Homesick

But if I see before me the nervature of past life in one image, I always think that this has something to do with truth. W.H. Sebald, After Nature, 2003 The Oxford English Dictionary defines “homesick” as “experiencing a longing for one’s home during a period of absence from it”. In other words, it is a feeling of distress caused by being physically away from home and living with preoccupied thoughts about home. In extreme situations, being homesick can be painful and leads to symptoms of depression and anxiety. Many assume that, once the sufferer has returned home, symptoms quickly disappear and recovery begins. But what if the opposite were true? What if being at home were the very cause for feeling distressed and anxious? 'Homesick' is set within the former glories of Failaka Island, located 20 kilometres off the coast of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf. Now in ruins, it lies bullet-ridden and abandoned, ransacked and dust-laden. Its twentieth-century affluence can be detected only in a forensic search through the remnants of its intimate dwelling spaces, ornately tiled bathrooms and strips of plush wallpaper peeling like dead skin from crumbling walls. The interior spaces evoke sickness and mental disintegration, its dilapidating rooms and ripped-out entry and exit points like damaged cells. Only the shell of its former self remains. Thus, in a place like Failaka, one may never suffer as much from being away from home as one does when one is at home.