Home Bound: A Journey of Discovery and Collection

The heroine of Maya Ish Shalom's book is an active, assertive, resourceful woman who knows how to get out of any situation and is searching for a place to call home. She manages to tell a personal story but also realizes through her body thousands of other journeys by other people.

Home Bound (cover)

Maya Ish Shalom, Home Bound, Salomon & Daughters, 2024. (avilable in Englush)

first publication (in Heb.) July 29, 2024.

Maya Ish Shalom's book, Home Bound, published by Salomon & Daughters, is a visual book or wordless graphic novel. Its title, suggesting a search for home, binds its heroine to the house and more than that, to the path leading to it.

Despite having no words, the narrative is clear, easy, and delightful to follow along this path, and to notice how full of movement, expression, and meaning it is. The narrative is clear, but the interpretations are flexible. At the book launch at the Artport fair and in an interview Ish Shalom gave to Portfolio, several reading possibilities were suggested, and still I felt the book allows freedom to see several more directions in it.

The book opens with a kind of exposition on its front cover: there's a woman who stops for a moment to tie her shoelaces, a close-up of walking feet, and then a double-page spread that opens from within the front cover of a New York landscape. This short exposition, in the tradition of the short story, establishes place, a vague present time, the main character, and her central conflict: the journey.

Connected to this are the first two double-page spreads that linger on moments of wonder at arriving in a new place. The woman gets off the train, stands, and the world stops with her; the train in place, the birds static on the sidewalk. In the next spread she stops and looks from bottom to top, trying to reach with her gaze the upper edge of the skyscraper. She again pauses in front of the first building she's supposed to enter, hands behind her back.

These moments of pause at the beginning of the book are very important because throughout its length she's very restless, doesn't linger anywhere, barely stands to observe or examine the situation. No sight she'll see will cause her to stop like the first time she arrived in the city and tried to find the edge of the enormous tower with her gaze.

She climbs and ascends the maze of stairs, with her suitcase at all times. When she discovers the stairs don't lead anywhere, she leaves the building, and from this moment she'll pass through 12 stations, some she'll pass quickly through, some she'll try to be in a bit longer.

Generally, she's drawn to abundance but quickly discovers she recoils from it. For example, she's drawn to an apartment where vegetation bursts out of it. She's fascinated by this and enlists to care for the plants (pruning, planting, watering) and belatedly discovers that the plants have taken over the entire apartment until the basic functions of shower, toilet, or laundry have been made impossible by them. This urban jungle is beautiful and aesthetic, but not practical.

In contrast to nature that appears here and there, technology is quite rare, but gets crazy expression in a restaurant managed without human touch. The machines feed her a respectable meal, but they also don't stop talking among themselves until the deafening noise drives her away. From the technological overload she escapes to human abundance. She enters one house, relatively small, that entirely speaks sacrificial humanity. The house looks like a face, the door knocker looks like a nose, and inside, every piece of furniture and every detail screams humanity. It felt like entering a too-specific Airbnb, like entering an unfamiliar family dynamic on Seder night or, conversely, during shiva.

This inhuman humanity is both mesmerizing and terrifying at once; a mirror embedded with a person, a carpet made of human skin spread like sheepskin, the clock hands are a man's hands, alternative limbs grow like a plant pot in the corner and more and more. The curtain is made from the dresses of two women holding hands to frame the window, and in the following pages these hands will embrace the woman, hug and wrap her.

For a moment she allows herself to sit and be comforted (her face shows this) but when the closeness becomes too close, she escapes from there, from the momentary community or not-her-family. And it seems to me this is the first time her exit is a quick escape, from distress, maybe even terror. The woman who until now only walked calmly or stood, runs.

And while we're on humanity, one might ask whether she misses human company. There are people around her, on the urban street. They walk around her, the building doorman waves hello. At one moment she can't reach the door handles in a certain neighborhood, feels short and small compared to the people on the street who are busy with their own affairs, but one man pushing a baby stroller turns his gaze to her and momentary eye contact is made. Maybe there's some small comfort in this, but no more than that.

Out of all 12 sites, there are several where Ish Shalom lingers. In some cases it seems she simply enjoyed as an illustrator dwelling in them (the restaurant without human touch, the safe, the beach house that's entirely a visual homage to Magritte), but in other dwelling places, there's principled importance. I'll dwell on just two more.

A caravan seems like a perfect solution for her, and she drives it happily, between the city buildings, to the spaces outside, and arrives at a wild forest. She experiences a night in nature and finally does laundry, eats a meal tailored to her with fish she caught herself, positions herself in space (with a drawing of the cat she recently left). The next morning, when it goes up in flames due to a technical malfunction, she watches the smoke rising to the sky, bows her head like in a moment of silence, and for the first time seems sad to move on.

