BACK ISSUE

In Our ‘Search for Home’ Era

Once you move out of your family's home, how long does it take for you to find Home? On today’s episode, @RegardingJosh examines our cultural understanding of home, talks to some Black ex-pats to see where he should be looking for home and looks at current landscape of the housing market to see how possible it is to even find a "home."

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

Back Issue Intro:  Beyonce? You look like Luther Vandross. Ho, but make it fashion. I don't get no sleep because of y'all. It's Britney, bitch. We were rooting for you, Tiffany. We were all rooting for you. But I ain’t one to gossip… Who said that?

Josh Gwynn: Welcome to Back Issue, a weekly podcast that revisits formative moments in pop culture that we still think about. I'm Josh Gwynn. Okay, so boom. I'm sitting here looking out of a window that's not mine, in this house that's not mine, waiting, ooh Lord, waiting for the day when I have something that is mine. I'm craving the feeling of home. In this episode, it's going to be a little bit different, just hear me out, because I need to get some stuff off my chest. I want a home, but I want to work through what that actually means.

Josh Gwynn: I'm going to talk to two incredibly thoughtful amazing folks to help me figure this out. But first, like I said, I want to try to explain what I mean when I say the word home. I feel like I've always wanted a home, and by 30, that was my goal. Three bedrooms by a coastline. I was always taught to want a home, a home means security, financial stability, happiness, the end of careless spending on things like rent that you never really see anything back from. A home means control, control over my space, control over where I lay down my head. My own blank canvas to reflect me.

Josh Gwynn: A home means that everything that I was supposed to do, I did it. So here I am, sitting here in this house that's not mine, looking out of a window that's not mine, because as the borders started to shut down and the death toll started to rise during the pandemic, I made the decision to move back to California, back to my family's home. This makes total sense, right? It gave me a little bit more time with my family, which I desperately needed, allowed me to save a little, put down some money on house. Lots of other people had the same thought.

CLIP MONTAGE: The 2020 housing market was one of the hottest that we have ever seen. The red-hot housing market ... Housing market. Pandemic. Skyrocketing housing prices.

Josh Gwynn: I hear what's happening, but it's in one ear and out the other, because like I said, I need a home. It's time. So I did all the things, I saved my money, I looked into first time home buyer programs. It was a marathon, but I was like, "You know what? I'm putting on my shoes, I feel like I've been training."

Announcer Voice: Runners ready. Three, two, one.

Josh Gwynn: So my friend Ashley hooked me up with this realtor that she knew from church, this girl named Keana. I saw her, she was short, she's got a bunch of natural hair that sits on top of her head. I was like, "We see each other." Then she connected me to a loan agent so I could get pre-approved. They asked me so many questions. Do you want a single family? Do you want a condo? Maybe you want to get a duplex. What are your priorities? What are non-negotiables? Would you rather be closer to the city in a shoebox? Or would you rather be further out and you have to commute? No one's probably going to visit you, but you'll have some square footage. We went to open houses with lines so long it looked like it was perpetually Black Friday and Walmart was just giving away free TVs. You get a TV, you get a TV.

Announcer Voice: And they're off, look at them go.

Josh Gwynn: But I kept going.

Announcer Voice: Runners sprinting around the corner. Josh is in 117th place with multiple runners before him, but he's pushing on, folks. Look at him go.

Josh Gwynn: So began what would be the next phase of my search..

Josh Gwynn: Submit an offer.

Josh Gwynn: Get outbid in cash by a venture capitalist. 

Josh Gwynn: Submit an offer.

Josh Gwynn: Realize that the HOA had no money and if a tree fell on the roof of the condo, I'd be SOL. 

Josh Gwynn: Submit an offer.

Josh Gwynn: Actually, the bank won't let you submit an offer, because one person owns 45% of the units, which means they functionally own the HOA.

Josh Gwynn: Submit an offer.

Josh Gwynn: Outbid in cash by a venture capital firm.

Announcer Voice: Look at him go, sprinting to the front with all his might, ladies and gentlemen. This is one determined home buyer here. 

Josh Gwynn: Submit an offer.

