The Bedroom: A Symbolic Analysis

The bedroom is perhaps the most intimate of spaces in the home and domicile. It is refuge and sanctuary amidst the busyness of mundane life. The place of undress for the body and mind and, within the concealment of its four walls, where one can be their most vulnerable and rest their spirit.

Over my young lifetime I have set up many a bedroom. Starting from childhood, each of the times my family moved to a new country, my first instinct was to lay claim to a space for myself in our new home. Let that be scribblings on the wall, or lining up my favorite toys just so, I always felt the need to adorn or mark a space for it to truly feel like my own.

It is my first time living in Massachusetts and my third time living on my own and apart from my family.

Although I could not bring all my collected treasures with me from my travels I find myself clinging to the few objects that I managed to bring along as I begin this new life chapter.

At the foot of my bed, draped over my duvet, is one of my mothers’ scarves that she would oftentimes place over her boubou* when she would go to social events in The Gambia. A bright royal blue of shiny fabric that catches the Cambridge light that streams through my window in the afternoon and brightens my small space with the memory of my mother swishing about in her clothes, gold bangles chiming, as she got ready for the day’s events.

On the sill of my window sits two small leather jewelry boxes that I haggled for in a craft market in Niger during an internship, filled with rings I have collected over the years. One dyed indigo filled with my collected silver and the other a dark brown filled with brass.

On my desk sits a worn copy of the Holy Quran that I purchased the freshman year my undergraduate degree in Sharjah, alongside a copy of “The Divine Order and the Universe” I nicked from my father’s library.

A bottle of perfume my sister gave me before I left for school sits on the shelf of the lamp near a sticker my baby sister stuck on my laptop. A mug gifted by a friend, a leather journal from an old coworker, the list goes on and on…

As I assemble the new threads of my life with thrifted furniture pieces that I am beginning to collect as I start to set down new roots here in Cambridge, I have begun to recognize the “bedroom” as not only a space of rest and respite but a repository and time capsule.

The bedroom. Adorned with the trinkets and mementos that we imbue with meaning and sentiment of our lives as we live them. Echoing Bell Hook’s beliefs on beauty, I have begun to see objects as beautiful and a life enhancing medium; necessary and acting as a beacon of hope and transformation that speaks to a fundamental human desire for the pleasing to the eye and soul (Hooks, 1998).

Such a desire that transcends class and race and unfurls into every division of our shared human existence.

We all adorn our space with objects of meaning which in turn leads to the room that houses them to share in that meaning. The bedroom itself becoming a personal object that evokes both feelings of authorship and ownership along with security and comfort. 

*Boubou: a long, colorful, loose-fitting garment worn in many parts of West Africa. (Oxford Dictionary)

Hooks B. (1998). Art on my mind: visual politics ([Nachdr.]). New Press.