In the second half of James Baldwin’s seminal novel Giovanni’s Room, the narrator spots a sailor dressed all in white striding across a boulevard in Paris. He looks at him with a longing he doesn’t quite understand. The sailor reminds him of home, he realises, before making the following observation: “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
Chitra Ramaswamy invokes Baldwin at the start of her new book, Homelands. In it, she explores how a place becomes a home, what makes a family put down roots, and how hatred can tear them out. She does so by deftly interweaving her own life story with that of the 97-year-old Holocaust survivor she befriends, Henry Wuga.
