Making a home in the world: Clothes as mnemonic devices through which refugees experience home in flight and resettlement

Abstract

How do refugees experience home not just in the country of settlement but also along their journeys of flight? Departing from theories that see home as something which is left behind in displacement, this paper explores how clothes act as important mnemonic devices, storing and archiving memories from different times and places, whilst connecting people to new places en route. Through the in-depth analysis of two refugees’ stories, this paper highlights that home is not a onetime accomplishment but a lived experience that people are continuously involved in, especially in times of upheaval and transformation as they search for a safer place to be in the world. Clothes, as one of the few materials that refugees carry, become central to this lived experience not only as semiotic devices, carrying different narratives of home, but also as sensual materials through which different sensations of home are carried, transformed, and negotiated.

Introduction

Home is often thought of as a static place, bound by a nation state, a permanent shelter or confined to a particular time. In theories of displacement and movement it is thus commonly understood that these homelands and homes are left behind in both time and space. I depart from such studies of home, by focusing on homemaking both during flight and the resettlement process. This is a field which has garnered little attention within studies of forced migration. Following Freund (2015: 61), I highlight how ‘refugees are continually engaged in the process of making home, not only in the sending and receiving country, but also in the countries along their often complex and long migration routes’. Through examining how the journey plays an integral part in homemaking for many refugees, I counter typical narratives of flight as simply ‘a vacuum in which migrants feel “lost”’ (Freund, 2015: 62). Instead, I explore the importance of the environments, events and experiences along the way and how clothes hold and trigger memories from these times and places. It is through memories embedded in objects that people interact with past places, events and senses of self as they continuously reconstitute their connection to the wider world (Digby, 2006; Tolia-Kelly, 2004; Turan, 2010). Understanding home as a lived experience allows me to trace the ways in which home is made in the everyday lives of refugees as new experiences and connections are forged across different localities.

Central to the concept of homemaking that I develop is the role objects play in processes of self-narration (Digby, 2006; Hoskins, 1998). Drawing on a range of perspectives and disciplines, I show how objects, in particular clothes, store memories from different times and places and how refugees interact with these possessions along the journey and during resettlement. As an important ‘autobiographical tool’, stories and identities become woven into their very fabric, often through the very physicality of the clothing, interweaving the emotional and sensory, and thus becoming an important means of keeping memories alive (Gibson, 2015: 14). Importantly, clothes accompanied them on the journey, picking up key memories and connecting them to places en route (Arev, 2019). These connections form a wider network that many refugees have to different times and places, highlighting the complex and fluid nature of home (Hui, 2015).

Although memory has been highlighted as important in linking refugees to their country of origin (Marschall, 2019), little attention has been paid to the role of memory along the journey and during resettlement as refugees make their home in the world. In the second part of this paper, I explore Ahmed’s (1999) conception of home as lived experience, arguing against a conception of the migrant body as being exiled and unable to settle anywhere. Core to Ahmed’s (1999) argument is the conception of home as a time and place that we have left behind but which has been imprinted on our bodies. Whilst I follow Ahmed (1999) in seeing environments as imprinted on our bodies, I argue that these sensual memories are key for connecting to new environments. Finally, drawing on Hage’s (2010) concept of intimation, I show how refugees draw on the sensual memories contained within objects as they navigate their resettlement in Hamburg.

Between 2018 and 2019 I conducted interviews and participant observation with seventeen refugees who had been able to acquire full refugee status and were currently living in Hamburg. Due to the significance of objects as a research topic, objects also acted as important methodological aids within interviews. The presence of an object in interviews enabled participants to go ‘beyond the elicitation of verbal accounts’ and physically interact with the object to narrate a particular story, for example demonstrating the special feeling of the material by rubbing it, pulling it or smelling it (Woodward, 2016: 360). As De Nardi (2014: 444) argues, ‘storytelling mementoes’ are ‘not only sites of memory but also sites of feeling’ that are ‘channelled through the body's interaction’ with them. It was therefore crucial not only for my benefit as a researcher but also for the interviewee to be able to interact with objects, which acted as important prompts whilst narrating their stories of flight and home to me (De Leon and Cohen, 2005).