Josh Gwynn: They're not alone, there's actually 35 offers and 25 of them are more than $20,000 above asking.

Josh Gwynn: Stop submitting offers. 

Announcer Voice: Josh has fallen behind, not sure he'll make it.

Josh Gwynn: I was one of those people who did what I was told over and over again, get a loan, go to school, work, work, work. No, Rihanna. Pay it back. But like so many other people, I just felt really stuck. I felt like I'd trained my entire life for a race, only to show up in the wrong shoes. It didn't feel worth it. It felt like it was affecting my moral, my hope, my idea of who I was, my idea of what my future was. Then I really couldn't help but turn inward and ask what felt like an even more fundamental question, do I even want to live in this country anymore?

Josh Gwynn: Have you seen the country we're in right now? There's insurrections, there's terrorism, police brutality. You can't help but wonder what it would maybe be like to just pack it all up and move, like so many other people have before, like Nina Simone. I found this interview of Nina Simone, the prolific classically trained pianist and singer/songwriter where she was being interviewed in Liberia by Mavis Nicholson.

CLIP: What was it like? What did it feel like? Like going home?

CLIP: Yes.

CLIP: What sort of feeling?

CLIP: Well, I didn't have to sing. I didn't have to do anything. They fed me, they wined me, they dined me. I almost got married there to a very rich man, and it was the first time in my life I felt that the intense work that I had done in the Western world was worth it.

Josh Gwynn: I love Nina Simone, I love her legacy, I loved how she took nobody's shit, how she spoke her mind on songs like Mississippi Goddam. It's not surprising to me that her idea of home involves softness, involves not having as many obstacles, to not have to grind as much, to be able to rest as needed, to be able to take more time out for yourself. Nina's speaking my language.

CLIP: Have you got a home?

CLIP: Well, I count not only the world as my home, since I've been around it several times, I'm only 2000 years old, but the two places that I love the most and that I consider my real home, in terms of how they make me feel, are Switzerland and Liberia, West Africa.

Josh Gwynn: Nina's not alone here. I remember reading Between the World and Me and learning that Ta-Nehisi Coates moved his family to France. He wanted a country that had a bigger social safety net.

CLIP: To be in a country which has much greater social protections than we have here, a much stronger safety net than we have here, and to meet with Black people over there, to meet with Maghrebin people over there, and to see that even with that expansive safety net that they have is so much stronger than ours, it hasn't cured racism.

Josh Gwynn: Ta-Nehisi Coates was maybe living my Parisian fantasy, and sure, we all know you can't outrun racism, but isn't a little something better than nothing at all? Here he is talking to Democracy Now's Amy Goodman.

CLIP: Of course, James Baldwin also went to France. What is it about France?

CLIP: I have no idea. I wasn't so much chasing Baldwin, however, I may have a different answer in 10 years, because maybe there's something about that that's working on a larger level. I don't particularly see it right now.

Josh Gwynn: So Ta-Nehisi is not clear if he was chasing Baldwin, but sometimes I think we're all chasing Baldwin and don't even realize it. Here's James Baldwin's National Press Club speech from 1986, just a year before he died of stomach cancer.

CLIP: I didn't so much go to Paris, as leave New York. The reason I left New York is because I knew that one fine Tuesday somebody's going to call me nigger just once too often, just once too often, and somebody was going to die, and I didn't care which one of us it was. So I split. I didn't know what was going to happen to me in Paris, but I knew what was going to happen to me here.

Josh Gwynn: I'm really struck by those words, because all I have to do is turn on the news and it's made really plain, really explicit what could happen to me here.

CLIP NEWS MONTAGE: Breaking news out of Michigan with another mass shooting. The Republican Governor's administration is blocking an advanced placement African American history course from the state's high school curriculum. And we begin with the emotional hearing in a Buffalo courtroom, the White supremacist who killed 10 Black people at a neighborhood supermarket last May. New details about the death of Tyre Nichols, it's been nearly a month since Nichols died after being beaten by five Memphis Police officers.

