1.Is there a particular sound, smell, taste or visual experience that gives you a strong sense of 'home'?

When I was studying in England the accent (particularly the Northern accent) brought me back home. To be honest though, and perhaps because the distance is relatively small, I wasn't consciously home sick or in need of anything to anchor myself back in Ireland. Perhaps in a similar way to the migrant experience, I was cocooned from the wider society by the common experiences of your fellow students and therefore that yearning to go home wasn't relevant. I had chosen top study at that university, it wasn't going to be forever and I could return whenever I wanted so what was I missing out on. In addition, being Irish in England is not that dissimilar to being Irish at home. We speak the same language, watch the same TV, read the same newspapers and socialise in the same ways. Whilst those in the Irish diaspora based in England will argue, quite justifiably, that they are an ethnic minority I didn't feel that I was in such an alien environment as to need to locate a sense of 'home'. But then, I wasn't staying and those that had spent 5, 10, 15 years or more needed that attachment with their 'home' to underpin their identity and protect it from further dilution.

2. Have you ever had an experience where somebody completely misunderstood what you were saying?

Even in Dublin they sometimes fail to understand what I am saying and I don't think I have a particularly Northern accent any more. My students get particularly lost if I use northern expressions ( 'yes' as a greeting or 'aye' instead of yes) which is remarkable when the border is only a few miles up the road and hardly the other side of the world. Living in Dublin I am possibly more conscious of the Scottish influence in the northern accent and the absence of expressions that I thought were universal but now turn out to be regional. That regionality is important and I think we forget it sometimes when we talk about national boundaries that nations are made up of regions that have their own identity...as a migrant coming to a country I think when you have just convinced yourself that you are beginning to understand the local culture you realise that 20 miles down the road they do things ever so slightly differently.

Whose Voice Is It Anyway?

1. The conventional idea of migration is to cut your roots at home and to re-plant yourself in a new country. It is often viewed a one-way movement and integration into the ‘host country’ (never to return home). Do you seek this kind of integration in Ireland?

I think the idea of a person leaving their home country, arriving, settling in, 100% assimilation and forgetting its own roots is a very, very abstract idea of a migration process.
My truth currently is, I am here, I like it, I try to be present and understand as much as possible about where I am and what this is about. But I am also reading a German newspaper, I am skyping and on the phone with friends and family, Dragan and I still have a room in Berlin, we share a flat with our friend Uli, an ethnologist working in Africa most of the time. We founded this shared apartment and called it our’ world-apartment’ before we moved in 2006. We all realized that we need emotionally a sense of ‘home’ in Germany even if we are only there relatively few times. Berlin is so cheap that it is doable. I have my tax number still in Germany, we are registered there. I vote in Berlin.
I honestly cannot tell what will happen in the future. It depends on the job situation, but I think far more it depends if I feel at home and welcome here. The thing about NI is that it is certainly not a cosmopolitan situation. In a location like Berlin it is easy to feel at home for anyone, because there is people from all over the world and OTHERNESS is the norm. The question of where you are from and when you go home is not asked. It is a more fluid society of people being there now. Here I sense the relationship to home and land and nation is different (and contested) and I always get identified as someone not from here. It makes me wonder about the possibility to ever feel at HOME completely.
My other idea about life is anyways a more mobile one. I want to bridge cultures and people, bring people here and also to where I come from.
Within my marriage we also negotiate 2 nations, 2 cultures, 2 languages and I am just starting to explore that. I do not speak Macedonian yet, I am hardly aware that I have a huge family now in Macedonia. So where or what will we ever call ‘HOME”? I guess it is a conscious decision at some point to settle down and to stay. People say, children determine often this process of settling down. I am sometimes afraid to get lost in all this. I miss certain things, but I also realized in Germany how much I can be bored if everyone speaks German and agrees on what we call a LEITKULTUR (the culture of the majority)… (this is not so much the case in Berlin, this is more at other places).