How to love a homeland by Oxana Timofeeva

In 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and Kazakhstan declared independence. In a flash, a border emerged in space and time, separating writer Oxana Timofeeva from her roots in two blows: “the state where I was born didn’t exist anymore, while the place I considered my homeland turned into a foreign country.”

In How to love a homeland, Timofeeva explores the difficulty of reducing one's sense of belonging to one's country and the philosophical interconnectedness of movement and rootedness. Interweaving exquisitely rendered portraits of internal and external landscapes with reflections on the nature of nations, borders, and belonging, this essay calls to reimagine our conception of homelands in the face of nationalist and imperialist forces.