Josh Gwynn: In this country, there are days where I'm okay, but then there are days where I'm really just broken down, where I feel completely empty. The future that I want just seems so out of reach, and the odds of becoming a statistic or a news story or a hashtag seem way closer than they should. Does America even deserve me? Is it worth the effort of trying to make it work? I know I may be romanticizing the idea of home a bit, but I really can't help it. I've grown up being told what home should look like, what it should feel like since I was a kid by music, by books, and by film. There are so many movies that have undoubtedly impacted my definition of home, and that's what I wanted to talk to writer Maya Cade about.

Maya Cade: My name is Maya Cade, I am the creator and curator of Black Film Archive, a living digital archive of Black film streaming from 1898 to 1999, and I'm a scholar in residence at the Library of Congress.

Josh Gwynn: I asked Maya how to use film to unpack what I'm really feeling, and hopefully figure out what I really want. I've been thinking a lot about the idea of home. What I'm wondering is, do you think that film might be a good way to explore what home is?

Maya Cade: So early pandemic, I was re-watching the Wiz every day. The Wiz is really an overabundance of Black aesthetic.

CLIP: I know getting out in that world ain't easy, even Uncle Henry and me. But we'll always be here for you, Dorothy. Whatever your fears are, well, they'll be defeated just by facing up to them. Now, you take that new job and find a place for you and Toto, it's time for you to make a home of your own.

Maya Cade: We have Dorothy, played by Diana Ross, and some people argue too old.

Josh Gwynn: Please.

Maya Cade: Hello?

Josh Gwynn: Please.

Maya Cade: Hello? But we have someone who is searching for home. The film starts and she's talking to her aunt, and her aunt's like, "You're going to have to make your way in the world. You're going to have to figure it out." Then she goes out, she's taking the trash out and this windstorm blows her away, and she's in an unfamiliar territory. Through that, she meets these people and these circumstances, and she has to figure herself out and articulate what life means for her.

Maya Cade: So every day, almost every day, I was watching this movie and thinking, "What does life mean for me? What is the language that I'm searching for? What is the thing I'm searching for?" Because I think even though the pandemic was a time of great sadness, it was also a time of great possibility. The Wiz has just been this platform I think of radical possibility, and even if that's not the intent of the film, I think it gave me the platform to see that through. I hope the Wiz and this conversation of examining home, it's just the perfect place to start.

Josh Gwynn: I remember looking at when she gets to Oz and they're all walking around that fountain, it looks like a ballroom and they're like, "To be seen in green."

CLIP: (singing) I want to be seen in green….

Josh Gwynn: I remember being like, "This is queer as hell."

Maya Cade: Come on. I feel that too, right? Being alone in New York and watching this film constantly was like, "This is the New York I'm searching for. This is the New York I'm hoping to cultivate."

Josh Gwynn: Right? When I was thinking about like, "Okay, what does home look like? What does it feel like?" There are two movies that popped in my head. The first one was Soul Food.

Maya Cade: Oh, come on.

Josh Gwynn: So Soul Food, the plot, it's told through an 11-year-old boy in Chicago, he has him mom Vivica A Fox, and she has two sisters, Vanessa Williams and Nia Long. They have their mom, who's the strong matriarch, and she wants the family to stick together. They all get together at her house every Sunday for Sunday dinner, and she has diabetes and she passes away. So a big portion of the movie is like how does that affect this family? Will they fall apart? Will they execute the matriarch's vision for them post her dying?

CLIP: Y'all messed up the family, can't you see that? Big mama wanted me to get everyone together for a Sunday dinner, but I didn't know how to do that, because all y'all do is fight.

Josh Gwynn: You know that saying like, "It takes a village?" This movie is about the village.

Maya Cade: Hello? Listen, I think the most important thing to know about home for Black people, I think that film is such a perfect example, because it's just wherever we can find refuge. Sometimes that refuge ... From the weight of the world, so the world do be weighing. She's heavy, she's heavy, okay? I think sometimes that refuge can be a conversation among those you love, trying to figure it out, trying to calculate who's getting this, what does this look like?

Josh Gwynn: What traditions do we carry on?

Maya Cade: Come on. Who is making the fried chicken after the matriarch passes?

Josh Gwynn: Oh, my god.

