Home archives: The stories we carry across generations

By Romina M. Iramloo | ISSUE 28

Childhood photo of the author’s mother. Photo courtesy of the author, Romina M. Iramloo

Trigger warning: This article includes war, violence, and migration experiences that may be distressing to some readers.

Who we are is shaped by the past and the memories we carry. Growing up in a migrant family, I understood myself through the stories my parents shared about life before leaving home. As I grew older, I understood these memories differently, not only because I changed, but because the stories were often told in fragments or withheld until my parents felt ready to share them. 

Our home countries are often shown only through images of bombs, economic crisis, terror and fear. This way of seeing turns the East into something one-dimensional, where everyday life disappears, and violence becomes the whole story, reflecting what Edward Said described as an orientalist view shaped in the West. To avoid confusion, an orientalist view frames societies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and Asia through a Western lens, portraying them as exotic, backward, or frozen in time, while positioning the West as the standard of modernity. Without wanting to enforce an orientalist view myself, I can still acknowledge that some of the stories my parents told me about Iran reflect to an extent what is put out in the media.  

To offer just a glimpse of the stories I was raised on: bombs landing just metres from my mother as she walked the streets of Tehran, the sight of bodies strewn across the city becoming almost ordinary during the revolution and the eight-year war with Iraq. The morality police chased my mother, cutting her jeans so close it almost grazed her skin

And still, life went on. Unfortunately, it did so under the shadow of fear and uncertainty. Migration followed, and exile became their new life.

I heard all of these stories, and I know there are more that they have not yet told. At times, my eyes filled with tears, which I swallowed back. It was not because the stories were less painful, but because of how ordinary they were told. They were shared calmly, almost casually, as if survival itself was how they perceived the world. Over time, I too began to receive these stories as ordinary. So, all of this is true. But it is not the whole story. Hidden within their memories are glimpses of joy and ordinary life. Those were the stories I loved the most, the ones outsiders found hardest to believe, as if good memories could not exist alongside such horrors.

This brings us to archives, whose limitations often leave the true experience of migration incomplete. Archives are often understood as a collection of historical documents and records that provide information about a place, institution, or group of people. This raises questions about how representative archives can be when they rely mainly on verifiable documentation. 

Does the absence of records then mean that an experience did not happen, or is untrue? 

Migrant stories, as mentioned, are often shared gradually, long after migration itself. Their journey is marked by vulnerability, risk, and trauma, making it difficult to formally record as it takes time to share. Freud in his 1917 work on mourning, distinguishes between normal and pathological grief, highlighting how detachment from a lost object - in this case, a homeland - is a painful process that unfolds gradually. Mourning, he argues, involves the slow work of reconciling loss and reattaching to present reality. Viewed through this lens, the delayed telling of migrant stories is not a failure of memory, but a reflection of the intricate emotional work of leaving home behind. As a result, conventional archives rarely capture the full reality of migration, where much remains unspoken or undocumented.

I am not the first to critique archives. Its colonial structure and institutional bias, especially in relation to migration, have long been questioned. For instance, Foucault understood archives as ‘hegemonic, characterising ways of thought, modes of colonisation, and the control of citizens’. For this reason, archives tend to preserve official state perspectives on migration while marginalising migrant experiences and stories. This can be seen through how migration is repeatedly framed through crises and borders, positioning migrants between “here” and “there,”. This is a view reinforced by media images that degrade them to anonymous groups while erasing their personal memories.  

However, what I have come to realise is that debates surrounding migration are often about a process that begins only after leaving one’s country, when archival records usually become available. However, I argue that migration does not begin with departure alone. It starts earlier, shaped by the conditions that make leaving necessary, and includes the lives lived before displacement. Recognising these memories matters as it pushes back against the dehumanisation of migrant lives. It would reveal that before displacement, their lives were full, meaningful, and built, even as they witnessed destruction in their home country. This is what archives should capture.

Beyond academic critiques of archives, even if institutional archives could include migrants’ stories without relying on verification or documentation, a more vulnerable issue remains:

(in)ability to share stories. Visibility can feel exposing rather than empowering, particularly when stories are marked by loss and grief. Therefore, archiving migration stories might be too sensitive. What is often needed instead are private, more intimate spaces – beyond the watchful eyes of others and institutional spaces - where stories can be shared in confidence, among trusted listeners. It is within this need for intimacy that I introduce the concept of “Home Archives”, grounded in intergenerational storytelling as a form of archival practice. These archives capture experiences of pre-migration, migration, and post-migration not through formal documentation, but through lived memory and oral narration. They encompass my own experiences, as well as the experiences of others who grew up hearing stories passed down within families. As Edward Said once observed, ‘once you leave your home, wherever you end up, you simply cannot take up life and become just another citizen of the new place’. Home is therefore not something that can be left behind entirely; it is carried forward through what migrants have seen, what they have lived, and what they remember in their own time. Migrant memories, therefore, shape how migrants make sense of a new life. “Home Archives” creates nostalgic spaces where the former home lives on within the new one. Stories are handed down, taken up by the next generation, and woven into their own understanding of home - one that still bears the imprint of what came before, enabling it to persist across generations. “Home Archives” are then flexible in ways institutional archives can never fully capture.

As I mentioned earlier, when I look back on the stories of why my family had to leave, it is the small joys that stay with me, shining through the hardships that came before migration.

I, for instance, catch myself daydreaming of my grandmother opening her door to neighbours, her hands full, even when there was barely enough to eat. I smell saffron simmering in the mornings, warm and fragrant, filling a home that held more love than possessions. I feel the hum of community, people leaning on one another even when scarcity pressed in from every side.

I hear my mother’s laughter, sharing faloodeh and saffron ice cream with friends from her father’s shop, hands sticky from the sweet treat, sitting on the curb as the streets of Tehran came alive around them. I hear her running with her cousins through narrow hallways I have never seen, voices echoing, feet barely touching the floor, chasing joy between the walls, while some aunt yells at them to stop.

I was not there, yet the memories feel like mine, as though I once belonged. Their homeland lives within me, not only as memory but as inheritance. This is Home Archives.

Romina M. Iramloo 

Romina holds a BA in Sociology with Psychology from Middlesex University and a Master’s degree in International Migration and Public Policy from London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a second-generation Iranian, born and raised in Norway, and her work is shaped by both her academic background and personal experience. Her research focuses on how ideas of home are formed and reshaped across migrant generations. She is particularly interested in belonging, integration, and how parents’ sense of belonging can influence their children. She also works to challenge one-sided narratives about the Middle East by highlighting more nuanced and diverse perspectives. Romina currently works as a social advisor in a Norwegian primary school. Her role involves preventive work to strengthen parents’ sense of belonging and to support cross-cultural dialogue within the local community. Through both her research and professional work, she is committed to promoting inclusion, integration, and stronger communities across generations. Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/romina-m-984450327