Making Home: Care Work in Uncertain Times

“The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminised and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honour it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.”– Johanna Hedva^[1] Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” Mask Magazine (2016).

In around 1080, a monk named Goscelin wrote to a woman named Eve. She had started a new life without him in a hermitage in France. He writes to her, imagining her in a “little home of pilgrimage and pasture, this little house eight feet long...secluded from the onset of the world, and hidden away from worldly seas as if in the ark itself.” Elsewhere, he calls her tiny living space “a house of refuge from the hurricane of evils.” At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, while hunkered down in a two-room rented flat in London on research leave from my job in Beirut, I couldn’t stop thinking about this description of Eve’s cell. I kept reading it to other people. A house of refuge.
Goscelin’s invocation of Eve’s cell as small and safe resonated with me in my tiny pandemic bolthole. In those first moments of lockdown panic, I needed alternative models to think about solitude, safety and labor. Eve’s life became one of them. Eve chose to restrict herself to one place to serve God more effectively, and that small space protected her from the world so that she could think more broadly. Her cell was not a prison but a sanctuary. Goscelin calls that space of sanctuary both casula and domuscula in Latin. Both words mean “little house” or “cottage”; the “ula” ending is the diminutive that makes the casa (house) or domus (home) small. This description foregrounds the labor of Eve’s solitary contemplation because, as well as small human homes, both words are used to describe the cozy dwellings of industrious animals.
The casula is a small house or cell that a recluse might live in, but it is also the cell of a honeycomb. A hive of bees is a well-worn metaphor for the collective prayer work of monks and nuns in the Middle Ages. Elsewhere, Goscelin writes of the nuns of Wilton Abbey that “following the example of the bees and ants, the swarms of virgins were eagerly industrious in building the heavenly Jerusalem.” The domuscula is a little house, but it is also a beaver’s lodge. Before being hunted to extinction in the 16th century, beavers were widespread in Britain, and Britain’s waterways would have been dotted with their lodges. Adrian Lloyd Jones, of the Welsh Beaver Project, enthuses about the labor of beavers. Through their dam-building work, “small, insignificant streams are transformed into cascading mosaics of dams, pools and wetlands, all providing new homes for all sorts of native wildlife, from dragonflies, fish and frogs to water voles, otters and water birds.”
Both the lodges of the beaver and the cells of the bees’ honeycomb are products of collective, communal labor. The bees build their tiny cells collectively, and busily collect pollen to produce the honey that sustains the hive. The reintroduction of the beaver shows us how the whole ecosystem relies on their work to thrive. Goscelin uses both of these collectively-built homes to describe Eve’s new, solitary life. Eve moved away from England to France, to enter her cell. We don’t have any surviving writing from her point of view. Spending the rest of her life in that small cell, she dedicated her life to prayer, on the assumption – with the faith – that prayer was active in the world. That it did something. That the love that she felt for God and expressed through solitude would make things happen. I don’t believe in God, but thinking about Eve’s journey into her cell made me think about change developing out of solitude. And maybe developing out of care.