Maya Cade: Who is going to make sure that we all gather around for Sunday dinner? If I think about the home canon of Black film, if you will, I'm really thinking about films that give Black people space to dream, imagine, hope, and ponder what do we want to do with this thing called life? But the '90s, we're writing and directing our own visions, and of course Soul Food, this really embodiment of home, because home isn't an inherently joyful place, it isn't. It's a place where you can experience the dynamic range of what life has to offer. That isn't always joy, and that's okay.

Josh Gwynn: It's weird that both of my movies come from that time period, because the other one that sticks out to me is the movie Friday. I think it's because I'm from Southern California, all my family's from Long Beach, which is outside of Los Angeles, this movie looks like all of my family's neighborhoods. Where we would play outside, where we would go by the park, where we would chase the ice cream truck. This movie is from 1995, it's about this guy Craig Jones who's played by Ice Cube, and his friend Smokey, and Craig gets fired that day.

CLIP: Hey, I know you didn't smoke weed, I know this, but I'm going to get you high today. Because it's Friday, you ain't got no job, and you ain't got shit to do.

Josh Gwynn: You just follow them throughout their Friday, and again, I just remember seeing it and feeling so taken aback by the fact that somebody could capture place so well.

Maya Cade: I think Friday is really the picture that hangs at your grandmother's house, that you could go and you're transported into a world, and you can describe everything.

Josh Gwynn: Exactly.

Maya Cade: I know what I was doing, what I was wearing. So it's no coincidence that both of these films come from this era, modern Black era of self articulation, of self-expression. Ice Cube did the thing.

Josh Gwynn: I don't know where he's at now, but back then ...

Maya Cade: Listen. Home and community are not just the place you live in, it's also the person on the corner, for Black communities, right?

Josh Gwynn: The characters in your neighborhood.

Maya Cade: Hello? It's also the textures of living. You know that your neighbor who is fine is going to be outside at this time, so I'm going to be outside too.

Josh Gwynn: Yeah, for sure.

Maya Cade: You just know these things, and that's also a part of home. That's what it's about, come on.

Josh Gwynn: I love that. How much has film influenced how you think about home? How much should we let pop culture influence how we think about home?

Maya Cade: I'm going to answer that question in a different way, in a very Maya Cade way. I think most people that I speak to think of Black film in particular from a place of limitation, and I don't think that film was ever designed to be a full representation of who we are, like a singular film. But what I do think is that there's so many riches of the past of film, the present of film, that can help us cultivate images of things unimagined. Goof films feel like a semblance of home, because they also exist in a space without Blackness being translated.

Josh Gwynn: That's so pretty. I like the Maya Cade way, you should patent that. Thank you for sitting with me, Maya. This has been so helpful.

Maya Cade: My pleasure. The last thing I'll say is home is whatever you want it to be. Home is your archival space. So what you take, what you bring in, make sure it is tender and good to you.

Josh Gwynn: I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that. I'm going to take that. Thank God for that conversation with Maya, I feel like I'm back on track. It feels like halftime, I need to get some Gatorade. I'll be back after the break. 

***MID-ROLL AD BREAK***

Josh Gwynn: And we're back. Maya Cade gave me so much life, I couldn't wait for my next conversation with Marquita.

Marquita Harris: My name is Marquita Harris and I am a journalist and current wandering spirit.

Josh Gwynn: I met Marquita when we both worked at Essence Magazine, she hosted this podcast that's called UnBossed and we both just hit it off. She won this contest with Airbnb called Live Anywhere on Airbnb, where she got to stay in Airbnb's all over the globe for free. Now she's back in the States, but I thought this girl has seen it all.

Marquita Harris: So I started in Barcelona, I went to Lisbon, Portugal, I went to Marrakech, Mexico City, Playa del Carmen.

Josh Gwynn: So I wanted to ask her where should I be looking when I want to feel home? Tell me about where you're from and what your first home was.

Marquita Harris: I was born in Chicago on the South Side, and we were there until I was about five or six, and then we moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is where my mother is from. Yeah, I was pretty much raised in Grand Rapids until I was 18, and that's where I am right now at 38. But it's pretty boring, and I don't like it. I don't know, I just would never feel quite like my feet were on the ground here. I still don't, which is affirming, because I did wonder if I would feel differently when I came back here during the pandemic. So now I'm just in this space where I'm like, "Okay, where is home?" How can I be like this at my big age? This is terrifying, honey.

