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Home is a makeshift haven, by Saira Khan, explores contested notions of home and belonging

Posted on May 3, 2023
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FIFSW students often produce creative work, including drawings, paintings, collage, video projects and more, as part of course work or co-curricular initiatives. These art-based projects offer an alternative way to explore, understand, and communicate knowledge, ideas and experiences — as well as inspire action and foster a sense of community. To view more student art, click here.

Home is a makeshift haven  

By Saira Shafiq Khan
@another_aesthete

In the Summer 2022 Semester Saira Khan, Ijaabo Mohamed, Natalia Munive and Bilqees Mohamed created ‘Home is Not a Place – Exploring What it Means to Belong’ — a collection of artworks submitted as part of an expressive arts final assignment for SWK 4658: Social Work with Immigrants and Refugees taught by Associate Professor Izumi Sakamoto. Through this project, the students explored the various conceptualizations of home and belonging. They wove together their artwork by incorporating images of a tent which symbolizes precariousness and transiency. 

“Tents are portable homes. We chose to incorporate a tent within each of our artworks to demonstrate this symbolism and also to weave our interpretations together in a common theme,” wrote the students on the website they created to share their work.  

Saira Shafiq Khan’s piece in the collection was a zine titled Home is a Makeshift Haven. 

“Through my zine, I have expressed the contested notions of home and belonging as experienced in my journey of migration from Pakistan to Canada,” writes Khan. “The concept of home has changed over the years for me and overlaps with my experiences of marginalization, migration, acculturation, and identity formation. I touch upon the themes of transient nature of belonging and my positionality in a settler-colonial state.” 

Text, left page: "I have many names for home. They morph into one another on my tongue" Right page: circles in shade of orange, yellow, pink, red, and purple with names for home written in them. Text: "I wasn't the only one who left home. Home was a traitor for leaving me too. Agonizing my soul, engulfing me whole." Painting of a women with dark, wavy hair and three green dots under each eye. The woman is in a body of water that reaches her nose. Text: "Home will remain a city that didn't love me back." Painting of a cityscape in greys, browns, blues, greens, and oranges, with a highway running through high-rises, including the CN Tower. Written on the highway: "A land named pure. A land that felt foreign." Text: "This is stolen land" written in red on a placard with splatters of red that look like blood below it. Text in black and red on the right page: "The home that was supposed to be my refuge was someone else's home. I didn't wish to be an intruder yet I am one." Text in blue and purple: "Home is forever changing and flawed as me." A faceless woman with dark wavy hair, wearing purple, holds a mirror in front of her that shows her face in relief. Text in green and red, left page: "I have forgiven home for being amorphous. I let it be a transient feeling, a familiar scent, a lovely moment." An image of white flowers with many green leaves is in the bottom left corner. Text, right page: "Nothing lasting, nothing grand." An image of three maple leaves in shades of red and green in the upper right corner. Text: "Home is now a journey of being a migrant in this land, migrant through time, migrant through this life." Image of a brown woman in a hijab walking along a beach, by the shore, leaving footprints behind her. The different phases of the moon are at the top of the page in silver.

 

Poetry from the zine Home is a Makeshift Haven, written by Saira Khan: 

Home is a makeshift haven 

I have many names for home,
they morph into one another on my tongue //
watan, ghar, makaan, hadeed, malir, karachi, wah, dunya, deen, dil, khuda, aap, mein, hum  

I wasn’t the only one who left home //
home was a traitor for leaving me too,
agonizing my soul, engulfing me whole  

Home will remain a city that didn’t love me back //
a land named pure // a land that felt foreign  

The home that was supposed to be my refuge
was built on someone else’s home //
I didn’t wish to be an intruder, yet I am one 

Home is forever changing and flawed as me  

I have forgiven home for being amorphous //
I let it be a transient feeling, a familiar scent, a lovely moment //
nothing lasting, nothing grand 

Home is now a journey of being a
migrant in this land,
migrant through time,
migrant through this life.