I focus on the stories of two refugees, Mahdi, 30 from Afghanistan and Miran, 27 from Syria who are both now living in Hamburg. It was through a t-shirt and a pair of shorts that both men respectively narrated different experiences of home and homemaking along the way and once in Hamburg. As Mahdi and Miran described the clothes to me it quickly became clear that these were far more than just something to cover and protect them. Clothing was one of the most prevalent and frequent items that came up when refugees spoke about their journeys and the memories they carried and collected along the way. It quickly became apparent in interviews that items of clothing, unlike photographs or other more traditional memory aides, did not start out as ‘memory objects,’ but rather, with time and routine usage they gathered shared experiences, memories and emotional attachment (Marschall, 2019). However, these memories were not just of other times and places but interacted with both along the journey and during resettlement as refugees were constantly engaged in the process of homemaking. Clothing reminds us that materials are not simply semiotic receptors, but sensual objects with particular qualities (Miller, 2010). The sensual memories evoked by the clothing were core to understanding their connection to Hamburg during resettlement.

A t-shirt ‘full of time’

Mahdi was the first refugee I spoke to and to whom I continuously returned to with questions and thoughts throughout the research. Mahdi came from a small village in Afghanistan where he worked as a teacher as well as an interpreter for the American organisation, National Guard. In 2012, Mahdi's life as he knew it drastically changed. At the beginning of the year his younger brother was taken in by the authorities and killed, days later Mahdi was also summoned. After receiving the letter he knew it was only a matter of time before the authorities would come for him as well. Within hours he had packed a small bag and said goodbye to his mother, father, sister, brother-in-law and baby niece, all of whom he doubted he would ever see again.

Mahdi described leaving in his ‘traditional Afghan clothes, a long shirt over cotton trousers’. He had worn this style of clothing for as long as he could remember but as soon as he crossed into Iran, he swapped them for a pair of jeans and t-shirt, leaving his Afghan clothes on the roadside, never to be seen again. I asked him whether he was sad to leave them behind, but Mahdi said, ‘these clothes, they are very comfortable, but I only wore them because everybody else did, I didn't really have a choice. I prefer to wear jeans and a t-shirt, these feel more like mine.’ Leaving his clothes on the roadside and choosing a new outfit was a key way in which Mahdi was able to secure his identity during a period in which everything else had been forcibly taken away from him. Whilst the experiences of refugees, especially during flight are often only seen through the lens of victimisation, it is important to also highlight the small ways in which refugees, in this case through clothes, take back some control and decide who they are and who they want to be (Kiddey, 2020).

Mahdi quickly moved on from Iran and into Turkey where he stayed with a friend in Istanbul for two years. Originally, Mahdi had planned on only staying a few weeks until he could get the boat onwards to Greece and continue his journey. But like many routes of migration, things didn't pan out that way and Mahdi found that he quickly grew attached to a place which was only ever meant to be a ‘stepping stone’ location (Amrith, 2021: 127). In comparison to authors who see home exclusively as origin and resettlement, this example highlights the way places along the way form part of a larger network of home. Whilst Mahdi was in Turkey, he formed connections to the food, the culture and the life around him. Mahdi always smiled when he spoke about this time in his life. He told me how much he loved the architecture, the markets and the small cafes where he would go for his morning coffee. Although Mahdi was forced to work secretly and illegally in a tool factory, it was the smells, tastes and sights of roaming through the city that became most embedded with his descriptions of this time and place.

Mahdi described a particular t-shirt that had become directly associated with this environment and time in his life. It was an earthy brown colour with ‘New York’ written across the front. Mahdi told me about the time he bought it down one of his favourite streets in Istanbul. He said to me; ‘it was hanging outside a shop and I saw it while I was walking down, and I was like, yes, I will buy this t-shirt.’ As he wore it through the streets of Istanbul it became closely connected to his life there and the street where he originally bought it, where he always went to get his morning coffee. Now sitting in Hamburg, under the quiet hum of the library lights, Mahdi described his t-shirt as being ‘like a song that you hear for the first time and when ten years later you hear it again it takes you back to that time … I had a good time with this t-shirt and it always reminds me of that time and place.’ Through the t-shirt Mahdi is able to return to Istanbul and the life he was leading there, linking Mahdi to this home environment through the memories it contains.

