foreword

Czesław Miłosz’s ancestral home in Krasnogruda, Poland, a village near the border with Lithuania, was the setting in late November 2022 for Home/Land/s: An International Symposium. Supported by a grant from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State and organized by the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP), this symposium explored some of the possibilities, obligations, and forms of meaning intrinsic to any definition of home, which is by its very nature complicated. What better presiding spirit for the discussions that unfolded over three days than Miłosz, a poet, essayist, and Nobel laureate whose writings were profoundly shaped by his long exile from his homelands in Poland and Lithuania? Not long after the Berlin Wall came down, he returned to this border region, where he met two remarkable artists, Krzysztof Czyżewski and Małgorzata Sporek-Czyżewska, founders of the International Center for Dialogue, which hosted our symposium. The road from Sejny and the fields around were dusted with snow. The first line of Milosz’s poem, “House in Krasnogruda,” came to mind: “The woods reached water and there was immense silence.” This was how our discussions began.

The IWP invited a dozen poets and writers from Algeria, Kazakhstan, Mauritius, Myanmar, Poland, Ukraine, and the United States to address Robert Frost’s memorable definition of home, which appears in a conversation between an old couple in “The Death of the Hired Man”: Warren says, “‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in.’” And Mary replies, “‘I should have called it/ Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’” These lines sound different in the wake of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, which have displaced millions of men, women, and children, creating dramatic scenes at the borderlines encircling our various home/land/s: masses of bodies huddled in fragile boats; welcoming citizens standing at border crossings with jackets and hot drinks; barbed wire fences guarded by heavily armed soldiers; currents of migrants weaponized by politicians like human missiles deployed to strike at the heart of a distant enemy country; explosive conflicts in domestic asylum politics over tradition versus inclusion, all complicated by the pandemic…

Abstract humanitarian principles of right to shelter against the many local variants of the castle doctrine acquired new meaning at Krasnogruda with the arrival of several Ukrainian writers, who risked life and limb to cross the border, bringing fresh news about the tragic consequences of the Russian invasion of their country, which in a matter of months had not only flattened cities and towns, killing and maiming tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians, but for the first time in six decades raised the specter of nuclear war, which would make the issue of borders immaterial. And there was general agreement that the ongoing destruction of livable environments everywhere, which has already uprooted millions of people, will only complicate the notion of home/land/s.

Who has the right to cross a border, who has the obligation to open the door, must the one crossing the threshold take off their shoes and bare their head, must he or she “deserve” …? How to think about this dialectic of yearning and rights, of mercy and obligation, as a fault line much less tangible than a national border hovers above us all, namely the latitude below which heat and drought makes living conditions less and less possible? What will become of the expectation that someone someplace “has to take you in” and that this is something one need not “deserve” as lines drawn around “land” become meaningless?  These were the kinds of questions the writers raised at Krasnogruda, answered in surprising and provisional ways, and then developed in the following essays, which offer readers a vast range of insights about our individual and collective time at home—wherever home may be, now and in the future.

Christopher MERRILL has published seven collections of poetry, many edited volumes and translations, and six books of nonfiction, among them Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include numerous translation awards, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations and many others. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries.

acknowledgements 

The Sejny/Krasnogruda symposium was funded by a grant from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, and we are very grateful to our program officer, Jill Staggs, for her assistance and support at every stage of our planning for this gathering.

 At the Sejny/Krasnogruda Fundacja Pogranicze/Borderland Foundation, we are grateful to its director Krzysztof Czyżewski, international programs project lead Weronika Czyżewska-Poncyljusz, and administrator Agata Szkopińska. Kate Tsurkan coordinated logistics for the Ukrainian participants, translated some of their texts, and offered sage advice at every turn.