Rod Stewart, Diaspora, and the Search for Home

In When a Song Becomes a Homeland, we explored how Rod Stewart’s Every Beat of My Heart speaks to the memories, attachments, and longing that accompany those who leave their homeland behind. But what happens after departure? What happens when the traveler reaches a new country, establishes a life, and discovers that the search for home remains unfinished?

A plane lands. A ship reaches shore. A train pulls into a station. From the outside, the journey appears complete. The traveler has arrived. There is an address, perhaps a residence permit, eventually a job, a family, and the familiar routines of everyday life. Yet something within continues traveling.

Rod Stewart’s Sailing gives emotional expression to that unfinished journey. The song begins with a sense of longing that gradually gathers intensity. Stewart’s voice seems to reach beyond the immediate moment, as though the destination remains just outside his grasp.

For someone who has experienced displacement, that longing may evoke more than separation from a loved one. It may recall a country left behind, a family scattered across continents, or a home that continues to exist in memory long after it has ceased to exist in its familiar form. And sometimes, the journey continues for reasons the traveler never anticipated.

When Arrival Is Not Recognition

Consider a woman who has lived in Sweden for thirty years. She speaks Swedish, has raised her children there, knows the streets of her neighborhood, and has built friendships that have lasted decades. She has celebrated weddings, mourned loved ones, and watched her children grow into adulthood in the country she now calls home. Then, during an ordinary conversation, someone asks, “Where are you really from?” She answers politely.The stranger probably means no harm. The question could have arisen from genuine curiosity. Yet something about that word really lingers.

Thirty years of living, working, loving, and belonging have suddenly become insufficient to answer a question about home. She knows where she belongs. But does everyone else recognize that belonging? Frantz Fanon explored this difficulty in Black Skin, White Masks, examining how racial and colonial hierarchies shape the ways people are perceived and recognized. His insights help us understand why belonging cannot always be achieved through personal adjustment alone. A person may embrace a society while continuing to encounter assumptions that place them outside it.

But the woman in Sweden does not experience this as a philosophical question. She experiences it in a conversation. And when she returns home that evening, she may not even mention what happened. She prepares dinner, calls a friend, or asks her daughter about the day. Life continues. Yet the question remains, somewhere beneath the ordinary routines of belonging.

The River That Refused to Choose

Sometimes the question of belonging comes not from strangers in a new country but from those who know our history. In Beyan Negash’s I & Eye: The Mirror, Exile & the Nile, a revealing conversation unfolds beside the Nile between the elderly Hajj Musa and Sumaya, a young woman whose inheritance crosses Eritrea and Sudan.

The river is swollen. Sumaya stands near its edge, where water meets earth. Hajj Musa, who has lived long enough to understand the demands history can make upon individuals, offers an observation. “When the flood recedes,” he tells her, “the river must choose a bank.” Sumaya watches the water. “Do rivers choose?” she asks. Hajj Musa answers, “We must. Before others choose for us.”

There is wisdom in his warning, but also a troubling demand. He knows that Sumaya carries histories from both sides of the river. Her Eritrean and Sudanese inheritance cannot be separated as easily as the two banks before them. Yet he understands that the world sometimes insists upon distinctions that human lives cannot neatly accommodate. For Hajj Musa, choosing may be a matter of survival. For Sumaya, choosing may mean surrendering part of herself. Later, she observes, “There is no pure origin. Only crossings.” But the old man remains unconvinced that inheritance alone can resolve the demands of the present. “And still,” he tells her, “you must decide where you stand.” Their conversation offers no simple resolution. Nor should it.

The woman in Sweden and Sumaya beside the Nile confront different circumstances. One is asked to justify belonging where she has built her life. The other is asked to choose between histories that have already become part of her. Both discover that belonging involves more than geography.The woman has reached her destination. Sumaya stands between two shores. Yet each encounters a world that expects identity to have a more definite address than lived experience sometimes permits.

Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North explores related tensions between Sudan and England, reminding us that migration can unsettle identity without offering an uncomplicated return to what existed before departure. The journey changes the traveler, just as time changes the places left behind.

A river may connect two banks without becoming either one. Perhaps human belonging is sometimes like that.

When Safety Is Not Yet Home

For many refugees, arrival first means safety. A family that has lived through war, political persecution, or prolonged uncertainty may experience enormous relief upon reaching a country where children can attend school and parents can plan beyond the next day. That relief is real. So is the gratitude that often accompanies it. But gratitude does not erase grief.

A woman may be thankful that her children can grow up without hearing gunfire while remembering the relatives who did not escape. A father may take pride in his new citizenship while privately mourning the funeral he could not attend. A young person may become fluent in another language while discovering that certain childhood memories can only be expressed in the language first spoken at home.

These experiences need not prevent people from building fulfilling lives. Many develop deep friendships, meaningful careers, and lasting attachments to their adopted countries. Indeed, one of the remarkable aspects of migration is the human capacity to make a home where none previously existed.

But the new home does not necessarily replace the old one.Sometimes the two live alongside each other, neither canceling the other. A woman may speak Swedish at work, Tigrayit with her mother, and English with friends scattered across several countries. Each language carries relationships, memories, and ways of understanding the world. Which language, then, is the language of home? Maybe the question itself asks for a simplicity that life does not provide.