Digby (2006: 171) describes these objects as ‘metonyms for places and events’ through which our past can be re-experienced. The t-shirt acts as an important ‘interface’ between Mahdi and the world, connecting him to both his past and present (Digby, 2006: 180). Objects as interfaces allow subjects to engage in the process of self-narration, whereby they understand who they are and how they relate to the world around them. For people on the move, these objects ‘are evoked to maintain images of the self, to magically conjure up past worlds of comfort, and to negotiate a place within the new culture and place’ (Digby, 2006: 185). This allows people to understand themselves within a new environment through reflecting on their life stories, what they have been through and what they hope for the future. However, the ‘meanings are not inherent in the objects; rather, meanings are invisible, attached only through our stories’ (Digby, 2006: 176). As such, the meaning of an object is not fixed, but changes as we change, helping us to renegotiate our sense of self within any environment. Both along the journey and during resettlement, the t-shirt stored memories of what Mahdi had been through, allowing him to reflect on himself and his place in the world.

During the summer of 2014, whilst Mahdi was still living in Istanbul, he was put in contact with a man who said he could take him across to Athens. Mahdi went out and bought himself a waterproof bag and a life jacket. Once again, he was forced to leave the majority of his things behind. But he decided to wear his ‘New York’ t-shirt. He wore it throughout the entire six-week journey to Germany, only taking it off to wash. He wore it when the dinghy he was travelling in began to fill with water, he wore it when after a second attempt, he managed to make it to Athens, and he wore it when he finally arrived in Munich with just twenty Euros and forty-five cents and no idea what to do next. It bleached under the sun, it tore as he raced through Hungarian forests and across the border in Austria. It gathered a range of stains, some of which Mahdi can trace back to particular incidents and environments, others which happened unknowingly but remain important markers of what he described as a life changing journey. Things he felt and saw during that journey, he said, will always stay with him. Thinking back to this time, Mahdi described how when he did not have any shelter or anything else to protect him, his t-shirt continued to comfort him, taking him back to the streets, smells and sights of Istanbul.

Mahdi described the journey from Istanbul to Munich as being one of the ‘hardest times’ of his life. At this point in the story, it became clear that the t-shirt also acted as what Schuppli (2020) has called ‘material witness,’ through which often difficult experiences and feelings were expressed, remembered and embodied. The t-shirt, having been with Mahdi through everything, had undergone and archived everything that he had. As Mahdi narrated this part of his journey, it became clear that the t-shirt and Mahdi's experiences had become ‘so complexly intertwined they could not be disentangled’ (Hoskins, 1998: 2). The stories that are embedded within the t-shirt are a way in which Mahdi can narrate the story of his own journey and the hardships he endured. As argued by Kiddey (2020: 603), objects document ‘the material constitution of contemporary social experiences’, acting as archives for the different experiences refugees must face after displacement.

Objects, such as Mahdi's t-shirt, carry the ‘traces of the travels and transformations they have undergone,’ embodying the past and carrying it ‘into the present’ (Dziuban and Stańczyk, 2020: 385). Through the marks, stains and tears, Mahdi can see and describe what he went through, where he had been and what effect this had on him. Hunt (2014: 208) argues that one important feature of clothing is the way in which they take an imprint of the body that wears them, documenting the ‘sweat and stains of everyday life.’ Furthermore, what we see with Mahdi is the way in which clothing also takes an imprint of different environments through which people move and which become embedded in their sense of self. Although these memories were not happy or pleasant, Mahdi spoke about this as an important stage in his life. This highlights the way in which difficult or painful memories can also be part of homemaking, as they are also part of the way in which we see ourselves, what we have been through and our connection to the wider world.

In her introduction to ‘Moving Subjects, Moving Objects’, Svašek (2014: 5) addresses the ways in which ‘object transition’ and ‘subject transformation’ are ‘dialectically related’. That is, as people move through new environments, the changes they experience in terms of their status and identity formation are constantly changing and reacting with their material environments. The two are in a constant interplay, forming aside one another. Particular objects become central nodes within this interplay, constantly relating people to their environments whilst gathering and interweaving different meanings and experiences of home as people search for safe places to stay. For Mahdi, this particular transit completely changed the way he thinks about himself and the world around him. He described this change to me by holding out his hand and contrasting the palm of his hand with the back of his hand, saying, ‘I am still the same person but also the complete opposite.’ As the journey marked and changed Mahdi, it simultaneously marked and changed his t-shirt.

