home

“I let it go. It’s like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.”
― Joanne Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange

A few days ago I was skyping with a friend of mine back in Belgium. “Are you feeling homesick?”, she asked. Well, that is a very confusing question for me. “Which home do you mean?”, I asked back. She had to laugh and clarified that she meant whether I missed my partned after our amazing couple vacation in Oman. Yes, I did, and I still do. If you consider the notion of home as in the definition of home as a place where your heart is, then I feel homesick. Otherwise, I’d say I am at home. My home can namely be anywhere.
When I just arrived I went to visit my friend from the teacher training in Thailand who lives in Johannesburg. I was still very sensitive after all that was happening in the last year, still quite struggling with myself, still overprotective about my achievements in getting better. We ended up having an awful fight about me living in denial. At some point she asked me what did I actually in the past year, what were my prestations. “I gathered alll my courage and moved to South Africa,” I answered in a small voice. “Bullshit!” bounced back her reaction. “That’s what you do, that’s your f…ing nature. You pack a 30 kilo backpack and head backpacking allover Thailand. That is your strength, but nothing to be proud of. It’s simply what you do.” In an even smaller voice I replied that she’s probably right. She is. I am a nomad, and this is what I do.
I can’t remember a time when I would feel somewhere at home, I always stood out in one way or another. Whether it’s because of my social anxiety, or my social anxiety is the result of that, I don’t know. It is, however, probably the reason why I learnt to feel at home (at ease) anywhere I am. There is no home. And everywhere is home. As a snail, I carry my home around anywhere I go. (Maybe that’s why I keep a pet snail at the first place…). In order to help me make myself comfortable in a new space, I carry a few objects with me (see also my post Objects: https://desperateyogini.wordpress.com/2013/06/24/objects/). It works pretty well. I need exactly one day to make any space my own space. I spread a patchwork blanket my dog used to sleep on, pack out my tea mug, I place my precious Kuan Yin statue somewhere visible, my Tibetan singing bowls and gratefullness diary close to my bed, I hang some of my postures and pictures, … And I get plants.
I applied the same approach when I moved to Pretoria. Firstly, I threw myself on my office, since I was waiting for a month for permanent residence. Using the available objects that already were in the office and my limited finances I created a colourful working lounge with a couch, lots of plants and smell of incense. People passing by will stop and admire the cosiness (the hominess!) of the space. The same I did with my room. One day. How many times did I already do that?
There is a growing group of people like me, the nomads who carry their homes within themselves. I wrote about some of them yesterday, but actually most of my friends (soulmates maybe?) are just like that. Yesterday, taking the train to Johannesburg to attend a book launch of a feminist book on (african) domestic labour, I experienced one of those wonderful moments of shared experience. My colleague and a new friend in becoming comes from Lesotho, grew up in Cape Town, studied in Paris and works now in Pretoria, while living in Johannesburg. Already on our way to the train station we shared our frustrations about the university gender policy. Once sitting comfortably in the Gautrein our talk turned into the direction of home. Maybe, I proposed, the two of us don’t have this feeling of “we”, of belonging to a certain group, because of our nomadic subjectivity. We never belonged anywhere, which is why we experience difficulties identifying with a group based on one characteristics. She agreed, after which we shared the complex stories of our paths. She also doesn’t have this feeling of home as a place. Where would it be in her case? In Lesotho, which she left at the age of 17? Paris, where she got into a relationship and gave birth to a child, but stayed marginalized? In South Africa, whose struggles she simply can’t identify with?
That sounded indeed very recognizable. She reminded me of many of my friends who took a similar path as she, and I. Many of them are artists, many of them are academics. Maybe there is a connection between the drive to migrate and the drive to create. Maybe it’s something free spirits share. And maybe we all just strive to create “a home”…

distances

A week ago I came back from Oman. I flew 10.000 kilometers and my partner 6.000 kilometers so that we could spend a week together. In a beautiful resort far away from everything. We spent a week in paradise, enjoying ourselves and each other in the beautiful scenery of sand, rocks, sea and palm trees. We read our books in the shade of palm trees while listening to the calming sounds of the ocean, we went kayaking by sunset, indulged in local cousine, took long walks by moonlight, danced under the stars, surrounded ourselves with the intoxicating smell of frankincense, …
As I was waiting in Dubai for my flight back to Johannesburg at 4 in the morning I realized the cruel irony of our postmodern condition. We are able to relocate ourselves thousands of kilometers in a few hours, but are loosing the ability to reach out. In some perverse sense is my partner back in Belgium so much closer to me than poor black people a few hundred meters far from me, because (due to my privileged societal position and skin colour) I simply have no access to them, and they to me. I have problems communicating my worldviews to people in the country of my origin, but I can easily begin a philosophical discussion with my (black) friend’s father in the middle of Soweto.
In the last weeks I experienced a number of fantastic intercultural encounters.
Case one: O. Some time ago, when still living in Belgium, I went to a literary evening with migrant writers. One of the participants presented a great essay on migrants as writers and writers as migrants. I wrote to him, asking for theoretical literature he has ben referring to, but never got an answer. Suddenly, more than half year later, he wrote me back, excusing himself that my message got lost in spam. The Venezuelan migrant to Belgium and Czech nomad, currently living in South Africa, started an almost daily correspondence. In Dutch. We found out that we can easily understand each other, the notions of nomadism, the experience of being a migrant, being an artist. I interrupted our discussion by my trip to Oman and still didn’t find time to write back.
Case two: I. On my flight from Johannesburg to Dubai, I shared the middle row with two Indian men (on my left) and a black man (on my right). The quite large Indian man next to me fell soon asleep, robbing me of my already limited space. Some time later the man sitting next to him started vomiting. When I was ordering another glass of white wine to calm down my nerves, the man on my right asked whether I drank white because I was white. “Oh, so that’s why you’re drinking Bailey’s!” I replied and we started to talk. In a few minutes we found out that we both work at a university, both have a nomadic subjectivity, studied at the same universities (Vienna and Utrecht), … We exchanged email addresses and are planning a reunion.
Case three: R and L. A few days after my arrival back to South Africa I was heading back to Johannesburg to meet two of my fellow trainees from the yoga teacher training in Thailand. I was coming from Pretoria, R. worked herself up from Soweto to Sandton. L. was born in Montreal and lives now in Dubai. The three of us were sitting at a coffee shop, drinking soy cappuccino/chai latte/fresh sqeezed juice and talked. About yoga, about Thailand, about teaching, about our personal paths and so much more. It a wonderful morning spent with people with whom I felt deeply connected, even though every one of us comes from a different culture (different continent even!) and has a different background. That day, that morning, above my third soy cappuccino, distances became even more an abstract and complex notion for me.
I left my house and parents to move to Belgium, I left for Thailand to find myself, I came back to Belgium after two months and was even more confused. Just before my departure to South Africa I started seeing a few lines. Now, after three months of living and working in South Africa I see it much more clearly. It is not about distances, it is about how far you are from yourself.