Rod Stewart’s Sailing can speak to this experience because its emotional power lies not merely in movement toward a destination but in the longing that accompanies movement. The listener may have reached the shore. The longing may not have.

When the Children Hear a Different Song

Imagine a mother listening to Sailing in her living room. The recording begins, and she remembers a time when departure was not a choice freely made. Perhaps she remembers waiting for news of relatives, leaving familiar streets behind, or arriving in a country whose language she could not yet understand. The song carries her backward. Her daughter enters the room. She was born in Sweden. She knows the song because her mother has played it for years. To her, Rod Stewart’s voice belongs to the familiar sounds of childhood: weekend afternoons, family gatherings, perhaps the radio playing while dinner was prepared.

The daughter recognizes the melody. But she does not hear the same journey. For the mother, Sailing recalls departure, uncertainty, and the hope of reunion. For the daughter, it may initially evoke the warmth of home and the reassuring presence of her mother. One song. Two generations. Different memories.

Years later, the daughter may begin asking questions. Why did her mother leave? Who remained behind? Why does a particular photograph bring silence to the room? Why does the mention of a certain town change the expression on her mother’s face? Gradually, the song acquires another meaning. It becomes connected to a history the daughter did not personally experience but has inherited through stories, gestures, silences, and family relationships.

Yet she does not have to reproduce her mother’s grief to understand its significance. Nor must the mother expect her daughter to feel the same attachment to a country she has never known in the same way.

This is one of the quieter challenges of diaspora. Parents remember a home their children may know only through stories. Children develop attachments to a country their parents may once have regarded as temporary refuge. Over time, what was temporary becomes permanent, and what was remembered becomes part of an inherited family history. In other words, the mother may continue to think of Eritrea as home. The daughter may think of Sweden as home. Both may be speaking truthfully. And as they listen together, the song creates a moment in which neither must persuade the other.

The Song Belongs to the Listener, Too

Songs travel in ways their creators cannot entirely anticipate. A listener in Asmara may hear Sailing as a song of romantic separation. Someone in London may associate it with a parent who died far from home. A refugee in Stockholm may remember a journey across borders. Another listener may hear nothing more complicated than a beautiful performance.

The song does not need to have been written about exile to become meaningful to someone who has experienced it. Music enters the lives of its listeners, and those lives give it additional associations.

A melody can bring back a familiar room. A voice can recall a person whose absence has become part of everyday life. A song heard decades earlier can suddenly return with an emotional force that surprises even the listener.

There is no guarantee that two people hearing the same recording will remember the same things. The mother and daughter do not. Nor do they need to. This is part of what gives music its extraordinary capacity to accompany human experience across generations and geographical boundaries. It does not erase differences. It gives people a way to encounter them. And occasionally, it makes possible a conversation that might otherwise never have begun.

The Journey Continues

Edward Said wrote movingly about exile and the difficulties of living between worlds. His reflections remind us that displacement can produce a heightened awareness of different places and perspectives, but such awareness should never be mistaken for compensation for the losses that exile can impose.

There is nothing inherently romantic about separation from family, interrupted education, dangerous journeys, or the uncertainty of not knowing whether return will ever be possible. Yet people continue living. They build friendships, raise children, celebrate marriages, mourn their dead, learn new languages, and gradually create attachments to places that once seemed unfamiliar.

Home can expand. It can also become more complicated. The woman in Sweden may belong deeply to the country where she has lived for thirty years, even when others question that belonging. Sumaya may carry an inheritance that refuses to fit neatly on either bank of the Nile. A daughter may love the country of her birth while coming to understand why her mother’s memories travel elsewhere whenever a particular song begins.

Their experiences differ, but each reveals something about the unfinished nature of arrival. The journey does not always end when movement stops. Sometimes it continues in the ways we remember, in the relationships we preserve, and in the effort to make sense of identities that cannot be reduced to a single place.

Every Crossing, Every Beat

In When a Song Becomes a Homeland, Rod Stewart’s Every Beat of My Heart offers a way of considering the home that remains alive in memory. Sailing brings us to another side of that experience: the movement toward another life and the discovery that arrival does not necessarily resolve the longing that accompanied departure.

One song evokes what we carry. The other evokes what we seek. Between them lies the complicated human experience of leaving, arriving, remembering, and belonging. It becomes obvious then home is not always a destination waiting at the end of a journey. Sometimes it is a relationship patiently built in a new country. Sometimes it is a memory sustained across generations. Sometimes it is the freedom to inhabit more than one history without being compelled to surrender either.

And sometimes, when the music begins, home is neither the place we left nor the place toward which we are traveling. For a few moments, home is the recognition that we have carried something precious across the distance. And that it has traveled with us all along.

Link to the song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOt3oQ_k008

References

Negash, B. (2026). I & Eye: The Mirror, Exile & the Nile ( https://www.amazon.ae/I-Eye-Mirror-Exile-Nile/dp/B0H8Q562CH).

Said, E. W. (2000). Reflections on exile and other essays. Harvard University Press.

Salih, T. (1969). Season of migration to the north (D. Johnson-Davies, Trans.). Heinemann. (Original work published in Arabic in 1966).

Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1952).