However, as Digby (2006: 183) claims, these stories are not fixed, they are malleable to our imagination giving us a certain amount of ‘power and control’ over our pasts and futures. As Mahdi held the t-shirt he began to tell a very different story through it. ‘I also really like that it has “New York” written on it. The last team that I was working for, they were called National Guard and they were from New York. They were very cool people, amazing people. Because of this, I like this “New York”.’ As Appadurai (1986) argues, objects rarely begin as the thing that we make them into but shift and mutate with every re-contextualisation. Although Mahdi did not have the t-shirt at the time he was working for the National Guard, he has still been able to connect the two through their common association with New York. Mahdi was obviously very proud of his work with the National Guard and often brought it up in conversation.

On one occasion, Mahdi told me about his desire to eventually live and work in New York, alongside his former colleagues from the National Guard. Although it is easy to think of memories as somehow anchored to past places, literature is increasingly showing how ‘future simulations are built on retrieved details of specific past experiences that are recombined into novel events’ (Schacter and Madore, 2016: 245). The memories and associations that Mahdi has weaved into the t-shirt form the foundations of his future hopes and dreams. King (2008: 77) argues that dwelling ‘has no start or end for us, but instead seems to form a seamless continuum of presents linked to past and future. It holds our memories and our hopes and dreams for the future, all along with our present activities’. Like King’s (2008: 77) concept of dwelling as being ‘full of time’, I see homemaking as a continual process linking different times and places through the memories embedded in objects. The t-shirt was integral to connecting a variety of times for Mahdi in the present, as well as helping him to situate the future. The t-shirt thus highlights the four-dimensionality of objects, where they can help us traverse times and places both through the memories embedded in them and the way in which we interact with these memories as we narrate both our present and future.

Mahdi's t-shirt demonstrates how the meaning embedded in objects is not always directly apparent but is part of the ‘situated semiotics’ of the object (Knappett, 2012: 87). Knappett (2012: 87) uses the term 'situated semiotics' to describe ‘the many facets of artefactual meaning’ that ‘are not directly present in a given situation, but are indirectly present, perceived or cognised through association’. Knappett (2012) argues that for us to understand the full semiotic depth of objects, they must be situated within the wider context of their indirect, and therefore not directly perceived, associations. Whilst the direct affordances of the t-shirt as clothing and even the ‘New York’ logo as direct link to the city are clearly perceived, the secondary associations with Mahdi's work and his aspirations for the future only become apparent through our conversation. However, the embedded meaning and the material itself cannot be fully divorced either. Certain materials will be selected for particular meanings and associations because of the possibilities that such materials afford. It is because of the ‘New York’ logo that Mahdi was able to embed this extra layer of meaning, but it is only through unveiling these secondary associations that the full semiotic depth of clothing becomes apparent. Only by situating clothes in the whole context of its owner's biography, does the full range and depth of the meanings embedded within it become apparent (Gibson, 2015).

Speaking to Mahdi and other refugees about their journeys, they were seldom described as a trip from ‘a’ to ‘b’. For most refugees, they were a string of different events, experiences, and environments, some devastating, others uplifting but each decisive, unforgettable and a core part of how they viewed themselves today. For many setting out from a war zone, they could not even begin to imagine what a ‘destination’ or ‘arrival’ might look like. Journeys could span months and sometimes years. They were filled with barriers, uncertainties, ‘stuckedness’ as well as unexpected friendships and unforeseen attachments to places along the way (Amrith, 2021: 4). As Amrith (2021: 128) argues, simple ‘nation based categories’ in the study of migration hide the ‘more dynamic, subjective orientations of migrants as they journey across space and time’. Concepts such as home also often become embedded in such categories, especially in studies of migration and displacement (Amrith, 2021). Here, home is often considered a feeling or a space that becomes uprooted with migratory departure and can only be replanted once the migrant is more permanently settled in their country of destination. This is problematic as it contributes to the idea of migration as a linear process from ‘a’ to ‘b’ in which homes, like people, are moved in a singular migratory event from one place to another, ‘reducing more complex multinational or multilocal journeys’ (Amrith, 2021: 127). It also falsely binds home to nation states where only those who are seen to be settled in one permanent location can experience a sense of home.

