Domus

All I can do is write about houses and the soup of life in them like a frustrated women's novelist, gendered, branded. But the world is in houses, and I am from the city. During lockdown also, when I wrote this, it was impossible not to think through houses even if it hurt. 

 

 

 

I am making soup for my family with the half rotten carrots and still shiny apples from my Aunt G’s house. My parents visit her a couple of times a year, and I absentmindedly signed a Christmas card for her a couple of days ago. This time they came back exhausted, which is normal for them on any slight excursion from the home.

One of the first things my mother said was "She’s been eating dog food. The wet kind, out of the packet" and gestured, making it into a joke. "Her house is full of food - but she’s lazy, that’s what! Too lazy to cook!"

 

Later on my mother said to herself while doing the dishes, "A hell house!". I looked up in attentive alarm - my older sister said No, she’s talking about G’s house, not here but my mother replied "- No, I’m actually talking about this house."

 

At the end of Is Racism an Environmental Threat, Hage talks about 'generalised domestication'. This is a relation of power that turns other things into objects. The word Domus which means house, which people usually associate with domestication (kind, mutual, taming) comes from Dominus, which means lord. So every house is a house only because of power, because of thingification of every other self. Generalised domestication is a mode of inhabiting the world through dominating it for the purpose of making it yield value. Blah blah obviously (we know this is what capitalism does) but I am still stuck on this house/power relation with the sweet heavy lifting lie of mutual benefit in it, of symbiosis. 

 

He also says this which I like: our idea of a home can be best encapsulated in the fundamental action of what a home does. It is the feeling of "being mothered", of near-suffocating care, of childhood. But this mothering is the result of patriarchal domination of the mother, a relation which is hidden. Even if there is mutual benefit or joy in this relation it remains a power relation. "Its appearance is not what hides its essence but is part of its essence". 

 

When I handle the apples and check them for bumps (there are none) they have a mysterious aura. I think like a child "These come from the house of a woman who eats dog food", and added to that "These come from the house of a woman who sleeps on her hard floor instead of a bed", "These come from the house of a woman with ulcers on her legs who refuses the doctor" etc. etc. I have made G into a witch. I have given her objects life, a life which I refuse to give to G. I have not seen my aunt in many years.

 

My mother has vibrated with anger these past couple of days. I wrestled her and she needed the touch like I would have needed it. Today she is in bed with a migraine and a hangover and sharp blue dip of mood. Hilariously my father has not got dressed at 3pm when I sit and talk with him. He makes himself bacon and eggs for lunch. An off duty kid! The dishes pile up. We eat cinnamon buns. When I knock, coming back from a walk and having forgotten my keys, my dad does not get up to open the door and I am angry. Then I see him walk, an uneven walk coming from his hips, requiring thought and concentration. One leg bends strangely, out, like a bird's wing, remembering deeper each day an accident decades ago. I see the grey in his hair. We do not talk about his walking, but myself and my dad have doctor's appointments for our chronic pain on the same day: both, of course, organised by my mother. 

 

Hage asks us to consider other modes of being. He is neutral as to domestication itself, suggesting it is the domination of domestication as a mode of relating which is the issue, instead asking us to consider what it would be like to see other lives as a non threat to ourselves and instead part of ourselves. Reciprocity and mutuality which he details like an instruction manual. Also to notice difference and not to make it duality, polarity. This is standard frustrated anthropologist talk, but I feel strangely moved by it. 

 

She leaves little smoke trails around the house. Listen: once many years ago I got into the car and it smelled funny. My mother said that they had been taking trash to the dump. Then an hour later she whispered in my ear that G’s toilet had been broken so she had been relieving herself in plastic bags and piling them in the bath, and my parents had to clean it out that day. The hot unsayable knowledge of this followed me around for years. 

 

The soup has fogged up the windows. I write through my new red migraine glasses on the circle table in the kitchen. The phone rings with a special tone and my dad calls "Can someone check if it's G - I don’t want to pick it up if it’s from G!".