When we are home, we don’t need to talk about it. “To be at home”—byt’ doma—is a slightly a-grammatical expression in many languages [1].  It is as if it can’t be learned; we just know how to say it in our native tongue. To feel at home is to be comfortably unaware of things, to know that things are in their places and so are you. It is a state of mind that doesn’t depend on an actual place. The object of longing, then  is not really a place called home but this sense of intimacy with the world,  it is not the past in general, but that imaginary moment when we didn’t know the temptation of nostalgia. “Intimate” means “innermost,” “pertaining to a deep nature,” “very personal,” “sexual.” Yet, “to intimate” also means “to communicate” with a hint or other indirect sign; to imply subtly [2]. I will speak about something that might seem paradoxical–a “diasporic intimacy” that is not opposed to uprootedness and defamiliarization but is constituted by it. So much has been made of the happy home-coming that it is time to do justice to the stories of non-return or return to the place one has never been. They allow one to explore intimate ways of reflective nostalgia. In the late twentieth century millions of people find themselves displaced from their place of birth, living in voluntary or involuntary exile. Their intimate experiences occur against a foreign background. They are aware of the foreign stage set whether they like it or not. Moreover, immigrants to the United States bring with them different traditions of social interaction, often less individualistic; as for the writers, they carry the memory of oppression but also of their social significance that they could hardly match in the more “developed” West. In contemporary American pop-psychology one is encouraged “not to be afraid of intimacy.” This presumes that intimate communication can and should be made in a plain language and consists in saying “what you mean” without irony and double speak. Immigrants—and many alienated natives as well—cannot help but dread it. Diasporic intimacy can be approached only through indirection and intimation, through stories and secrets. It is spoken of in a foreign language that reveals the inadequacies of translation. Diasporic intimacy does not promise an unmediated emotional fusion, but only a precarious affection–no less deep, while aware of its transience. In contrast to the utopian images of intimacy as transparency, authenticity, and ultimate belonging, diasporic intimacy is distopic by definition; it is rooted in the suspicion of a single home, in shared longing without belonging. It thrives on the hope of the possibilities of human understanding and survival, of unpredictable chance encounters, but this hope is not utopian. Diasporic intimacy is haunted by the images of home and homeland, yet it also discloses some of the furtive pleasures of exile.
Intimacy has its own historical topography. In the Western tradition it reflects the colonization of the world by a private individual. Intimacy is not connected to life in the traditional community but to the discovery of privacy and solitude in the late medieval and early Renaissance culture. Privacy is no longer perceived as a “deprivation “ of public and religious significance (as the original Roman etymology of the word suggests); it became a value in itself. Privacy acquires particular cultural significance in the seventeenth-century Holland and eighteenth-century England where a non-transcendental conception of home emerged just around the time of the first diagnoses of nostalgia. The maps of intimacy expand through centuries, from precarious medieval retreats—a corner by the window or in the hallway, a secluded spot behind the orchard, a forest clearing—to the ostentatious bourgeois interiors of the nineteenth century with their innumerable curio cabinets and chests of drawers, to the end-of-the-twentieth-century transitory locations: the back seat of a car, a train compartment, an airport bar, an electronic homepage. It might appear that intimacy is on the outskirts of the social; it is local and particular, socially superfluous and non-instrumental. Yet, for better or for worse, each romance with intimacy is adulterated by a specific culture and society [3]. Intimacy is not solely a private matter; intimacy can be protected, manipulated or besieged by the state, framed by art, embellished by memory or estranged by a critique.
The twentieth century embraced intimacy as an ideal and also rendered it deeply suspicious. Hannah Arendt criticizes intimacy as a retreat from worldliness. It doesn’t matter whether it is a middle-class cult of intimacy or a special relationship cherished by a pariah group, a form of brotherhood that allows one to survive in a hostile world. Intimacy, as Arendt sees it, is the shrinking of experience, something that binds us to national or ethnic community (even if it is a pariah community), to home and homeland, rather than to the world [4]. Similarly, Richard Sennett argues that in contemporary American society the cult of intimacy turned into a form of seductive tyranny that promised warmth, authentic disclosure and boundless closeness and effectively led to the detriment of the public sphere and sociability [5]. Sennett’s critique is directed against the late twentieth-century commercialized version of the Protestant cult of authenticity that could make everyday life inartistic, humorless, divested of worldliness and public significance. It is also connected to the American dream and the cult of “family home.” In this case intimacy is no longer a retreat from but a fulfillment of the dominant cultural ideology. This ideology of intimacy—not so much as actual experience but as a promise and even an entitlement—pervades all spheres of American life, from slick fresh breath advertisement of family values to informal support groups and minority communities.
The diasporic intimacy that interests me is neither the touchy-feely imperative of the breath-freshener commercial nor the fraternal/sororial warmth of a minority group. Diasporic intimacy does not promise a comforting recovery of identity through shared nostalgia for the lost home and homeland. In fact, it’s the opposite. It could be seen as the mutual enchantment of two immigrants from different parts of the world or the sense of a precarious coziness of a foreign home. Just as one learns to live with alienation and reconciles oneself to the uncanniness of the world around one and to the strangeness of the human touch, there comes a surprise, a pang of intimate recognition, a hope that sneaks in through the back door. It punctuates the habitual estrangement of everyday life abroad.