In contrast, Mahdi's t-shirt highlights the ways in which objects act as interfaces to a range of different places and times. His t-shirt was not simply linked to Istanbul but to a range of key experiences and places, enabling Mahdi to feel connected to a multitude of different times and places that were important to him. Freund (2015: 62–62) states that we must stop thinking of home as ‘one-time accomplishments in the country of origin and the country of settlement’ but rather understand that for refugees’ stories of home, it is rarely one place or one time but an amalgamation of ‘their manifold and diverse experiences of making home in different places’. As Mahdi moved with his t-shirt it continued to connect him to new routes and experiences along his journey whilst documenting and absorbing them for the future. The way in which objects act as interfaces between people and the world around them is thus not a singular event but a continuous process in which objects continuously document and connect to different environments and events.

Tolia-Kelly (2004) argues that we rely upon the perceived security and stability of materiality to sustain the past within the present. Material culture acts as the solidified form of these pasts, much like the ‘solid precipitates’ that remain after a chemical reaction (Tolia-Kelly, 2004: 315). The events and experiences which encompass the history, identity and heritage of a culture must be stored within these material forms. However, as Tolia-Kelly (2004: 315) recognises, ‘ironically, these material foundations are sometimes transient, ephemeral things’ and therefore must be carefully stored away and looked after. Since arriving in Hamburg, Mahdi's t-shirt has taken on a new status. He said, ‘I still have it, but I don't wear it. I want to keep it. It is with my other clothes. When I get changed, I see it every day but I never wear it.’ Though Mahdi stores the t-shirt with his other clothes, it has a very different role to them. It is no longer worn, but simply kept to look at. By storing it with his clothing, Mahdi is able to keep it protected whilst also being able to see it on a daily basis when he chooses his outfits. Unlike other materials such as metal or stone, clothing fades, rips and wears down easily. It is constantly changing in its appearance, texture, form and meaning. Whilst many of us chuck out t-shirts when we no longer wear them, for Mahdi, it is about keeping it safe and keeping it somewhere it can still be a central part of his life, even if he cannot wear it anymore. Afterall it is not just any old commodity but secures and connects important memories as Mahdi moves through both time and space.

Bringing in the sensual

Speaking to refugees about their journeys, settlement, and homemaking, it soon became clear that objects were not just special because of the meanings that they semiotically possessed but also through the embodied experience of the object itself. This has gathered most attention in studies of migrant food practices (Choo, 2004; Hage, 2010; Petridou, 2001). The embodied experience of eating and preparing food is understood as a key way in which personal and cultural memories are re-experienced within the diaspora enabling migrants ‘to connect or reconnect with self and place’ (Choo, 2004). However, I show that food, whilst abundant in the literature, is just one of many materials through which migrants sensually connect with self and place in processes of homemaking. Through drawing on Miran's story of flight from Syria, I highlight the important sensual role that wearing a particular pair of shorts had for his understanding of self, place and home, especially once he had settled in Hamburg. Bringing in the sensual, enables me to show how the very form, texture and feel of clothes are integral and inseparable from the semiotic and symbolic meanings that they embody for an individual (Miller, 2005). Here, I build on a small body of scholarship which focuses on the importance of the embodied material experiences of a range of materials for homemaking during and after exile (Arev, 2019; Dudley, 2011; Motasim and Heynen, 2011; Turan, 2010).

I first met Miran at a ‘Refugees Welcome Café’ where he and his cousin could always be found by the foosball table. Miran was often very quiet and would generally let his cousin answer for him when asked something. I was thus very happy when he seemed to come a little out of his shell during our interview. Miran told me that the first weeks in Germany were one of the toughest periods as he came to grips with his new surroundings. ‘I had very bad Heimweh, everything was new, the weather, the food, the clothes ….’ Though Heimweh, or homesickness in English can also be about the larger things such as missing loved ones or being able to speak freely in one's mother tongue (Hage, 2010), for Miran it seemed to express itself primarily through the smaller material aspects of his day-to-day life. Miran described how nothing felt right, smelt right or tasted right. He explained how happy he was to find a Syrian bakery, only to be disappointed when he put the bread in his mouth and found it did not taste right.