Josh Gwynn: It's hard.

Marquita Harris: It's hard.

Josh Gwynn: So how did you get involved with this program with Airbnb?

Marquita Harris: In December of 2019, I became obsessed with this idea of being nomadic. I joined all these groups, I hate Facebook, but I joined all these groups on Facebook, and someone in the group posted a link to this Airbnb thing. It just said, "Live anywhere on Airbnb." I'm seeing this link as I'm in my childhood bedroom at 2:00 in the morning sipping a whiskey sour, whatever. Just sign up for it, see what happens, no big deal. Then next thing you know, a few months later, I was making my first trip to Spain, one of my favorite places.

Josh Gwynn: What was the one place where you moved where you're like, "I could move here tomorrow?"

Marquita Harris: I could live here?

Josh Gwynn: Mm-hmm.

Marquita Harris: The places that I felt the most home, in terms of community, Rio, Portugal, oh, and Mexico City. Those were all places where I found us in various forms. I ended up actually meeting a lot of locals when I was in Rio, which was easy. There was a moment where I was out with some new friends that I had made and I'm at this bar and I'm like, "I do not speak Portuguese, I don't know what anybody is saying." But the body language of everybody in that bar, because it's all Black and Brown people, we're loud, we're having a good time.

Josh Gwynn: I was reading these couple articles from the LA Times, and they did one article where it was about Mexico City and how pissed-

Marquita Harris: I read it.

Josh Gwynn: Right? How pissed everybody was that all the Americans were moving in. Do you feel like an American gentrifier if you're only going to be there for 30 days?

Marquita Harris: So when I moved to New York in 2010, I moved Uptown to Harlem, I felt like a gentrifier then. I think I've had to also accept the nuance of it. I am a Black American, our people have been, we've been spread out and finding the places where we feel safest, where we feel like we can prosper and thrive. I definitely was always hyper-aware of my place in that space, what me coming here and what that signifies, why did I choose these places? I think you just have to really just accept that you're an outsider, you're an outsider. So what does it mean to be an outsider? That means you need to be cautious about things. It means you need to be aware of the culture. It means you should try to learn the language. You are a foreigner and you need to respect and remember that.

Josh Gwynn: Personally, I've just been feeling really ungrounded. You know what I mean? Here. I guess just with your experience, do you think that if I moved abroad it would change?

Marquita Harris: Oh, man. I'm going to sound like one of those motivational speakers. Everything is attitude, babe. It's attitude. Home is wherever you want it to be, but you have to really put in the work and you have to commit. I think people like us, you start to overanalyze things to the point where you don't want to commit to any place. A lot of people that I know who have similar feelings and have that similar spirit, friends who used to feel like this, who are maybe married and they have kids and they're settled in a different way, life forced them to commit to a place. So that's where they found home. If you don't choose a home, it's going to choose for you.

Josh Gwynn: I feel so read. Did this experience make you appreciate America any more?

Marquita Harris: I love my family so much, and I love my friends and community, it made me appreciate all of that more. But no, it really didn't.

Josh Gwynn: So now that you've had all of this experience in terms of going all around the world and aye-yeah-yeah, how has your definition of home changed from before the experience to after?

Marquita Harris: I think I just realized even more than ever that home, it does start with you and how settled you allow yourself to feel in a place. Home is where you can rest. In a way, you can do that anywhere you choose, you just have to choose it.

Josh Gwynn: What a word. Now that you've had this experience, does it feel closer or further away?

Marquita Harris: Oh, gosh. Everything feels far away from Grand Rapids, Michigan. I keep saying it, because I'm going to shade it, I'm going to shade this place forever. I did when I was a kid and I still feel the same way. I don't expect to find a permanent place anytime soon. I know that home also has to be a place, and this is boring as hell to say, but where I can afford to retire.

Josh Gwynn: I feel like I was lied to.

Marquita Harris: We're all lied to. We were lied to, bamboozled.

