Feeling estrangement at home, and home across the borders: tracing senses of belonging upon music

This paper explores modes in which, features of music become devised by refugees/ asylum seekers to make sense of, and express aspects of their forced migration experience. The discussion draws on ethnographic material, and is structured around vignettes that display encounters actualized by music, that trigger narratives of (non-)belonging. More specifically, the narratives discussed highlight the dual way in which perceived common patterns in repertories created and/ or performed in the home/host settings my interviewees have fled from/resorted to, foster senses of (non-)belonging across borders. The paper shows how common patterns consequently act as a canvas articulating senses of ‘estrangement at home’, and ‘feeling home at host,’ and juxtaposes my interviewees’ musically imagined intimacies, to their lived reality of consistent (cultural) otherization and (social) marginalization in host settings, as stemming from the predicaments of the legal limbo that asylum processes involve.
The discussion developed contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the relations between (forced) migration and music, addressing particularly the spatially-focused approaches to the creative expressions. Moreover, it hints at the opposing forces that carve refugees’ (non-)belongings, as carved by musical dimensions of everyday life, and the rigid bureaucratic processes.