an evocation of a childhood through a sequence of dreams, memories, imperceptible sensations and sounds.”
- Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Piano Quintet No. 2, "Memories of the Tuscan Countryside", Op. 155 (1951) (approx. 36-37’) exudes gentle joyfulness, performing the only return available to a man who would never again set foot on the ground he was remembering. The music is not nostalgia and not protest but a particular act: a journey back to a specific landscape, made through the door of art when every other door had been closed, reclaiming in sound what exile could not erase.
Albums:
- Will Ackerman, “Returning” (2004) (53’) is a gorgeous compilation disc of music for solo guitar, broadly classified as New Age, though it avoids most of the formulaic conventions of that genre.
- Jakob Bro, “Returnings” (2018) (42’): “Most of this album has an acoustic, organic sound, but the title track is an exception. Here, Bro and brethren take a darker, electronic tack; it’s an unusual addition to the program, but it works. As a whole, this is a recording to be savored during life’s quieter moments.”
- Stephan Crump & Rosetta Trio, “Reclamation” (2010) (48’): “Vignettes in music are not all that uncommon—or unusual, for that matter. But when they are only partially written—or mostly suggested—by the composer, to be largely interpreted and improvised with singular flights of the imagination then they are not simply uncommon, but beautifully unique. Moreover, if the performers form a string trio where a myriad of perspectives collide, swinging madly as they careen in and out of a moving timeline, then they become more alluring. And finally, if the music tumbles down in virtuoso ways as it of explores that confluence of instrument, music, musician and ideas—as bassist, Stephan Crump's Rosetta Trio does on Reclamation—then a whole new cultural ethos begins to emerge; the music is, then, quite priceless.”
- William Goldstein, “A Long Way Home” soundtrack (2019) (32’)
- Carn Davidson 9, “The History of Us” (2021) (53’): “Comprising of two suites of music (one by Carn and one by Davidson), this album is a meditation on family, loss and migration.”
- Return Trip, “Spanish Roots” (2021) (38’): Spanish folk and flamenco music
- Geoff Eales Trio, “The Homecoming” (2005) (66’)
- Pee Wee Russell & Coleman Hawkins, “Jazz Reunion” (1960) (46’)
- Matthew Shipp, “Piano Vortex” (2007) (53’): “Shipp revisits his roots on Piano Vortex by eschewing electronics and post-production wizardry in favor of the traditional acoustic piano trio format.”
- Yungchen Lhamo, “Coming Home” (1998) (52’): “She sings traditional Tibetan folk songs that she learned from her family and original compositions -- mostly a cappella.” Lhamo says: “When I grew up I knew nothing of freedom. I lived in poverty and was denied the rights most people take for granted. This is the ordeal Tibetans are subjected to, then and now. Since I escaped, by foot over the Himalayas like so many other Tibetans, I have been able to find freedom in the West. Working on this album, being able to experiment using my Tibetan voice with Western sounds, is an expression of that freedom —a freedom to work and express myself that I never knew in Tibet.”
- Maya Youssef, “Finding Home” (2022) (62’) is “. . . a journey through memories and the essence of home both within and without . . .”; “Syrian Dreams” (2017) (50’) “was inspired by Maya Youssef’s reactions to seeing her homeland ravaged by war in 2011.”
- Gavin Marwick, “Quarterdays” (2023) (27’) “is a project by much-travelled Edinburgh fiddler Gavin Marwick to celebrate, in four seasonally-released EPs, the old Scots quarter days of Candlemas, Whitsun, Lammas and Martinmas, all of them beloved of folk-balladeers and researchers past and present. . . All the tunes are newly penned by Gavin to illustrate the history and lore of the season, and all are firmly anchored in the traditional styles of jigs, reels and airs with clever variations by both musicians.”
- Fiachra O’Regan, “Na Beanna Beola” (2023) (56’): Irish jigs and reels on uillean pipes
- The Gloaming, “The Gloaming” (2014) (60’) is an album of traditional Irish jigs, reels and folk songs in a modern style.
- Cara Dillon, “Coming Home” (2024) (42’): “She balances passion and sincerity with every song she handles, whether traditional or original songs she leaves you with lasting memories.”
- Katherine Priddy, “The Pendulum Swing” (2024) (44’): “. . . its title referenc(es) the urge to leave and change, and the opposing pull to return to the familiar.”
- Akhtamar Quartet, “Origins” (2025) (54’) couples Antonin Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 13 (1895) with Jelena Dabić’s Anzhamanak (2024) (approx. 17’). Dvořák’s quartet weaves folk influences into “impulses (that) are richly folded into music that speaks primarily in an exquisite rhetoric of the Romantically charged but essentially Classical, European string quartet.” Dabić’s work “draws on Armenian legend and Balkan rhythm to explore an abstract idea of home . . .” As a whole, the album “feels like a single well-argued story about roots.”
- Parisa Karimi Molan & Tehrani Drom, "Unveiled" (2026) (44') centers on Molan’s East Azerbaijani roots and a feminine perspective within Iranian traditions; she restores a connection to her ancestral lineage.
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Simon & Garfunkel, “Homeward Bound” (lyrics)
- Nawang Khechog, “A Sad Return to My Birthplace”
- Yungchen Lhamo, “Coming Home”
- Franz Schubert (composer), “Rückweg” (The Way Back), D. 476 (1816) (lyrics)
Visual Arts
- Norman Rockwell, Thanksgiving: Mother and Son Peeling Potatoes (1945)
- Giorgio de Chirico, Happiness of Returning (1915)
- Frédéric Bazille, Family Reunion (1867)
Film and Stage
- The Celebration, a deliberately ironic title for this family gathering
- The Secret of Roan Inish: on connecting with family through its folklore
