Homesick -

Social and practical strategies

Linguistically, homesickness (from the Latin nostalgia , literally “return pain”) conflates space and time. When an immigrant misses their homeland, they are not mourning the current geopolitical entity, but the temporality of their childhood within that land. This is why returning “home” often fails to cure the sickness. As Thomas Wolfe famously wrote, “You can’t go home again.” The physical house may stand, but the self who inhabited it has dissolved. Thus, acute homesickness is actually a form of temporal dislocation: the subject is homesick for a year, not an address. Homesick

Institutional supports