A cultural genealogy of diasporic intimacy leads us away from the “history of private life.” We have to look for its modern beginnings in the alienating and illuminating experiences of the metropolis, in the double bind of modernity and nostalgia reflected in the consciousness of the urban wanderers at once estranged from and engaged with the life around them. Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire discover a “love at last sight” that produces a sexual shudder with a simultaneous shock of recognition and loss [6]. Rather than a melancholic sorrow, “love at last sight” reveals itself as a miracle of possibilities. “Love at last sight” strikes the urban stranger when he or she realizes they are on stage, at once an actor and a spectator” [7].
What might appear as an aesthetization of social existence to the “natives,” strikes an immigrant as an accurate depiction of the condition of exile. That is, of course, when the first hardships are over and the immigrant can afford the luxury of leisurely reflection. Immigrants always perceive themselves on stage, their lives resembling some mediocre fiction with occasional romantic outbursts and gray dailiness. Sometimes they see themselves as heroes of a novel, but such ironic realizations do not stop them from suffering through each and every novelistic collision of their own life. As for the sexual shock, it becomes a commonplace. What is much more uncommon is a recognition of a certain kind of tenderness which could be more striking than a sexual fantasy. Love at last sight is the spasm of loss after the revelation; the tenderness of exiles is about a revelation of possibility after the loss. It is when the loss had been taken for granted that one can be surprised that not everything has been lost. Tenderness is not about complete disclosure, saying what one really means, getting closer and closer. It excludes absolute possession and fusion. It defies symbols of fulfillment and is not very goal-oriented. In the words of Roland Barthes, “Tenderness…is nothing but an infinite, insatiable metonymy” and a “miraculous crystallization of the presence” [8]. In tenderness need and desire are joined. Tenderness is always polygamous, non-exclusive. “Where you are tender you speak your plural” [9]. The reciprocal enchantment of exiles has a touch of lightness about it. As Italo Calvino points out, “lightness does not mean being detached from reality but cleansing it from its gravity, looking at it obliquely but not necessarily less profoundly” [10].
Diasporic intimacy is belated and never final; objects and places were lost in the past and one knows that they can be lost again. The illusion of complete belonging has been shattered. Yet, one discovers that there is still a lot to share. The foreign backdrop, the memory of past losses and recognition of transience do not obscure the shock of intimacy, but rather heighten the pleasure and intensity of surprise.
In the age of globalism, often perceived as a domination of an American-style free market and popular culture, there is a rebirth of nationalism and new emphasis upon “cultural intimacy.” Cultural intimacy is new concept; it is defined as a social poetics that characterizes existence in a small nation and transposes upon the national community what was historically the realm of a private individual and familial relationships [11].  It defines itself in opposition to global culture, not to “worldliness” or the public sphere. Sometimes the immigrants themselves, particularly those who came to the developed countries not for political but for economic reasons and were not subjects of persecution, reconstitute a mini-nation-state on foreign soil, failing to see the diasporic dimension that feeds their narrowly defined cultural intimacy.
There is a problem, in my view, in making a direct connection between home and homeland and in projecting personal longing onto historical and collective history. Benedict Anderson compares national recreation of the past with individual autobiography. Both are seen as narratives of identity and personhood that sprang from oblivion, estrangement and loss of the memory of home. Homecoming, return to the imagined community is a way of patching up the gap of alienation, turning intimate longing into belonging. In a lyrical passage the critic draws on a developmental metaphor of the adolescent who wishes to forget childhood and the adult who desires to reinvent it by looking at an old photo of a child that supposedly resembles him or her [12].  However, not all biographical narratives qualify for the national imaginary, only the pure ones, rooted in local soil that begin “with the circumstances of parents and grandparents” and follow nineteenth-century realistic conventions. What is left out of Anderson’s account are the stories of internal and external exiles, misfits and mixed bloods who offer digressions and detours from the mythical biography of a nation. The development of their consciousness does not begin at home, but at the moment of leaving home. After all, every teenager dreams of leaving home, and often that first escape determines the map of one’s dreams as much as the architecture of home. These internal and external exiles from the imagined communities also long for home but with fewer illusions and might develop solidarity with strangers like themselves. An imagined community of reflective strangers? As utopias go, this might be a less risky one.

[1] In Russia “not to have everyone home” ( ne imet’ vsekh doma) does not signify privacy but a form of solitary madness. Somehow there is an assumption that home is to be crowded. “Everyone” has to be there in order for you to be yourself (what a difference from the French “chez soi”!). Yet every language praises the virtues of home, insisting on its singularity and uniqueness.
[2] American Heritage Dictionary  (Boston:Houghton Mifflin: : 1985) p.672.
[3] Philippe Aries, “Introduction” to History of Private Life, Vol 3, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 1-7 and Orest Ranum, “The Refuges of Intimacy” in History of Private Life, Vol 3, p. 207.
[4] Hannah Arendt, “On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing in Men in Dark Times, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc: 1968), pp. 15-16.
[5] Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London, Boston: Faber and Faber: 1977), p.337-340.
[6] Walter Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1978)
[7] Georg Simmel, “Sociability” in On Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald Levine (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p.130. I am grateful to Gabriella Turnatui for bringing it to my attention.
[8] Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang: 1978). p. 224-225.
[9] Ibid. p. 225.
[10] talo Calvino, “Lightness” in Six Memos for the Next Millenium (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1988, pp.3-31.
[11] As Michael Herzfeld observed, cultural intimacy plays hide-and-seek with common frameworks of memory and can both be manipulated by state propaganda and provide ways of everyday defiance. (Cultural Intimacy, New York: Routledge, 1996)
[12] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York and London: