Aprendió dos cosas, una en la calle, mientras tenía los ojos abiertos, y otra en su piso, cuando los cerraba para dormir: la primera es que hay hombres que sueñan con los labios; la segunda, que hay muchas formas de ver la luz, pero sólo una de estar ciego. Cuando murió, lloraron por él en cinco ciudades distintas.

El hombre que escuchaba, Benjamín Prado.

::

The stuff of documentary, the stuff of fiction.

With my eyes open, Toronto is fiction because there are many versions of it. They feel mostly unfamiliar. Madrid is documentary because, preserved in closed-eye memory, it has stayed intact — every street and haircut — for five years. New York is somewhere in between. Paris, I’m starting to forget. Canal-side afternoons, the périphérique as viewed from a speeding taxi on my way to work at 3:30 am, the moment at Chez Georges when the crowded cellar overwhelms with its heat and Piaf, the fussy bakers, the saggy dog with no knees, the thin man with no voice who’d pour me too-sweet Kir or espressos, the round bar, the greatest hidden gem on rue Ramey, knowing every inch of the metro, and the awkward clusters of foreigners who are just so excited to be there. I forget if I tried to remember.

Esta maldita ciudad. Estas malditas ficciones.

Bob Dénard - now there’s a biography I’d like to write. Né Gilbert Bourgeaud, aka Said Mustapha Mahdjoub, Muslim, Jewish or Catholic depending on the territory being occupied. Father of eight, murderer of many.

Killer of independence.

The lessons he carried out, cautionary tales illustrating the cost of freedom versus the value of it, have weighed heavily on my mind this past week.

For three decades, beginning in the 1960s, he was the patrol dog of Françafrique and beyond. He put his mercenary paws all over Benin, Gabon, Congo, Yemen, Nigeria, Iran, Zimbabwe, and his favourite target, L’Union des Comores. He’s doctored more coups and coup attempts than I have fingers and toes, generally with the backing of Western powers looking to protect their interests in the decolonized South. It was in France’s interest that the Comores be plunged into chaos and poverty post independence. It was in France’s interest that these newborn republics fail. Otherwise, what sort of message would that send to the remaining colonies? Colonies that, to this day, moodily accept overseas territory status and massive inequality, perhaps for fear that the alternative - independence - would leave them in much worse shape. Recent referenda in Martinique, French Guiana and Mayotte show that no, in fact, we do not all yearn to be free. Some would prefer to stay yoked, heads held above water, than drown.

Vive la mort, vive la guerre, vive le sacre mercenaire.

I wonder if Bob the Dog ever looked on Haiti and cursed himself for having been born too late. “A century and a half earlier,” he might have muttered, “and I could have put a clamp on that, too.”

Awful, awful, awful.

Just a quick peek-a-boo hello from me. I wanted to let you know that my little dot com portfolio is back in action. I scrapped the old templates and built anew. Much cleaner and very basic, due to aesthetic preference as much as my own impatience and limited HTML skills. Someday I will learn how to do fancy things with websites, or wavesites, or whatever next comes.

If you find anything that needs fixing, or have a killer job offer, fais-moi signe.

Today I took some dried bits of tobacco I had balled up tight in my left fist and ground them into a stone monument atop an Iroquois burial mound in Scarborough.

Five hundred bodies below my feet. Sun in my hair. Long clouds shoving their way across the huge northeastern sky.

As I scraped my palm along the grey rock, the back of my hand all yellow and sickly-looking from clenching, I thought of my generations. My grandmother, died November 1st not so many years ago. My grandfathers. Their parents, whose names I don’t know. Three and four and five generations back, complete mysteries, an empty space, blank faces and unknown names. I may never know my family’s histories, but I can imagine them. I closed my eyes, hoped I could honour the ones come before, and asked forgiveness of the ones come after.

Crunch crunch crunch for the dead. Autumn wind, gusting, took much of it away.

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.

I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed. See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write — on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there.

But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” … We are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.

[Again, Joan Didion.]

Every notebook I have kept since 2002, black hardcover blank paged deeply personal things, was lost in the post sometime in the last three and a half weeks. I’ve deluded myself thinking that they could still be on the way — just a little delayed is all, they’ll arrive tomorrow or the next day. But after three and a half weeks it’s time to give up that space on the book shelf I was holding empty for them. It’s time to fill that space with documents or magazines or other, softcover notebooks with quotes and statistics and hastily-scrawled scraps of stories in them. Not the hardcover ones. Not the black ones. Those are gone.

History is tidalectic, I tell myself. It’s not that I’ve lost those seven years — important years, when I lived in Madrid, in Sackville, in New York, in Paris. These past two months, compounded by having to pack up my things and move across the world again, have already been filled with loss. If life were shaped like an arrow, I would accept this as a defeat. But life is shaped like a tide. It rolls around and it roars, in and out with the cycles. Up and down. It will all come back to me somehow.

.

I was that person running to my gate, terminal 1 CDG, my limbs aching from sleeplessness and the weight of my carry-on. The bags tugged me down, wanted to coax me onto the floor, but my legs pushed forward. I heard my name echo over the loudspeaker three times, then four. The plane wanted to leave to Keflavik International without me.

Suspended in the air, or flying through some country-side highway, hours spent staring out of windows thinking and trying not to think. I said once that I only feel at home when I’m in motion, but I don’t know whether “home” or “motion” are the right words.

There is a certain comfort in long-distance travel. It’s not so much the act of being in transit, because the experience itself is very still, very removed. Suspended.

Emotional and physical exhaustion wore me down and I nearly cracked from the strain a few times along this last journey. Break-down from the build-up of so much. But here, in this in-between state, is neither the time nor place — it has no time and has no place. It is a reprieve. A distancing.

