“Giving up the Idea of Home”: Ambivalent Geographies, Geopoetics, and Resisting Capture in the Cities of the Middle East

Abstract This paper sits with the geopoetics of the Egyptian poet and writer Iman Mersal to grapple with affective ambivalence towards common objects of desire, such as an anchorage of one's place in the world, an idea of home. What does it mean to “train” ourselves into the idea that we are never really at home? In what forms might these trainings to come to terms with our precarious relation to the world manifest? And how might they rework imaginations of precarious geographies in world politics? By way of an answer, I suggest supplementing the urban geopolitics of home, one that is beholden to the event of violence, with an urban geopoetics of home, one that I propose might be more open to affectual ambivalence. I argue that an urban geopoetics of home opens up towards modes of knowing, feeling, and storytelling home and city otherwise; one that critically witnesses their material precarity without being beholden to the event of violence inflicted on them. More specifically, it allows for an ambivalent relation to home as an uncertain anchor to selfhood.