THAT LIFE THAT GOES ON WITHOUT YOU (the country not taken)

I can hear my life vanishing on the other side of the ocean.

In the end, the road not taken is meaningless. Right, Frost? Things could've been otherwise, but they weren't. However, engaging in thinking about what could've been, as pointless as it may be, is no strange activity to most of us. When you leave a country, a place, with its people, its shops, its streets and its traditions in order to live in a different set of relations, the question somehow feels magnified. If I had stayed, what would my life be like? Some migrants say, "oh, i would've been like the rest, you know, got married, had kids, etc. etc. etc"... although people do those same things when they migrate, but, you know how much we, the people, like to think of ourselves as different from, you know, the people. Some others say that same statement with a more nostalgic tone, one that longs for some sort of stability. Either way, the life not lived in the homeland, or elsewhere, haunts many migrants. Would I have been happier? I often ask myself that question. Where should I have stopped, or ... should I keep going? Or is it just pointless anyway? 
Torturing questions aside, the life not lived is a ghost both for the migrant and for those who stayed. An absence is left behind,  temporarily in many cases,  but a void nonetheless. I find it shocking that this phenomenon is something so prevalent in our current world. It scares me a little bit to know that so many of us experience this kind of temporal absence of a geographical kind in some way or another. It is as, if not more, mundane than death, and it can also be very painful. I guess this is can be compared to the separation between lovers. The post-break-up phase where you sometimes wonder how it would've been if it had gone well... only it didn't.
Pointless reflections, maybe, but that nonetheless run through our minds in our nights of solitude (or bad company). And since today I am not in the mood for being pragmatic, here is a text that covers two of these emotional and despairing topics.

When I left our house in your country

For a while,  I couldn’t stand the touch another human being without missing your touch, the feeling of your body next to mine.

It hurt to touch another. Any other. 

I escaped it, the physical contact that for so long I had encouraged.

My nerve endings would remember us,

The way we watched tv in bed,

The way i laid behind you on our couch,

The way your hand rested on my leg in countless pubs,

The way you held me through the nights.

I wanted the days to pour through me so that I could begin to forget you,

And yet, when the details began to fade, I would go through moments in my head so that you stayed somewhere inside me.

And it rained, every single day it rained, but it wasnt our town, it wasnt our house. It was somewhere else, with no green fields, no birds, no clear sky to look forward to after the storms.

I could feel those feelings escaping slowly through the distance,

My presence no longer making noise, no longer stumbling through your ashtrays, no longer running up and down your stairs, no longer cleaning, no longer singing, no longer…

A new life… a new routine, forming around us, 

Marking our own end… helplessly.



And a little song about absence:  when you lie under different stars

BELONGING AND DWELLING: What it means to inhabit a home

For when we love a place, we dwell there in heart

Augustine

The literature on migration has often addressed the issues that arise for migrants in their journey towards an (im)possible adaptation. One of the main and most obvious ones is to feel like one belongs in a place. In theory, we feel like we belong at home (although some of the literature has also covered those migrants that flee home exactly for the opposite reason (Fortier, 2003)). When we migrate, or even when we travel as tourists, we suddenly encounter that even in our globalized world, things don’t work out quite the same everywhere we go. Migrants often struggle with the process of feeling like they belong in their new place of residence and they often long for what is left behind.  Belonging has been “cleverly” deconstructed in the literature as those who feel like the belong, those who can just "be", and those who long (Probyn, 1996). Evidently, the distinction is not mutually exclusive. However, it does point at the question of what it means to feel like one belongs?

Heidegger always draws inherent links with our context. For him, our relation to the home is marked by our engagement with it, an activity he considers to be intrinsic to us: dwelling.  Dwelling, he says, is to feel safeguarded and protected, to feel at home. Dwelling is our main activity, we direct our endeavors to wards feeling comfortable. For Heidegger, then, to feel at home, to dwell, is an intrinsic desire that is part of our ontological structure, of the way we are as human beings, and that is directly related to feeling part of the place where we are. Also, when I feel protected and safe, I am able to do that for others. I am able to share that feeling of comfort, and also to begin building. In his text Building, Dwelling, Thinking (Bauen, Wohnen, Denken, 1951), Heidegger relates dwelling to the activity of building. When we find a place we can dwell in, where we feel safe, we can build relations, homes, new social networks, which ideally also increase our feeling of safety. So, our feeling comfortable and feeling like we belong is inherently related to our context, and it is also dependent on how we engage with it. In his lectures on the poet Holderlin (Der Ister, 1942 ), Heidegger speaks of a different kind of dwelling: a poetic one. Poetic dwelling for Heidegger is not only feeling comfortable and safeguarded, but also to see the sublime within the mundane. When in our daily routine we are able to discover and experience amazement at those details that normally go unnoticed, we understand ourselves beyond our individuality and related to that context that we are part of. It becomes somehow amazing that we are there, staring at that same landscape, or that person, drinking from that same mug, and suddenly it is as if we took one step backwards and felt marveled at such moment. It is awesome (from awe-inspiring, not from OMG that is so awesome!) that we find ourselves where we do, that we have built (and sometimes failed to) that specific life around us. For Heidegger, although awe-inspiring experiences can happen also within foreign contexts, poetic dwelling involves an amazement with the home, and we can only experience that when we are truly engaged in it, and when we feel like we belong with those things, those people, that landscape.

