Wellbeing, Space and Society (Jan 2023)
There's no place like [your] home: Exploring Somali hospitality as a care-full choreography enhancing Somali Canadian diasporic wellbeing
Abstract
This article explores Somali hospitality's ontological functions as a cultural custom that functions to enhance the well-being of its (Somali) visitor(s). Interviews with first-generation Somali Canadians (n = 27) depicted Somali hospitality as a choreographed ritual which caters care-fully and sequentially to guests’ well-being. From door to departure, the guest is 'top-down centralized' — the custom commencing first with an attention to a guest's physiological needs (e.g., food, drink, shelter); then shifting to focus on their welfare necessities (e.g., financial, social, medical), and concluding with an implicit awareness of guests' social well-being (e.g., sense of community, sense of belonging in place). During Somali hospitality, both home and host are transformed into material sites of protection, the cultural customs of the homeland providing a buffer against the weight of occupying a multiply racialized (Black, Somali and Muslim) in settler colonial place. Occurring in the private geographies of Somali home(s), the ritual provides Somalis a temporary break from the structural logics of anti-blackness and Orientalism negotiated daily in public space. Through prioritization of homeland social dynamics, the custom care-fully re-positions Somali guests from margin to center — from out of place, to in place. In focusing on geographies of the Somali home and the concealed spaces of racialized Black folk, this work contributes to the areas of Black feminist and Muslim geographies as well as to diaspora research concerned with migrant well-being at large. Most importantly, by highlighting the qualitative intricacies of Somali hospitality, this work validates the existence Black Arab cultural customs, for they remain largely subordinated within and erased from the Arab social imagination.
