Belonging

Home Away from Home

Isabel Huggan’s acclaimed Belonging is pure pleasure to read—richly entertaining, beautifully written, laced with gentle humour and valuable insights acquired during years of world travel. Beginning as a memoir and concluding with three short stories, Belonging illuminates the mysterious manner in which chance and choice together shape our lives. At the book’s core is Isabel Huggan’s stone house set among vineyards in the foothills of the Cévennes mountains in the south of France, from where she contemplates the meaning of home and the importance of remembrance.
  • WINNER | 2004
    Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction
There Is No Word For Home

In the country where I now live, there is no word for home. You can express the idea at a slant, but you cannot say home. For a long time this disconcerted me, and I kept running up against the lack as if it were a rock in my path, worse than a pothole, worse than nothing. But at last I have habituated myself and can step around it, using variants such as notre foyer (our hearth) or notre maison (our house) when I mean to say home. More often, I use the concept chez to indicate physical location and the place where family resides, or the notion of a comfortable domestic space. However, if I wish to speak of “going home to Canada,” I can use mon pays (my country) but I can’t say I am going chez moi when I am not: for as long as I reside in France -- the rest of my life -- this is where I will be chez moi, making a home in a country and a language not my own. I am both home and not-home, one of those trick syllogisms I must solve by homemaking, at an age when I should have finished with all that bother.

In the foothills of the Cévennes I live in a stone house that was, until only a few decades ago, home to silkworms, hundreds upon hundreds of them, squirming in flat reed baskets laid on layered frames along the walls in what was then the magnanerie, a place for feeding silkworms, and is now a bedroom. For the duration of their brief lives, these slippery dun-coloured creatures munched mulberry leaves, fattening themselves sufficiently to shed their skins four times before they’d stop eating and attach themselves to twigs or sprigs of heather on racks above the baskets. With a sense of purpose sprung from genetic necessity, they’d then spin themselves cocoons in which they’d sleep until they were plucked from their branches and dunked in huge kettles of hot water. Perhaps some luckier ones were allowed to waken and complete the magic of metamorphosis -- there must be moths, after all, to furnish next season’s eggs -- but silk manufacturers preferred the longer filament, which comes from whole cocoons. There are sacrifices to be made for beauty, and if the life of a lowly and not very attractive segmented grub has to be that sacrifice, perhaps that is the Lord’s will.

The Lord’s will rests heavy on the high blue hills of the Cévennes, for here God has been imagined in Calvinist clothes, a moral master whose plans for man and beast alike are stern. This little-inhabited part of southern France (the mountainous northern corner of Languedoc, much of it now a national park) has long been the heart of Protestant opposition to Roman Catholicism. From the mid-1500s, revolt against Paris and the Church continued with appropriate bloodshed on all sides until the Édit de Tolérance in 1787 finally allowed those few Huguenots who remained the right to practise their religion.

The rugged terrain, hidden valleys and craggy cliffs are geologically congenial to the Protestant mind -- in the back reaches of the Cévennes there have always existed stubborn pockets of religious and political resistance. This is an austere landscape where, even now, life is not taken lightly and where pleasure and ease are distrusted. The puritanical harshness of Reform doctrine seems also to show itself in the fortress-like architecture of Huguenot houses such as mine: angular, stiff-necked buildings, tall and narrow with small windows shuttered against the blasts of winter or the blaze of summer. Nevertheless, graceless and severe though it may appear from outside, the cool, dark interior of the house is a blessing when you step in from the painful dazzle of an August day. It is not for nothing that the stone walls are well over half a metre thick, or that the floors are laid with glazed clay tiles.

Sometimes I wake in the early morning before it is light, the still, dark hours of silent contemplation: how have I come to be here? But there is nothing mysterious, the reason is mundane–it is not the will of God, but the wish of the Scottish-born man to whom I have been married since 1970. The first time we came hiking in these mountains -- more than a decade ago, while we were living in Montpellier -- he said, immediately, that he knew he was chez lui dans les Cévennes. His experience was profound, affecting him in some deeply atavistic way I did not understand until later, when I felt the same inexpressible, magnetic, and nearly hormonal pull the moment I first set foot in Tasmania and knew myself to be home.

When it happens, this carnal knowledge of landscape, it is very like falling in love without knowing why, the plunge into desire and longing made all the more intense by being so utterly irrational, inexplicable. The feel of the air, the lay of the land, the colour and shape of the horizon, who knows? There are places on the planet we belong and they are not necessarily where we are born. If we are lucky -- if the gods are in a good mood -- we find them, for whatever length of time is necessary for us to know that, yes, we belong to the earth and it to us. Even if we cannot articulate this intense physical sensation, even if language fails us, we know what home is then, in our very bones.

I sometimes say jokingly that I have become a WTGW -- a whither-thou-goest-wife, an almost extinct species, but one with which I have become intimately familiar in the years we have lived abroad because of Bob’s work in development. I have met many other spouses -- men, as well as women -- who have done the same as I: we have weighed the choices, and we have followed our partners. Our reasons for doing so are as diverse as our marriages and our aspirations and the work that we do. In my case, writing is a portable occupation: I can do what I do anywhere.

