At the end of the poem, Jones paints a picture of his “burning house,” indicating that he must walk back to the place that causes him grief and struggle, (Jones 8). This fire serves as a metaphor for what his home life is truly like. Similar to a fire burning and causing destruction, that is what has happened inside Jones’ home. It is apparent that he is looking for an escape, as shown by him leaving the house in the first place. Earlier in the poem, the readers get the picture of two boys in the woods together. But the other boy left Jones “alone to pick pine needles from [his] hair,” (Jones 8). Jones is dirty from being in the forest, shown by his “mud-stained knees,” and he has been deserted by the other boy who is supposed to care about him (Jones 8). When putting these two images together: Jones being abandoned in the forest and his burning home; readers get the sense that he is unfamiliar with being treated well. When he was younger, learning from his parents set his expectations very low. So, as he is growing up, he continues to gravitate toward the people that treat him poorly. And despite all this, Jones still manages to return to his home. He knows something will happen if he does not. His father forces him to leave the house, but he returns because he knows he and his mother need each other. My question for the boy is why does he not try to put out the fire, solve his problems? Fires leave burn marks, but the less a fire burns, the less damage will be caused. How long has the boy’s house been burning? Does he even know how to put out the fire? Will he ever take action?
Tag: home
Home Is a Contradiction
“Home is also the damp, rotting log smell, the fog lifting to broken sun and wind. I am climbing steadily now, the two-lane shale road narrowing.” (Clare 27).
On this page, Clare connects environmental destruction to the queer experience. As Clare walks into the forest and hears logging trucks, he immediately thinks about his aversion to the timber industry, but then corrects himself with this statement. Although home is “rotting”, and like the trees, Clare felt like he was decaying while growing up in his rural community, he will always have ties there.
Clare continues this narrative by using a form that mirrors his relationship with his home. When Clare leaves his home the “fog lifts” and he expects to uncover his most authentic queer self, like he expected to see a growing forest. However, living in a city and surrendering to queer metronormativity makes Clare feel like more of an exile, and he feels out of place and “broken” like the environment around him.
Through the tie between home and decay, Clare implies that maybe home will always be a contradiction. He recognizes that his queer and disabled identities weren’t supported at his home, but he feels perpetually stuck in the chasm between rural and urban, which can feel like the chasm between decaying and flourishing when most queer media set in rural locations references violence or unhappiness. Like witnessing this forest being turned into a wasteland, Clare doesn’t want his life in a rural location “to mean destruction” (Clare 27), but to remain home for him.
Overall, in this passage Clare reflects on the ostracization he felt his home and how he now emotionally and physically sees his home as “a graveyard, a war zone, the earth looking naked and torn”. However, as Clare states at the end of this excerpt, as he is exploring the forest, he “climbs steadily”, walking on a “shale road”, stepping on rocks at the bottom of the chasm, but continuing forward, with his identities intertwined. For many queer people, home is a contradiction, home is the space between, and home is a multiplicity of identities, and this is what Clare implies as he describes navigating through environmental destruction and the memories of his home.
What I lost by leaving
Only later did I understand what I lost by leaving. Loss of a
daily sustaining connection to a landscape that I still carry with me
as home. Loss of a rural, white, working-class culture that values
neighbors rather than anonymity… (p.38)
I consider that in this passage, we can identify language and vocabulary related to loss. Not only because the word was repeated 3 times, but also because this helps the writer to highlight how he feels, and creates an image in the reader’s mind. He helps us to see that, while trying to define himself, he went to a different place where he found his home: “queer.” However, in this discovering, he lost the place where he grew up. That beautiful rural place where he feels he has belonged to for so many years, but due to the fact that he found himself in the urban life where he could be queer more easily, he was forced to let that first place behind. Here is where Eli distinguishes the life in urban and rural places. Urban places are shown as big cities where people could be themselves without taking into account the norms and stereotypes more easily than in the rural zones, where all the people know among themselves and those stereotypes and norms are stronger. In this last one, Eli would never be allowed to discover himself and be who he really wanted.
This reading helped me to understand how, due to the discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community, a lot of people struggled trying to define themselves. Not only for going against the stereotypes, but also because knowing where home is, is a really important part of our definition of identity, and if that is not clear, then one’s identity may become unclear.
What I am really trying to say here is that I think these lines show that in every attempt to define who he is, Eli goes back to his past, and he shows that he cannot have both ideas of himself, he only can have one. By having queer as a home, he lost his previous home that was a place he loved and enjoyed a lot. For him, there is no way of defining himself without losing.