Josh Gwynn: Go to a school that you can go to.

Marquita Harris: Take out a loan, take out a loan.

Josh Gwynn: Take out a loan.

Marquita Harris: You'll pay it back.

Josh Gwynn: Get this job. I just look back to my parents' generation and their experience in buying homes, and I'm just like, "Our generation is just so ..." I'm tired of being unprecedented.

Marquita Harris: Tired, tired. I would like a precedented moment. We're all feeling like this, right? You have to go where you know you're going to thrive.

Josh Gwynn: I'm so happy I got to talk to you today.

Marquita Harris: I'm happy I got to talk to you too.

Josh Gwynn: If you're familiar with the show, you know that this is the part of the show where we take a page from our patron saint, the one and only Tyra Banks, and asked ourselves if we learned something from this. And I did. A chair is still a chair, even if there is no one sitting there. Luther Vandross taught us all that. A room is not a house and a house is not a home. So I'm going to try my best to stop conflating the two. In talking to Maya, I'm thinking about home as a place of imagination, as a place where anything can be possible, because it's a place where I'm able to be myself without compromise. Which ways would I be able to grow? What kind of futures could I see for myself? That sort of freedom feels really, really empowering.

Josh Gwynn: In talking to Marquita, I'm thinking about the practical things I have to do in order to get myself ready for those futures, like finances, logistics, location. These are real things, they're real things to consider. Before I leave, we asked people from all over the world, from South Africa to Bosnia to South America, even the United States of America, and I've got to say it's amazing because everyone's answers made me feel absolutely seen and not so alone.

VOX MONTAGE: What does home feel like? Honestly, home can feel like a lot of things. The idea of home for me I think rests on the feeling of comfort, it's a place that grounds me where I can hear myself breathe. I think you feel at home in those places when you can stop for a minute and hear the wind, smell the air and be like, "I'm good." Home is a place of joy and trauma. Home is a place of hurt and healing. Moving to Brooklyn has felt the most like home. I grew up in predominantly White suburbs as a young Black girl, so being around this many Black people at all in America is always wonderful. Home is where you can take a break and charge your energy for whatever is next. Home is definitely made my bricks, by walls, furniture, but it's also fulfilled with energy, good memories, love and passion. My mother's house feels like home, it's where I wake up, walk outside by the shade of the peach tree or sit under the shade of the apricot tree, chicken roasting in the oven, pumpkin, tomato gravy, seeing the dough of the dumpling rising under the setting sun. Home is more of a feeling, more than a place itself. I feel like home is a state of mind. So maybe home is more feeling and less of an actual physical location. The place where people miss you after you leave, that place is called home.

Josh Gwynn: So I'm not going to force myself any more into just one way of what my future home could be, what it could feel like. I'm going to focus on the finish line. I can see it, because the entire race looks different to me now. Ready, set, go.

ENDING CREDITS: Back Issue is a production of Pineapple Street Studios. I'm the host and senior producer Josh Gwynn. Back Issue was created by myself and Tracy thee Clayton. What up girl? Our producers are Janelle Anderson, Xandra Ellin, and Ari Saperstein. Our editors are Leila Day and Emmanuel Hapsis. Our managing producer is Bria Mariette. Our executive producer is Leila Day, and our intern is Noah Camuso.

Today our episode was produced by Noah Camuso and myself, and edited by Leila Day. Our sound engineers include Sharon Bardales, Davy Sumner, Jason Richards, Jade Brooks, Marina Paiz, Pedro Alvira and Raj Makhija. Art Design by Cadence 13, and original music by Raj Makhija and Don Will. Executive producers for Pineapple Street Studios are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky.

I'm on Twitter and Instagram at @RegardingJosh. You can follow the show on Instagram at @BackIssuePodcast, and you can use the hashtag #BackIssuePodcast on Twitter if you are wild and crazy enough to have not left that hellscape because Lord, God in heaven. You can subscribe to this podcast wherever free podcasts are sold. Leave us a review. It really really really does help. Tell your friends, tell your enemies, tell everyone that you know. Leave 5 stars. If you do, when I find a home, I’ll invite you to dinner. I'll see you next week.