And so it follows that I shall learn, as I have learned in other places, to make this house home. Over time, I shall find out how to grow in and be nourished by this rocky foreign soil. I early learn the phrase je m’enracine ici, which means “I am putting down roots here,” in order to convince myself -- for this time, we are not moving on. We are here to stay, définitivement.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“From the richness of her experiences Huggan has fashioned a memoir of singular beauty.” —London Free Press

“Fans of the calm, elegant intelligence of Alice Munro or Carol Shields will feel right at home.” —Vancouver Sun

“Huggan’s story of her midlife move to France is what Peter Mayle’s Provence should have been. An outstanding writer who speaks from the heart with great intelligence, Huggan . . . explores what it is to be in a new country, and what draws us to our old ones.” —Globe and Mail

“Isabel Huggan takes the reader around the world, from France to Canada to Kenya to the Philippines to Australia and back again. . . . Her descriptions of the mountains, forests, and sea in Tasmania are lyrical and lucid, as are all her evocations of landscapes. . . . A remarkably strong and subtle voice.” —Toronto Star

“Huggan writes with a gentle thoughtfulness and her phrases are suffused with beauty. . . . Her style is warm and confiding, like a friend asking you in for tea on a dreary day. She explores her own heart and mind with a deft touch and in the process answers some big questions about who we are and how we became who we are. . . . Belonging shows us that home is always with us.” —Hamilton Spectator

“This is a book you’ll have to give away and buy another and another—until finally you can keep one for yourself to read again in the small hours our lives are made of.” —Lorna Crozier, author of After That and Through the Garden

“A book about the yearning to belong, family ties, unexpected friendships, and how life usually turns out to be quite different from our plans. . . . [Belonging is] a pleasure to read and provides an intimate look at a fascinating and open-minded woman.” —Toronto Sun

"The book is part engaging memoir and part intriguing exploration of how the creative mind works.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“Summer reading, I believe, should either draw you forcefully out of your world, or draw you irresistibly further into it. Belonging may do both. . . . This is not so much a book to read, as to re-read. Huggan’s stories [are] graced with turns of phrase and pockets of language that, well, make you turn down the page to go back.” —The Observer

“The best part of this book is her candid and engaging voice. By the time you turn the page on the last memoir in the collection, you feel welcomed as a friend, made privy to confidences, epiphanic insights, and intimate memories.” —Ottawa Citizen

Belonging is an elegant, gracefully written reminiscence of what it means to leave your home and native land. . . . It’s an entrancing journey.” —The Sun Times

About

Isabel Huggan’s acclaimed Belonging is pure pleasure to read—richly entertaining, beautifully written, laced with gentle humour and valuable insights acquired during years of world travel. Beginning as a memoir and concluding with three short stories, Belonging illuminates the mysterious manner in which chance and choice together shape our lives. At the book’s core is Isabel Huggan’s stone house set among vineyards in the foothills of the Cévennes mountains in the south of France, from where she contemplates the meaning of home and the importance of remembrance.

Awards

  • WINNER | 2004
    Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction

Excerpt

There Is No Word For Home

In the country where I now live, there is no word for home. You can express the idea at a slant, but you cannot say home. For a long time this disconcerted me, and I kept running up against the lack as if it were a rock in my path, worse than a pothole, worse than nothing. But at last I have habituated myself and can step around it, using variants such as notre foyer (our hearth) or notre maison (our house) when I mean to say home. More often, I use the concept chez to indicate physical location and the place where family resides, or the notion of a comfortable domestic space. However, if I wish to speak of “going home to Canada,” I can use mon pays (my country) but I can’t say I am going chez moi when I am not: for as long as I reside in France -- the rest of my life -- this is where I will be chez moi, making a home in a country and a language not my own. I am both home and not-home, one of those trick syllogisms I must solve by homemaking, at an age when I should have finished with all that bother.

In the foothills of the Cévennes I live in a stone house that was, until only a few decades ago, home to silkworms, hundreds upon hundreds of them, squirming in flat reed baskets laid on layered frames along the walls in what was then the magnanerie, a place for feeding silkworms, and is now a bedroom. For the duration of their brief lives, these slippery dun-coloured creatures munched mulberry leaves, fattening themselves sufficiently to shed their skins four times before they’d stop eating and attach themselves to twigs or sprigs of heather on racks above the baskets. With a sense of purpose sprung from genetic necessity, they’d then spin themselves cocoons in which they’d sleep until they were plucked from their branches and dunked in huge kettles of hot water. Perhaps some luckier ones were allowed to waken and complete the magic of metamorphosis -- there must be moths, after all, to furnish next season’s eggs -- but silk manufacturers preferred the longer filament, which comes from whole cocoons. There are sacrifices to be made for beauty, and if the life of a lowly and not very attractive segmented grub has to be that sacrifice, perhaps that is the Lord’s will.