After she crawls to a burrow underground and passes by a house that has only a facade and no substance, she arrives at a house that looks excellent, but up close it turns out it's not at all her size. The house has a brick chimney and a ladder leaning on its side (a clear hint to Alice in Wonderland), and because she's too big she can only peek into its upper floor room where a girl sits. Unlike the bizarre houses she's passed through so far, the girl's room with a good-sized bed, embracing bedding, many dolls and toys (but not too much abundance, because abundance is problematic), an organized table to draw on, a rocking horse. This sight moves the woman, a blush rises in her cheeks.

The girl is drawn from behind, her face hidden from us. If this is the past, meaning the woman in her childhood (possible, mainly according to the color matching) there are quite a few explanations for her condition here. She draws, her activity is found in imagination and its visual realization, above the bed a poster with houses in different shapes. Is the poster what created in the girl the desire to wander the world and examine all types of houses? Another possibility is that this is a picture of the future, the woman looking at her daughter, whom she's raising in a wonderful and stable house, at the foot of a poster containing all the experiences she's accumulated in her life.

Either way, the girl is peaceful, busy with her own affairs. The big woman peeks from the window, her face full of love. But this isn't the right time to stay in this house. She's too big, and the girl fills it completely, it's not hers right now. And she goes, passes from the open spaces back to the city sidewalks.

And suddenly, it's present time. Now she has a watch on her wrist. She enters the train station again and a moment before boarding she opens the suitcase (for the first time) and reveals to the reader and to herself the experiences she's accumulated on the journey. There are 12 objects in the suitcase, one from each site.

The synopsis on the book's back suggests a simple interpretation of the book, "a woman and a suitcase get off the train, searching for a place to call home," and immediately after, as if drowning this simplicity in a sequence of artistic concepts: "their search takes them through surrealism and dystopia, fairy tales and horror stories, futurism and naturalism."

I admit I preferred to dive into the book without this conceptual mediation. This book overflows with beauty, is intelligent and communicates with the reader easily. The artistic and cultural references are very important and add another layer for those who pick up on them, and still the stable narrative allows broad interpretive freedom and that's wonderful.

I referred to the fact that the first moment of wonder and pause was with arriving in the city. The second moment closes the book where she looks at everything she's accumulated so far. She's not frustrated by the prolonging of the path, not tormented that she failed 12 times to find a home. The glimpse into possible life realities, seeing the good in every experience, the choice to continue moving, all this can be seen in her suitcase. She's a collector.

One can see in the suitcase the woman carries a kind of continuation of her body, maybe an alter-ego, maybe a receptacle or container that parallels her role in the world, maybe a black box containing all her secrets, and these indeed were suggestions that came up at the launch evening at the Artport book fair. It seems to me that more than all this, the suitcase is like a kind of "blankie," a transitional object she drags with her from place to place.

The suitcase she carries with her (she doesn't use it, not even as a support, doesn't open it during the journey) is like an object that reminds her she came from a certain place and will eventually settle in a certain place. She's an active, assertive, resourceful woman who knows how to get out of any situation. And somehow, I'm not at all sure she's searching for a home because she doesn't have one or because she needs one. She knows how to enjoy the landscapes, the research, the doing.

In every location that's exhausted, the hint to the next stage already appears; the edge of the cat's thread appears in the yard of the IKEA house she tried to build. When the caravan burns, the boat is already waiting on the horizon. In this sense, it seems some providence watches over her, an organizing force greater than her measure that ensures no disaster will be too bad, that her path is paved.

This force is the force of the author, of the story writer, who takes her heroine on a liberated adventure. She has no family, professional, or national obligations. She has almost no human needs that must be fulfilled (most of her meals except one are interrupted in their middle, only one night of sleep is described). She has a world to explore, life forms to discover. And she has security.

And another matter. The woman is a human being of the woman type. She's drawn in simple, consistent, and clear lines, full of expression and emotion, and she manages to tell a very personal story but also realize through her body thousands of other journeys by other people. To my feeling, more than she's a woman, she's a human being. Her gender is not what defines her, and how would it define? There's so little society around her, no one to tell her where her place is or what to wear. Or to ask why she doesn't have children yet.

It's clear she's a woman, but when you're alone in the world, there's nothing to discuss about "traditional role division." Of course she'll cook, just as she'll drive, of course she'll assemble IKEA furniture and play with the cat. She's liberated from this too. In other words, she's a woman, but she's everyman, or the human with the freedom we all long for. She's free to walk in the world and accumulate in her collection all the beautiful things, and so are we. I, in any case, am putting Ish Shalom's book in my suitcase.