Although objects act as important mnemonic devices for distant places and times, we must also account for the important role that the body plays in remembering. As De Nardi et al. (2019: 5) argue, the body is essential for remembering as it links ‘what is physically felt and transmitted’ to ‘what is remembered, imagined, created’ even where this linkage is tacit and impossible to fully articulate. As we see with Miran's description of homesickness, the body is the locus of his memories of Syria. This is where Ahmed’s (1999) conceptualisation of memory as something felt first and foremost on the body becomes useful. Ahmed’s (1999: 341) description of home as a second skin describes an osmotic process in which ‘subject and space leak into each other’ to create a particular way of feeling and remembering which Ahmed sees as core to feeling at home. In particular, the ways in which ‘locality intrudes into the senses’, defining what somebody ‘smells, hears, touches, feels, remembers’, creating a sensual connection to that environment (Ahmed, 1999: 341). Ahmed (1999: 343) sees migration as a painful and uncomfortable experience, where the migrant body feels ‘out of place’ because the memories contained within it cannot find material resonances within the new environment. According to Ahmed (1999), individual embodied memories thus become a barrier to feeling at home within a new environment.

During my conversation with Miran there was one item which kept cropping up – a pair of shorts which he had worn during his journey from Aleppo to Hamburg. Unlike Miller and Woodward’s (2012) argument that people often find it hard to verbalise their relationship with clothing, for Miran, the shorts acted as an important prompt throughout our conversation (De Leon and Cohen, 2005). Like Mahdi, Miran wore this pair of shorts every single day from the moment he left Aleppo. They had been gifted to him by his best friend prior to leaving and instantly became a ‘special object’, acting as an important link between his life in Hamburg and Aleppo, triggering memories of his best friend in Aleppo as well as his journey and life now in Hamburg (Marschall, 2019: 254). Whilst Mahdi's depiction of his relationship with his t-shirt, at least in Hamburg, was primarily visual, Miran's experience of clothing was primarily tactile. Clothes, like food, are an important sensual object as they can be easily transferred from one place to another whilst remaining connected to specific locations (Petridou 2001). They connect us to environments through the smells they absorb and emit or, like in the case of Miran, the memories encased in the feel of a particular fabric on the skin. Like food, we attach clothes and their specific sensations to different experiences, landscapes and cultural identities (Arev, 2019; Dudley, 2011). Linking back to De Nardi et al. (2019), we can see that clothes evoke memories held within the body which are released when the familiar fabric touches the skin. The sensual qualities of clothes are thus an important part for many for feeling at home within an environment.

A smile would spread across Miran's face whenever he described them. ‘The shorts are from Syria and I find that I feel totally different, I always feel really good when I wear them’. Now thinking back to his first weeks in Germany, Miran began to tell me about his first clothes shopping trip here in Hamburg. Chuckling to himself, he said, ‘I went into the shop and looked at my cousin and we just laughed, who can wear these clothes? The shapes and sizes were so odd, nothing fitted, and everything felt wrong.’ Telling me about the first pair of shorts he bought he said, ‘I wore them but after two days I simply couldn't wear them anymore. I’m not sure why … something was missing. They didn't feel right. In Syria we had a different material. So I continued to wear my shorts.’ At multiple points in the conversation, Miran links the Syrian shorts feeling good to his own sense of being Syrian. Dudley (2011: 746) argues that it is through materials that refugees ‘work hard and creatively to maintain a sense of continuity with the past, with ‘home’ and with whom they perceive themselves to be’. Through sensually re-experiencing materials from past homes and domestic spaces refugees are able to connect with a ‘pre-exile past’ (Dudley, 2011: 749). The inability to find other clothes that felt right was part of the embodied experience of homemaking, where the body seeks out the familiar to feel at home. Miran's homesickness was coming from his body feeling out of place, surrounded by unfamiliar sensual experiences.

The sensuality and specifically the tactility of fabrics is something which is often missing in theories of clothing, but it is core to ways in which clothes become meaningful in our lives (Miller, 2010). As Freeman et al. (2016: 4) argue, ‘we must examine the intersections of sensation, experience, and meaning that arise through our interactions with material forms’. On those occasions where I was able to be with both interviewee and a garment which they had travelled with, I was able to see just how sensual people's emotional responses to these particular clothes were. In some cases, they would wrap themselves up in the material in front of me, in others they would continuously pick the fabric up, placing it to their face or their chest. It would be smelt, stroked, folded and refolded. When people wore these clothes, they also often described feelings from homesickness to nostalgia to different cultural identities which were all tied up with the particular feeling of an item against the skin. These clothes made them feel a certain way. A feeling that was often tightly caught up with a range of sensual recollections from the past (Dudley, 2011). Miran was no different, the tactile quality of the clothing in Syria compared to the clothing in Hamburg was central to how he expressed his homesickness.