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Medieval solitude was not about individuality. At least not for a recluse like Eve. To be solitary, to dedicate your life to prayer, to reading, to fasting, to contemplating God, was a way of becoming part of a collective. Aelred of Rievaulx, writing to advise his sister, another recluse, tells her about the early days of hermits in Christianity, when “holy men, in order to love their neighbors perfectly, made it their concern to have nothing in this world, to desire nothing, and not even to possess things without attachment.” Possessing nothing, they lived in solitude “to avoid ruin, to escape injury, to enjoy greater freedom in expressing their ardent longing for Christ’s embrace.” In order to love their neighbors perfectly, the hermits had to be separate from them so that they could focus entirely on their active, effective prayer work on their behalf. Writing about medieval recluses in London during lockdown, I wanted to think that our collective solitary decisions to wear masks, to stay in our houses, to put leaflets under doors with offers of help, to join countless mutual aid Facebook groups, could be ways of loving our neighbors perfectly from the individual cells of our apartment buildings. But the mutual aid Facebook group near my home had just as many posts complaining about the neighbors and threatening to call the police on teenagers. Under daily pressure and the lack of proper governmental support, the promise of mutual aid – which looked for a moment, in the pandemic, like collective, solitary care for others out of individual homes – threatened to turn into the neighborhood watch.
Just six months earlier, on October 17, 2019, before the onset of the pandemic, I was watching a one-woman play about Emily Dickinson in a packed theatre with several colleagues and students in Beirut. In the interval, people gathered together whispering and looking at their phones. During the second half, people started to leave the theatre. When we came outside after the show, the streets were empty and we couldn’t pick up a taxi. A squad of armoured vehicles drove past. An ex-student of mine piled seven of us into his 4x4 – four in the back seat, two in the front, and his girlfriend – another ex-student – in the boot. Driving through the city, it felt like driving through a video game, swerving around fires in skips and burning tires. In the back, N laughed, “Don’t worry, F has always wanted to be in a post-apocalyptic movie.” After that night, we were in the street for weeks.
I didn’t write anything about the Lebanese Revolution at the time, but I can’t think about 2020 – about COVID and lockdowns and quarantine – without thinking about all of the people together in Riad el Solh in 2019, chanting and laughing and waving flags. We shouted so loudly. We were so close together. During the revolution, the city became home. For years in protests in England, I’d shouted “Whose streets? Our streets!” along with everyone else, but the feeling of the streets being ours never lasted more than a moment. For the first few weeks of the Revolution in Beirut, though, the streets really were reclaimed. Someone set up home on the Ring – the main road through downtown Beirut – trucking in sofas, chairs, a fridge, lamps. Someone else put the new home on AirBnb, calling it “Beit Al Sha’b,” “House of the People.”
About a fortnight into the protests in Lebanon, we marched through a Beirut neighborhood singing a well-known song about a beautiful young woman walking to a neighbor’s house. The words were rewritten; this young woman was coming down into the streets: She’s coming down, she wants to protest, she’s coming down to the occupation, she’s coming down, she wants freedom, she’s coming down to topple the regime. An old woman in her dressing gown with a towel around her head threw rice down at us from a balcony – fertility, community, blessing. People shouted and banged their tanajer (pots and pans) out of their windows. Many individual voices became one collective sound. I originally thought of this as a moment when the revolutionary street imposed itself into people’s homes – the noise of the protest intervened in domestic space. As time went on, though, I began to think of it more as a moment in which the home expanded out of people’s houses and into the street. The neighborhood, for a moment, was domesticated. 
In her essay “On Coexisting, Mending and Imagining: Notes on the Domestics of Performance,” Giulia Palladini thinks through a field of action that she calls “domestics.” She argues that “the set of activities associated with organising, maintaining and inhabiting a house constitute a category in its own right, and that – just as much as the organising, maintaining and inhabiting of a polis – this category is not a given, but a field of struggle and imagination.” Palladini invokes gestures that “uncouple the idea of ‘home’ from the realm of private life and make it an instrument to think and build public life.” For weeks, every day at 8 p.m., we banged pots inside our houses and listened to the sound of others doing the same from their homes. An anonymous, solitary, repeated action that was also a form of collective revolutionary homemaking. Banging pots and pans out of a window can be seen as a way of bringing the work of home into the Revolution, using it as an instrument to build public life; it is, like Eve’s prayers, a solitary action that makes a claim on the collective. 
So why was it that clapping for the National Health Service in the UK during the pandemic (every Thursday, 8 pm, on doorsteps anywhere in the country) felt so uncomfortable to me? The first time it happened, our street in South London erupted in cheers as everyone came to their windows to be seen by others in the street. My partner and I sank into our sofa, exchanging grimaces. Surely this too was a collective, solitary action? One that brought people together? Apart from my aversion to British invocations of collectivity (Blitz spirit! The nation! Standing together against adversity!) and my fervently held belief that the fancy houses further up the street had probably voted Tory and so had no business clapping for the NHS, I chafed against the social pressure of being seen to clap. Banging pots and pans in Beirut was powerful because I could never see anyone else doing it; there was a wall of noise that came from everywhere and nowhere. If that had been a moment where the home had come into the street, clapping for the NHS felt like a moment where the street came into the home, just to have a little nose around.

