SOAPBOX: For poet laureate Alberto Ríos, home is about so much more than geography

On KJZZ's SOAPBOX, The Show  turns over the the mic to listeners. For the summer 2022, writers tackled the theme HOME.

Alberto Ríos is an author and Arizona’s state poet laureate. He’s also the director of Arizona State University's Piper Center for Creative Writing. According to Rios, home is about so much more than geography.

ALBERTO RIÓS: Stamping grounds. The place that gave you meaning and memory. Home. The place you always talk about when the afternoons get long and the mesquites start to droop. The place that no longer exists except in the buzzing cicada sounds of childhood. Home is something like a desert tortoise’s shell — something you carry with you wherever you go. It’s always there, though perhaps being there geographically is not the same as being there as an emotional participant. Home is a place somewhere in time.

Nevertheless, you know it well. You still walk those streets and paths. You still have that red Western Flyer bicycle. You still can feel the piece of wood that you used to carve a path through the tall weeds in order to get to your fort. The arroyo was, of course, your personal Mississippi River, though you did not know it then. You feel it, you hear it, you smell it. You are always searching for a taste of it.

There’s a word in Spanish for this home of yours that nobody else can see — querencia. It is complex in its definition, but simple in its meaning: love of a place, homesickness, longing for home, even as that place does not exist. That place does not exist but neither is it quite a dream. It is a special and personal geography.

And more than geography, home is a feeling. Places are public, while feelings are private. That’s what makes us us. The inexplicable. We each have a home if only inside ourselves. Happy, sad, or indifferent, home is somewhere nobody else can go and from which you draw the makings of yourself.

Moreover, that place seems invisible, and therefore not valid. It is not science in the same way that angles on railroad bridges are or the predictable arcs of the immediate planets. Nonetheless, the science of the emotional heart is not difficult to demonstrate. When you open and finish reading a book, for example, you are not where you were when you started yet you have not moved. Instead, you have been moved. That invisible feeling is palpable, meaningful, affecting, but does not fit well on any spreadsheet. It is personal. Indeed, you would look funny on a spreadsheet. And a spreadsheet does not make a home.

If you had a reasonably happy childhood, the Brazilians have a word in Portuguese, saudade, an intensely and equally complex word that has been described in simple terms as “memory of something with a desire for it,” knowing that it cannot be had again. Saudade. Happy and sad both. If you had an unhappy childhood, of course, then not so much saudade. But home, whatever it means, is there, in that place, inside us.

I grew up on the border geographically, but I also grew up on the border psychologically in a confluence of all things: heritages, languages, foods, colors, musics, laws, adventures, and dreams. Also, tourists. So many people from so many places, always passing through. They looked but never saw my home. Though, to be fair, it’s taken me a long time to understand that nobody did, even those I grew up with. And I never quite saw theirs either.