But things have changed since then. When I asked Miran whether he feels different in Germany, something that many informants had described to me, the role of the shorts became more complex. Miran answered me immediately, edging a little off his chair; ‘like a new person, the culture is so different, everything is new’. Referring again to clothing and his shorts Miran said ‘I feel no difference anymore’, now he tells me how he can go to a German clothes store and find things that fit and feel okay. Miran says that the transformation he has experienced means that he cannot even tell the difference between Syrian clothes and German clothes anymore. Although the shorts initially acted as a barrier between himself and Hamburg, he now uses the shorts to narrate the changes within his identity. Whilst narrating his changed stance to clothing, Miran quickly moved on to more general changes he has felt in his identity – ‘I have changed so much, my personality, my behaviour, my goals, I wear German clothes, I eat German food, I speak German. I’m eighty percent different’. Taking a deep breathe in he said, ‘you have to continue, study, learn, do new tasks and after that you forget everything from before, from Syria … all I have left are these shorts.’ He described how he feels like he has been made German, using the shorts as an example for this change. However, now the shorts also connect him to Syria and his life there. As above, Miran describes how he feels different when he wears the shorts. How they take him back to Syria and the person he was then.

This reflects Hage’s (2010) concept of ‘intimation’ which describes how the sensual qualities of material objects experientially trigger our connection to a past environment. However, unlike Ahmed (1999), Hage (2010) does not see this as a barrier to the new environment, but an important way of making us feel at home anywhere. Hage (2010) focuses specifically on the intimations of food for migrants and how particular smells and tastes promote specifically Lebanese feelings of home for migrants in Australia, tying them both to Lebanon as well as their present lives and homes in Australia. In contrast to Ahmed (1999), Hage (2010: 419) stresses that ‘not all intimations of homeliness are memories of lost homelands’ but rather ‘from the moment of arrival into host nations, migrants encounter many intimations of new possibilities’. As we connect to a new environment, we make sensual connections to our sensory environment, intimations therefore act as ‘affective building blocks used by migrants to make themselves feel at home where they actually are’ (Hage, 2010: 419). Where these connections are positive, we begin to feel at home within these environments (Hage, 2010).

Miran's relationship to clothes shows both the way in which new sensations begin to become part of homemaking, as well as how different objects hold sensual memories which are unlocked in the body. As Abbots et al. (2016: 18) argue, it is through our embodied interaction with the tastes, smells and textures, that our bodies are moved ‘beyond the confines of its physical locale and transcend space’. This acts as an important contrast to Ahmed’s (1999) depiction of the migrant body as confined to the unfamiliarity of the country of migration. What we see here is that it is through individual embodied relationships with different materials that migrant bodies can experience a multitude of feelings from a range of places and times. However, Abbots et al. (2016: 21) warn, we should not think of these sensual memories as being tied to these particular locales, ‘but are instead subjected to multiple influences and change’. Whilst the shorts take Miran back to being in Aleppo, they have now also become part of what it means to live in Hamburg. What the shorts show is the way in which the lived experience of home is constantly being negotiated through materials, not just through the stories that they hold and absorb, but through the very way they feel and are sensed by the body. Returning to Ahmed (1999), we can understand the embodied experience as constituting a second skin in which all sensory memory is embedded and mixed. Only by recognising the second skin as a site in which sensory memory is in a constant state of flux, can we move to an understanding of the role of the body in migrants’ experience of homemaking.

