Phantom Fires in Broken Hearths

Phantom Fires and Broken Hearths: That Homing Instinct explores the layered and evocative notion of “home.” Drawing from the literature across English-speaking Africa, including the works of Warsan Shire, the talk examines how belonging is imagined, fractured, invented and remade. Moving between literary cartographies and personal reflections, it asks how displacement, memory and identity shape our sense of home. As Naguib Mahfouz (allegedly) observed, home is not where one is born, but where the impulse to escape ends. This presentation highlights the paradox of home as both refuge and restlessness. Through Kenyan pastoralist traditions, it reveals home as a living concept marked by impermanence, movement and shared storytelling. In the shifting spaces of exile and return, home becomes a site of loss, reinvention and communion, a metaphor for the human condition itself, ever migratory, ever in search of a place called home

Homing (biology) · Imaging phantom · Instinct · Phantom limb · Word (group theory) · Modern American Literature Studies · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact