What is home? Where is it?

Ayanda, the Swedish-South African daughter of Robert Vuyo Khalipa, the protagonist in Missing, ponders the word ‘home’. She has realised just how much the word means to her father. ‘I wonder if it is a place in his heart or the place where he was born.’

The dimensions of home as a place in the heart are never fixed. They expand or contract with the expansions or contractions of our interactions with the world. They are as malleable as clay; capable of taking many shapes. The dimensions of home as a place of birth, on the other hand, tend to be fixed. They may remain unchanged in memory, whether we have moved to live away from our place of birth, or have never left it. Home as place of birth can be a lingering sense of sameness. If change occurs, as it always does, it is experienced more as small rather than as phenomenal transformation.

But beyond where it is, what is home?

Robert Khalipa answers this question at the end of the play. Home is ‘my family and that is the most important thing to me’. He comes to realise that a family chooses where it seeks to be, whether in the heart, anywhere in the world, or in the specificity of place of birth. Missing dramatises how the Khalipa family arrives at this choice of meaning or understanding of home. It is a formative moment for them.

Making a choice is a significant moment of cognition. It is a decision that can never be made without the awareness that it is being made. That moment, when it comes, as it finally does to Robert Khalipa, can also be experienced as liberating. ‘My country is free,’ says Khalipa. ‘The struggle is over. That is my reward. And that is enough for me.’

‘And I can go on now,’ he virtually tells us through his actions, ‘to live my life with my family in Sweden. I am no less a South African for doing so.’ This is how Robert Khalipa feels at the end of the play: free at last. It is as if for many years he has been meditating on exile and home without being fully aware that he is doing so, until finally a deep light is shed.