"Imaginary Homelands"

So Salman Rushdie titled his first collection of non-fiction works. Rushdie also deals with this idea in his second collection of non-fiction titled "Step Across this Line". He's speaking of boundaries, frontiers, identity of place. He rightly claims that these are imagined entities, they are products of our minds and cultures. They are valid and necessary, but I think he also cautions us not to elevate these entities to the status of immutable, universal fact.

What brought this theme to mind, was the central character is Foer's book. The boy invents obsessively. He imagines. It disturbs him. Towards the end of the story, he starts to realize, however, that not everything he thought was concrete and fact, was as it seemed. Others invented as well to create their own reality. I understood this revelation to imply that everyone, to some extent, imagines to fill in the holes in their own reality or to bridge the gap between two concrete experiences.

This resonates with me because I continue to imagine my own homeland, to build my own identity of place in this world. The classic question supposed to stop third culture kids (TCKs) in their tracks is this: "where is home for you"?. The reason that question is a problem, however, is that it's almost exclusively asked by people who have few or no gaps in their concrete experience of home. Their physical home is their imagined home. If they haven't realized that about themselves, they ask the question, ignorantly, not realizing it's the wrong one.