The Lord’s will rests heavy on the high blue hills of the Cévennes, for here God has been imagined in Calvinist clothes, a moral master whose plans for man and beast alike are stern. This little-inhabited part of southern France (the mountainous northern corner of Languedoc, much of it now a national park) has long been the heart of Protestant opposition to Roman Catholicism. From the mid-1500s, revolt against Paris and the Church continued with appropriate bloodshed on all sides until the Édit de Tolérance in 1787 finally allowed those few Huguenots who remained the right to practise their religion.

The rugged terrain, hidden valleys and craggy cliffs are geologically congenial to the Protestant mind -- in the back reaches of the Cévennes there have always existed stubborn pockets of religious and political resistance. This is an austere landscape where, even now, life is not taken lightly and where pleasure and ease are distrusted. The puritanical harshness of Reform doctrine seems also to show itself in the fortress-like architecture of Huguenot houses such as mine: angular, stiff-necked buildings, tall and narrow with small windows shuttered against the blasts of winter or the blaze of summer. Nevertheless, graceless and severe though it may appear from outside, the cool, dark interior of the house is a blessing when you step in from the painful dazzle of an August day. It is not for nothing that the stone walls are well over half a metre thick, or that the floors are laid with glazed clay tiles.

Sometimes I wake in the early morning before it is light, the still, dark hours of silent contemplation: how have I come to be here? But there is nothing mysterious, the reason is mundane–it is not the will of God, but the wish of the Scottish-born man to whom I have been married since 1970. The first time we came hiking in these mountains -- more than a decade ago, while we were living in Montpellier -- he said, immediately, that he knew he was chez lui dans les Cévennes. His experience was profound, affecting him in some deeply atavistic way I did not understand until later, when I felt the same inexpressible, magnetic, and nearly hormonal pull the moment I first set foot in Tasmania and knew myself to be home.

When it happens, this carnal knowledge of landscape, it is very like falling in love without knowing why, the plunge into desire and longing made all the more intense by being so utterly irrational, inexplicable. The feel of the air, the lay of the land, the colour and shape of the horizon, who knows? There are places on the planet we belong and they are not necessarily where we are born. If we are lucky -- if the gods are in a good mood -- we find them, for whatever length of time is necessary for us to know that, yes, we belong to the earth and it to us. Even if we cannot articulate this intense physical sensation, even if language fails us, we know what home is then, in our very bones.

I sometimes say jokingly that I have become a WTGW -- a whither-thou-goest-wife, an almost extinct species, but one with which I have become intimately familiar in the years we have lived abroad because of Bob’s work in development. I have met many other spouses -- men, as well as women -- who have done the same as I: we have weighed the choices, and we have followed our partners. Our reasons for doing so are as diverse as our marriages and our aspirations and the work that we do. In my case, writing is a portable occupation: I can do what I do anywhere.

And so it follows that I shall learn, as I have learned in other places, to make this house home. Over time, I shall find out how to grow in and be nourished by this rocky foreign soil. I early learn the phrase je m’enracine ici, which means “I am putting down roots here,” in order to convince myself -- for this time, we are not moving on. We are here to stay, définitivement.

Praise

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“From the richness of her experiences Huggan has fashioned a memoir of singular beauty.” —London Free Press

“Fans of the calm, elegant intelligence of Alice Munro or Carol Shields will feel right at home.” —Vancouver Sun

“Huggan’s story of her midlife move to France is what Peter Mayle’s Provence should have been. An outstanding writer who speaks from the heart with great intelligence, Huggan . . . explores what it is to be in a new country, and what draws us to our old ones.” —Globe and Mail

“Isabel Huggan takes the reader around the world, from France to Canada to Kenya to the Philippines to Australia and back again. . . . Her descriptions of the mountains, forests, and sea in Tasmania are lyrical and lucid, as are all her evocations of landscapes. . . . A remarkably strong and subtle voice.” —Toronto Star

“Huggan writes with a gentle thoughtfulness and her phrases are suffused with beauty. . . . Her style is warm and confiding, like a friend asking you in for tea on a dreary day. She explores her own heart and mind with a deft touch and in the process answers some big questions about who we are and how we became who we are. . . . Belonging shows us that home is always with us.” —Hamilton Spectator

“This is a book you’ll have to give away and buy another and another—until finally you can keep one for yourself to read again in the small hours our lives are made of.” —Lorna Crozier, author of After That and Through the Garden

“A book about the yearning to belong, family ties, unexpected friendships, and how life usually turns out to be quite different from our plans. . . . [Belonging is] a pleasure to read and provides an intimate look at a fascinating and open-minded woman.” —Toronto Sun

"The book is part engaging memoir and part intriguing exploration of how the creative mind works.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“Summer reading, I believe, should either draw you forcefully out of your world, or draw you irresistibly further into it. Belonging may do both. . . . This is not so much a book to read, as to re-read. Huggan’s stories [are] graced with turns of phrase and pockets of language that, well, make you turn down the page to go back.” —The Observer

“The best part of this book is her candid and engaging voice. By the time you turn the page on the last memoir in the collection, you feel welcomed as a friend, made privy to confidences, epiphanic insights, and intimate memories.” —Ottawa Citizen

Belonging is an elegant, gracefully written reminiscence of what it means to leave your home and native land. . . . It’s an entrancing journey.” —The Sun Times