Untethered
What happens to your sense of homeland when you live too many places?
Sometimes I worry that our peripatetic life has left us too unconnected from the earth, or at least from any one place. I often feel untethered, as if I am floating above countries, not sinking roots into them. I immersed myself as much as possible in Yemen, Bolivia, and Uzbekistan. But I will never belong to those countries. I am more observer than participant.
At the same time, I feel equally at home no matter where we go. You could set me down just about anywhere (preferably not in the midst of war or famine) and I would find a way to make it home, finding places and foods to love, finding friends, learning the language. I could happily spend the rest of my life in Bolivia, Egypt, Lebanon, Peru, Scotland, Norway, or New Zealand. It just doesn’t matter to me as much as I feel like it should. I am a chameleon, easily adapting myself to any environment. I would miss places, but I am always missing places. It has become a chronic condition. It no longer matters to me where I die or what happens to my body. No matter where my gravestone is, most people I know and love will be unable to visit it.
We’re allegedly settled here, but I will never belong to France. I will never speak French without an accent, never be shaped by its school system, never feel its politics are mine. But I feel equally foreign in the US, on my now rare journeys back there. Walking into the grocery stores and pharmacies alone overwhelms me; there is too much choice, the abundance paralyzes me.
Although I may never live in the US again, I do find myself more emotional about that country’s politics than about those of anywhere else. I take them personally. They enrage and terrify me. I feel mortified to be from a country that bans books while clinging to guns, that sells weapons to Saudis to use on Yemen, that elects crazed insurrectionist misogynists to the country’s highest office. I feel responsible. I vote in every election, no matter where I am, but that never feels like enough. A mere vote cannot stem the tide of violence, racism, anti-Semitism, and hatred.
Yet like most countries, the US looks better up close than from afar. Up close it is possible to engage with its wild diversity of peoples, spectacular landscapes, and rich cultural life. Up close you can watch provocative theatre, listen to every kind of music, or spend an afternoon picking apples. Most of the people I love, respect, and miss deeply live in the US. Every country comes down to this, comes down to people.
When I decided to move to Yemen, everyone I knew told me not to go. All they knew about Yemen was what they read in the newspapers, which repeatedly and meaninglessly wrote that it was the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden. That it was teeming with terrorists. That no American would be safe there.
Up close, I found a country that did not resemble anything I had heard. I have never felt as welcome anywhere in the world. As I walked the streets of Sana’a, passersby continually called out to me, “Welcome to Yemen!” or “I love you!” The moment I was introduced to a Yemeni, they invited me to lunch with their family. They fed me their best food, offered me gifts, and were endlessly inquisitive. I lived alone in the old city, the most beautiful place I have ever seen, and neighbors often knocked on my door to invite me to tea or to an Eid celebration. The four years I lived in Yemen remain one of the happiest times of my life. Yemen is not how we see it from afar.
France also has some terrifying politics. Everywhere we have lived has some terrifying politics. But everywhere we have lived, we found marvels and incredible humans. If moving around so often has taught me anything, it has taught me that nowhere feels better than anywhere else. There are no perfect countries. There are only interesting differences.I don’t want to oversimplify things; some countries have bigger and more basic human rights issues. I don’t think you need me to give you examples.
Now that we are here, in what is presumably our permanent home, will I grow deeper roots? At the moment this feels impossible, largely because my daughter hates it here and is deeply unhappy. How can I feel happy or rooted in a place that makes my daughter so miserable? I also find myself longing for city life, for the joy of walking everywhere, the broader access to the arts, libraries, stimulating lectures. And god do I miss New York bagels. I am also accustomed to moving every four years, accustomed to change. I get restless. Yet this is the only place in the world we have a home, and it’s a beautiful home, in the most creative, eccentric little village I can imagine.
I suppose there will always be limits to how far my roots can grow into the soil. Always comparisons with the previous places we’ve lived. I find myself wondering, is it ethical to always feel at a remove from the world? Because we are never living in our “own” country, are we less invested in what happens in it?
Yes, inevitably. It’s not that we don’t love these countries and want the best for them. But that I don’t feel the same responsibility to bring about change. I can’t vote in most of the places I live. I can’t influence their governments, nor would I ever try. Meddling in countries I don’t fully understand, can never fully understand, cannot be ethical.
Perhaps our remove from any one country gives us the opportunity to take in how our actions affect the entire planet rather than one particular place? Often I think the world would be better served by less patriotism and more feeling part of a broader world. This gets me thinking about borders and how they came to be. Which reminds me of my friend Matthew Longo’s book The Politics of Borders. Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11. Those interested in the how and why of borders can check it out here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/politics-of-borders/C5FC44039DE284A9FC438F55048B27F1
Constant border-crossing has its drawbacks. For decades, I have lived in a permanent state of nostalgia, always longing for places we have left behind. I wonder if I will ever learn to feel completely present. I hope so.
As I grapple with my illness and what it means for my future, I want to be with old friends, friends who live elsewhere. Friends who already know me, friends I don’t have to impress. I feel too exhausted to present myself to strangers as an interesting person, to try to persuade anyone to like me.
But these friends I long for are not all in one place. They are in South Africa, Norway, Singapore, Bolivia, Yemen, New York, Oregon, California, New Orleans, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, North Carolina, England, Georgia (both the country and the state), Minnesota, and Paris. And other places I’m likely forgetting. I wish I could whisk all these people around me, create my own village somewhere full of friends I can just run around the corner to see.
I am interested in how fellow travelers relate to the countries in which you live. How deep do your own roots grow? Is there one country that feels most like home? Those who are happy in one place, is it something that happens instinctively for you or is your sense of home something you have consciously created? How do you balance feeling connected to the world as a whole with connection to one little piece of it?
Yes, she is. She's a native Polish speaker with five working languages and she's in the process of adding a sixth (Portuguese). One of the advantages of the digital age is that in our more recent moves I don't have to carry as many kilo-heavy multi-volume dictionaries up and down the stairs (though the earlier dicos still line our walls).
Re the expatriate subject of your last post: by chance today when reading an essay by Simon Leys (a writer I've discovered just very recently, and belatedly: he's the bee's knees), I came across this (translated) quote from Victor Hugo:
"I feel increasingly that exile is good.
It is as if, without their knowing it, the exiles were near some sort of sun: they mature quickly."
Leys is writing about Hugo in the particular context of the Bourbon restoration, when for personal safety Hugo had to drop everything and leave France for 20 years, for Belgium and the Isle of Guernsey.
Now, what I know about Hugo you can put in a thimble. I have received ideas about a romantic windbag and Les Misérables. I haven't read the work.
And people like us aren't really "exiles"--we've had the luxury of choices.
But that image of (perhaps!) being somehow near some sort of sun, to mature quickly, appeals to me, personally. Of course it might be self-serving hindsight, to assuage my doubts, but in my case I feel that in my 20s I had a lot more growing to do which I didn't fathom at the time--I was rather immature, and needed to catch up--so leaving the US, and what was safe and familiar, helped me.
This is all very well said, Jennifer. There are always trade-offs. I don't regret leaving the US but it's sometimes been tough, particularly in regard to family. I definitely hear you when you say you'll never belong to France (ah, the accent! don't I know it!) but it might happen that France will, in a manner, belong to you. Since moving to Brussels, I see better how the decades I spent there marked me. It sounds like you've lived a lot of places and by now, well, you would not be you, without those experiences.