For Ahmed (1999), the discomfort of being a migrant is felt first and foremost through the body and one that all migrants share. Whilst Miran did go through the painful experience of finding himself in an environment in which nothing felt or fitted right, that feeling did not end there. As he spent more time in Hamburg, he felt his body adapt, whether he wanted it to or not. This change was not the result of forming a community and collectively reaching out to other uncomfortable bodies as Ahmed (1999: 345) suggests, but rather Miran described it as automatic, as happening out of his control and power. It was a change in how he felt, smelt and tasted things, a change in his perception of the world around him. Throughout this experience, however, he always had his shorts which allowed him to understand this change through narrating his changing relationship to them (Svašek, 2014). In the end, the shorts were no longer part of his story of homesickness, but rather had transformed to become a positive connection between himself in Syria and himself in Hamburg. What we see here is a transition from acute homesickness, to slowly feeling his body ‘acclimatise’ to the new environment and finally experiencing positive nostalgic memories as part of his present and future home in Hamburg (Hage, 2010). Finally, Miran said, ‘I am okay, we’re okay, everything will be okay’.

Conclusion

In contrast to studies of home and displacement that see home as something which gets left behind or only experienced once settled in a permanent location, this paper has highlighted the need to study home as a permanent project, whereby inhabitants continuously reconstitute their connection to the world. Whilst journeys of flight often get ignored and regarded as irrelevant in ethnographies of home and homemaking, both accounts highlight the centrality of these journeys for the ways in which people perceive themselves, the world around them and their conception of home within it. Clothes worn on the bodies of refugees absorb and narrate encounters during and after flight, enabling refugees to negotiate a sense of home for both the present and the future, wherever that might be. But importantly, clothes do not just tell the stories of home semiotically but also sensually. Through their materiality – their form, texture and fabric different expressions of home are also physically felt through clothes.

For refugees, clothes hold a privileged position as mnemonic objects. Many, like Miran and Mahdi, lost everything else that they had taken with them or had very few other possessions. But there are also other key reasons that are more related to the quality of clothes themselves. Clothes are objects that hold powerful semiotic accounts of people, times and places. As they travel on bodies, they become marked and stained, reflecting the journeys that refugees take. Through Mahdi's story, we saw the important role that a t-shirt played in the narration of himself and his relationship to multiple environments. Mahdi's account shows us that mnemonic objects go beyond any kind of national boundary. Whilst certain memories may be identified with a particular place or country, as the objects move and accrue new meanings and layers of memories from different places, they become renegotiated and recontextualised. Nor do objects have to have been somewhere with us, as a text we write our own meaning into them, showing that the memories embedded in objects must be understood as fluid and malleable.

Miran's story showed how sensory memory and material culture intersect as inhabitants come to make their homes in new environments. For Miran, to be able to feel connected to all the memories stored in his shorts, they had to be worn, he had to feel the material against his skin to be able to trigger those memories and feelings. But like with all memories, embodied memories shift with time and context. With new sensory experiences, old sensory experiences took on different meanings and became entangled with new surrounding places and objects. Integrating Hage’s (2010: 420) concept of intimation, these items are not just memories of lost homelands, but they are the very source of new possibilities in the present and future, ‘actively fostered to confront a new place and a new time and to try to secure oneself a homely life within them’. In this sense I depart from authors who have looked at the way in which objects from the past are integral to a sense of home (see Ahmed, 1999; Dudley, 2011). Whilst other authors frequently see home as an idealised pre-exile place, I recognise the continual process of homemaking across different environments and the important role that objects play in connecting them. Every time an item is fostered in this way, ‘the meanings of past memories … are reshaped to hold aspects of a layered, multiple self’ (Josselson, 2009: 647). Miran's accounts move away from the conception of memory as a purely cognitive process, to show the important role the body plays in connecting to and remembering environments.

This paper has highlighted the important role that clothes as mnemonic devices play in homemaking, as they provide the focus through which refugees can narrate a conception of their selves and their relationship to a range of environments. Departing from Ahmed’s (1999) characterisation of embodied memories as forming a barrier between inhabitants and their new environments, embodied memory is integral to the process of homemaking across new environments, where it is constantly renegotiated and layered with new meanings and connections. In both Miran and Mahdi's accounts we see the ways in which mobile possessions secure memory in motion whilst also enabling individuals to add new layers and meanings to different memories of their past. These memories were as much about the past as the present and the future. Memories of what they had been through, where they had grown up and the different places they had stayed in since all came together in the clothes that people wore and cherished. As such, it provides an argument against seeing home as located in localised time or space and instead presents home as a constant relationship that we have to the wider world. This relationship is constantly changing, and it is through objects that we connect, and reflect upon our connection, to different environments from both the past and present.