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The street came into the home much more violently in August 2020, when 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded at the Port of Beirut, traumatizing a city. The day of the first thunderstorm of autumn, when the punishing humidity finally breaks, is normally a joyous relief. That fall, after the first night of dramatic thunder in November, I logged on to teach my students. Many of them hadn’t slept. The thunderclaps brought the moment of the explosion back and made their houses feel unsafe again. 
When the explosion happened, I was in London on a short period of research leave from my job at the American University of Beirut. For days, I had dreams of breaking glass. I wanted to tell everyone in London how bad it was. I told them to imagine if the explosion happened on the Thames, their house in south London would have lost its windows. Remember how far away the airport is from the port? The airport lost its windows. My colleague’s apartment was destroyed. My friends had a baby and the windows of the hospital exploded, showering their newborn with glass. I wanted to be at home in Beirut to sweep up glass from the streets of the city, from my friends’ living spaces, and pick it out of their pot plants. I didn’t cry. I was so tired and so angry. Everyone in London said to me, you won’t go back now. Will you? Surely you won’t. 
When I returned to my flat in Beirut after the explosion, everyone I saw asked me why I had come back only to teach online. I didn’t really have an answer for them. I couldn’t stay away, I told everyone. I needed to check if you were OK. I couldn’t teach my students here from London. I needed to know what it was like. I had to come home. After the closeness of the revolution, being part of a crowd and part of the city, being away from Beirut at this moment of need felt intolerable. I wanted to work to rebuild with everyone else. 
In between helping with donations and renovating friends’ apartments, all I could think about was how to teach after the explosion. My introduction to women and gender studies course normally begins with a few weeks of thinking about the construction of gender, and in the first full week I teach some Judith Butler. That felt wrong – like pretending it was a normal semester, when even before the explosion we were months into a global pandemic. I didn’t want to address the explosion directly, though – I hadn’t been there, maybe my students needed space away from thinking about it; would talking about it in class compound their collective trauma? 
I started to read about gender, labor, and care to find something that would help us think together about crisis and possible responses to it, which would also fit in with the themes of the class. When I read Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, I found a question that I could use to start the semester: “What does it mean to shift our ideas of access and care from an individual chore, an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body, to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even deeply joyful?” I asked the students how this would change things. What would have to transform for this way of thinking about care to be possible? What would it look like for us to build on the forms of care we’ve seen during the pandemic? What would it look like for us to think about revolutionary moments as opportunities to build care and to center the work of care? My students immediately linked these questions about collective response to the explosion – the complete lack of governmental assistance meant that people themselves had to come together to clean the streets, to pay for surgeries, to rebuild homes.
One of the visible elements of the revolutionary moment in Beirut that has endured is the Instagram pages. As the economic crisis worsened, alongside calls for protests, information about student elections, and news, these pages started to regularly share images of unpaid surgery bills and pill packets. Has anyone got any of these to share? WhatsApp this number – my dad needs this surgery urgently, my mum needs this medication urgently, but we can’t afford it. Putting these calls for help with medical expenses alongside protest calls and news insists on the assistance not as a charitable act but as part of a revolutionary responsibility. In the early weeks of the pandemic, the mutual aid group I was part of in London also felt like it was working when the health and wellbeing of the individual became, albeit briefly, a collective responsibility.

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In Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, she describes the results of an experiment, conducted by one of her graduate students. Basket weavers had asked her to find out why some strands of sweetgrass were flourishing and others dying away – was it the result of the harvesting methods? Her student set up an experiment. Taking half of the plot each time, one group of grasses was harvested stem by stem, and one group of grasses was pulled up at the roots. The final control group wasn’t harvested at all. When the results were evaluated, it became clear that picking the sweetgrass stimulated its growth. Both harvested plots flourished, and the unharvested plot died away. The sweetgrass needed the humans to grow, just as the humans needed the sweetgrass to weave. Kimmerer asks, “Isn’t this the lesson of grass? Through reciprocity the gift is replenished. All of our flourishing is mutual.”
Goscelin describes Eve’s cell as a domus refugii, a house of refuge. A place where she would be safe – to think, to read, to pray. The first women’s refuges in England were set up in a moment of mutual revolutionary responsibility. Women squatted buildings in London to set up safe homes for women fleeing domestic violence, refusing to look away, demanding that the private matter of men beating their wives be made a collective problem. In 2016, an activist group in London called Sisters Uncut mobilized this revolutionary tradition when they occupied a building in Peckham to protest Southwark Council’s lack of support for women experiencing domestic violence. Their statement links domestic violence directly with housing policy, explaining: “Alongside refuges and domestic violence services, safe and accessible housing is essential to survivors trying to escape violent partners. How can she leave if she has nowhere to go?”^[2]South East London Sisters Uncut, “Summer of Action: South East London Sisters Uncut occupation on Rye Lane, Peckham” (2016), … Continue reading

A revolutionary politics that I want to be part of is one that takes the idea of refuge seriously and that labors, however imperfectly, to make home together. The prayers of the recluse strengthen the community. The reintroduction of beavers renews the whole ecosystem. The broken glass is swept up by many brooms. The noise of the tanajer comes from everywhere and from nowhere. We can’t make home by ourselves, and revolutionary moments call us to remember that.