Maybe that’s what’s comforting about it. Emotional and physical distance, manifest. See me as I disappear.

.

I spend a lot of time thinking about Tariq ibn Ziyad, DNA tests, and the fluidity of geography and skin.

Cristãos Novos, criptojudeus, and the indelicacies of the 15th century. It’s somewhat of an idle obsession.

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Yesterday I wrote about Africa Paradis, a Béninois film that depicts the migration en masse of down-on-their-luck Europeans to richer African pastures. This morning, the Europe edition of the Wall Street Journal ran a cover story with a similar plotline. First- and Second-Generation Françaises are “returning” to their parents’ homelands, the article says, in search of better job opportunities — and, interestingly, to escape systemic discrimination.

As France’s economy slowed in subsequent decades, however, unemployment rose, and hasn’t dipped below 7% for the past quarter of a century. In recent years, the jobless rate for immigrants has been around twice that of non-immigrants. Now that France is in recession, the first jobs to go are often those filled by minorities.

…. [In Morocco] Life can be better than in France. Surveys show that in France, applicants for a job have around a third the chance of getting a reply if their name sounds Arab or African as they do with a more traditional French name.

France is not alone in wanting to ignore race and ethnicity as markers. “You are all French now,” the state says. “And Frenchness transcends race.” But when your skin, your name, and the way others treat you tell you otherwise, what are you to believe? The (neo-)colonizer / (ex-)colony tango makes navigation particularly tricky.

I’ve had a few 1st and 2nd Gen friends move “back” over the years. It started happening when I was still in grade school — Marisa was 12 when she left her parents in Canada to go live in Portugal — and I have conversations with friends, now in their 20s and 30s, who want to live closer to their roots. There are new opportunities for them in China, in India, in Italy, in Morocco, and at one time, in Zimbabwe.

I can’t say this is a recent trend, but I do know that the tug to go “back home” pops up at one time or another. Goodness knows it’s crossed my mind.

The year is 2033, and the story goes like this:

Europe has become underdeveloped due to acute economic and political crisis while Africa has experienced thriving development.

Olivier, an unemployed engineer, and Pauline, an unemployed teacher, are struggling to scrape by in France. They decide to migrate to the United States of Africa but are denied entry visas, and so try to sneak in by way of a smuggler.

Their lives are turned upside down as they face the grim realities of illegal immigration — arrest, detention, threat of deportation, economic exploitation, etc.

I don’t need to tell you how badly I want to see this film. It seems like fairly straight-forward satire, part of a table-turning “what if?” tradition of storytelling, but I’m still fascinated. Has anyone out there watched it?

One YouTube commenter points out that this scenario is already becoming reality, as many Portuguese wait overnight at the Angolan embassy for papers — but somehow I doubt my olive-toned bredren are being roughed up by Luandan police on arrival.

It’s been quiet here in recent weeks. I’ve been putting thoughts to paper, watching, listening, traveling.

Your hotel is in a very bad area. The worst in Athens, our cabbie warned. “A lot of Pakistani,” he said. “It’s like Chinatown.” This was the first lesson in insider/outsider politics. Vathi Square was the outside — full of foreigners and all the ills that came along with them. Drugs. Prostitution. Violence.

First up was a week-long exploration of Greece, bouncing from Samos to Patras before finally settling in Athens for a few days. I met Iranians, Somalis, Palestinians, Afghans, and others who were living in immigrant detention centers, in port-side camps, and in overcrowded urban slums. Most of them had paid a fortune to smugglers and traveled for months for the chance to cross Turkey into Europe. For the chance to get roughed up by Greek police, to live in squalor, to risk their lives sneaking aboard freight carriers and ferries bound for other countries where they would again be roughed up, live in squalor, risk their lives, etc.

That was early April. Later that month, I was on another plane, south-bound via Dubai.

As I write this, I’m snug in a plane seat, flying right over the neutral zone. If I cup my hands around my head and press my face close up to the window, I can see stars. A carpet of stars I’ve never seen from these skies. Gaza is to my right, somewhere in the unseeable distance. Soon, we’ll fly over the horn. Then over Mozambique. Hours from now I’ll walk the streets in Johannesburg.

In Jozi, the details were different, but the story was the same — the unwanted masses, come to escape tyranny and torture, to escape poverty and disease, searching for that better life that so many of us are promised exists out there for us. But as foreigners, they’re classified as makwerekwere, not to be trusted, and subject to intense systemic and personal discrimination. They have settled into makeshift township slums and taken over entire sections of downtown Johannesburg, en masse, because there’s less danger of getting attacked if you’re in a group. Mozambicans, Zimbabweans, Swazis, different faces for the same makwerekwere.

Of course, the xenophobic attacks of last year were not entirely about xenophobia, but that element cannot be denied.

When you mix xenophobia with the desperation of locals suffering under joblessness and economic crises — particularly, in the case of South Africans, a long-time lack of access to basic services and housing — you get a recipe for disaster. And by no means is this restricted to Europe and Africa. This piece in the Wall Street Journal, about Immigrant VS Local job-hunting tensions in Tennessee, gave me chills when I read it today.

I’ve been writing about my experiences in both Greece and South Africa, and can’t stop thinking about the wider implications, the parallels, the patterns. I also can’t help thinking of the kids I grew up with and their families. Had they stayed behind a little longer in Zimbabwe, in Somalia, in Afghanistan, this might have been their fate. Had their luck been a little off, they could have found themselves in the arms of the Greek Coast Guard, or on the receiving end of a frustrated township mob.

But of course, there’s still time for all that. All we need is one spark — and right now there is no spark more potent than that of economic hardship and the competition for work.

(Boom.)