However, as I said before, it is not so clear-cut, this dwelling business. For migrants, sometimes we feel somewhat comfortable, but something is missing. There is that longing for the home, and yet, we are able to build homes, to love people around us, and to feel like we dwell where we are. Maybe that does not entirely mean that we belong there. Maybe feeling like one truly belongs somewhere becomes complicated for migrants. Migrants often point at a split sense of belonging, of feeling comfortable and at home with certain aspects of their lives and yet they long for others (Ahmed et al, 2003). And in a sense, they are facing one of the most profound questions for humanity. Where do I belong? What is my place in this world?

To their fortune, or misfortune, I guess mostly the latter, in most cases the circumstances decide the place of migrants regardless of their questioning: the job, the economy, etc. In my case, I face the question with more space for maneuver as my circumstances have given me, seemingly, more options, and those options burden me. Everyday for the last ten years I have walked different streets, including the ones at home, wondering if that is the place where I “want” to settle.

Such a simple combination of verbs, where my wanting somehow indicates the possibility of deciding my state of affairs, and, well, reaching some state of “having settled”. I question more the possibility of the latter, although I have probably remained somehwhat blind to the connection between my desire and the actual possibility of it being consummated.

Countless interviews speak of this specific dilemma of migrants (Madison, 2006). Will I ever return home? Some view it as a future promise, some as a hopeful ideal that is limited by their circumstances, which, not surprisingly, is also relieving, because the actual possibility of returning is not really there. The home is the mythic place of return, yet, once the return, temporal or permament, occurs, the pieces don’t seem to fit so nicely.

She used to say she never knew what she was longing for. After all these years, I realize how closely we spoke the same language, and yet, how common that language is amongst those who have been separated (willingly or not) from their home country for a significant amount of time (I suppose the significance depends on each case, the level of attachment, and all those others factors in dwelling mentioned above). What is it that we long for? Sometimes its so clear and yet, it gets wrapped in this feeling of something, of memories that have been re-lived over and over again because when we miss, when we long for the past, we tell ourselves again the stories, the streets, the man from the shop, the taste of that coffee, the sound of his lips as he chewed some pizza, the morning skies, and there they all are, in our heads, being re-played, re-told, but they do not really matter that much. The details do not matter. Sometimes I can’t even remember the colors or the smells, or anything. Its not that. Its that feeling, that sadness, that lack of something so vital, the absence of a part of you, of your life that no one else sees when you’re elsewhere. You are alone in that longing. The details will slowly fade, but the longing lingers silently, and every now and again, that life pops up again, that past life.
It is a split that becomes part of you. You can feel like you belong, you can feel amazed at your life, and yet, there is a call from elsewhere to remind you of other homes where you have dwelled, of other places that you were part of.

That Taiwanese boy

I started smoking regularly in Canada, in some tiny city when I lived with a Taiwanese boy in a basement. It was summer and the only time he came out for air and to take a break from the video games was to have a smoke. Summers are lonely in small Canadian cities. They are quiet, long, and humid. I used to go out for smokes with him, out in our backyard. He smoked Belmont Milds. They don’t sell them anywhere else, so when I left Canada, I had to switch to Camels instead. Nine years later, I walked up to the convenience shop near my house in Cork. It was any day, maybe Tuesday. I had a Tuesday mind, nowhere, focused on schedules and details. I asked the Pakistani guy behind the counter: Can I get a pack of Belmont Milds?

He stared at me funny. I corrected myself, paid and left.  

Canadian days: when the night feels my song, I'll be hooome...


REFERENCES

Ahmed, S., Castañeda, C., Fortier, A. & Sheller, M. (2003). Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford & NY: Berg

Fortier, A.  (2003) ‘Making Home: Queer migrations and motions of attachment’. In: Ahmed, S., Castañeda, C., Fortier, A. & Sheller, M. (2003). Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford & NY: Berg, pp. 115 -35

Heidegger, M.  (1975b), Poetry, Language, Thought. A. Hoftstader (transl). New York: Harper Colophon Books. 

__________ (1996), Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’. W. McNeill and J. Davis (transl.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Madison, Greg (2006) Existential Migration. Existential Analysis, 17.2: 238-60

Probyn, E. (1996) Outside Belongings, New York and London: Routledge.