When I saw her last, one year ago this month, she mentioned she had been working on my wedding towel. Embroidering it by hand, painstakingly, while her eyes held up. But I don’t know, she shrugged, if you’re getting married any time soon.

“Well,” I asked her, “is the towel finished?”

No, she said. I’m still working on it.

“So am I,” was my reply. And she laughed.

I got word two days ago — she’s finished. Her eyes are failing, but the towel is done, embroidered, pressed, and ready for me to collect from her mountain-top-weathered hands.

Oh lordy.

All those weeks in wintry South Africa I couldn’t wait to come back to a warm summer. But I’m here now and I can’t feel the heat. Can’t feel the sun, can’t feel the stickiness, can’t feel it pressing on my skin, filling my lungs, creeping through my clothes, or trickling down my back. I can’t feel any of it.

The newsroom stays quiet on a summer Sunday eve. I try not to wander.

At the end of the night I walk though a dark, narrow alley to collect my lonesome bike. I don’t even see the shadows. Don’t see the blinking reds and greens at the intersections, don’t see the inky blackness between the full nighttime trees, hardly see other bikes and cars and people on the road. Hardly see the road. I don’t feel the darkness, don’t feel the breeze. Don’t feel the ache of my weakened thighs pushing uphill, don’t feel the moon in my belly. I don’t feel the sleeplessness that tugs on my eyes, don’t feel the exhaustion heavy on my shoulders. I’m up by five the next morning because my body doesn’t feel the time. All it feels is the past. Somewhere else, I would be waking up now. Somewhere else, this would make sense.

It was the word “prawns” that first caught my attention. Stumbling sleepy somewhere around about 2 am on a frosty night in Newtown, I thought I must be hearing things. But then there it was again on their lips, praaawns. They wanted to hit another club just not that spot “with all them prawns and snakeskin pointyshoe n***as.” Heh heh heh. Instead we went to an all-night eatery across town, where tipsy patrons jumped up on the seats to lead a few rounds of Shosholoza, the day’s futbol games looping on corner TV screens. They tried to get me to sing too, but I didn’t know the words.

And so I sat and reflected on why I was back in South Africa. On prawns and makwerekweres, the origins of idle hatred, living frustrations, bodies and borders, the chasms between us, and how far one person has to be pushed before they feel the need to break their brother.

I spent the past five weeks or so traveling from one end of South Africa to the other. The N1 highway starts in Beit Bridge, where Mzansi touches Zimbabwe, and ends 1,929 km later in Cape Town, bending toward the mingling Indian and South Atlantic oceans. The N1 is where the story starts for a lot of foreign nationals in the country. They cross the Limpopo river, by bridge or bush, and the N1 is on their lips. That’s the road that will take them to Joburg, jobs, a different life. It’s also the road on their minds when they look for a way out. An escape from harassment, from threats, and from the promise of violence. The N1 goes both ways.

I was lucky enough to work on this project alongside my wildly talented friend Dominic Nahr (fresh from a Magnum Photo nomination! Yea!), and am deeply indebted to the support of the Pulitzer Center in DC. Our first Pulitzer Center blog post from the northern border is here, with more dispatches appearing here as they come. It’s worth poking around my twitter for updates too.

I still have piles of interviews, notes and audio to go through and Dom has such striking photos to share, so please do check back in. This is an important story. It’s not about spoiling any Black Star-inspired unity myth, not about simple racism or throwing blame or a jobs-and-housing cause and effect formula. It’s the most human of stories: about movement, the tugging and shoving of bodies. It’s about skeletons from the past and a crisis of poverty. It’s about being at a breaking point — just before you, or your entire world, explodes.

I arrived in Jozi late on a Wednesday night, a trio of lovelies waiting for me at O.R. Tambo. The flags had just gone up, decorations for hundreds of thousands of anticipated guests, not yet arrived.

Guests of another sort are occupying my time here, though.

Hanging about Mzansi for another while. More to come.

But while I was abroad I felt the need to find out who I was and where my soul was. I chose to be a Haitian woman. I couldn’t see myself being forever a nigger in the United States, an immigrant in Canada, or a stranger in Europe. I felt the need to be a part of something. This couldn’t be the black cause in the United States or the immigration cause in Canada. It could only be the cause of the Haitian people. Thus, I decided to return to Haiti.

Myriam Merlet, The More People Dream

 

I talked to a friend the other night, far from his New Mexico home in Hong Kong, where he’s decided to stay for another year. “I’m quickly becoming a refugee from everything,” he said. “In a way, it’s a nice feeling.”

There is no comparing self-imposed exile, or self-controlled banishment, from the kind of displacement people affected by war, economic collapse, or natural disaster experience. They are on different planes, different planets. I am a different sort of migrant from my parents, me with my fancy degrees, languages, bank cards. But when you are removed, for whatever reason, your relationship with yourself, your past and your future changes. Plucked from a space where you don’t have to second-guess such things, second-guessing becomes everything. It’s in your air.

“I chose,” writes Myriam Merlet, “to be a Haitian woman.” She sought and found her soul in her native Haiti, where she passed decades later in that terrible January quake along with so many others. I am saddened to know that, were it not for that disaster and her death, I might not have found her words. Sadder still that there will be no more words.

I’ve reached the conclusion that one should just proceed, and to hell with the others. This means that I won’t play the game. It’s hard and frustrating because you find yourself alone. At times you question your sanity, your ability to function while being so different from others.

A tribute to Myriam, and to others who perished in the rubble, is here.

Six days after I moved to New York in August 2007, Debbie Almontaser — an educator, inter-faith worker, and founding principle of the city’s first dual-language Arabic public school, the Khalil Gibran International Academy — was forced out of her job. Her employers at the New York City Department of Education had succumbed to a months-long smear campaign led by the NY Post and a swelling group of critics who called themselves the Stop the Madrassa Coalition. Terrorist, radical, Islamist, indoctrinator. “Dhabah,” they called her, attempting to paint her and the others who helped guide the school as alien and enemy.

As this was happening, a very different story was developing. Arabic, the language under siege by those opposed to the dual-language academy, had become the fastest-growing language in the United States. According to a November 2007 report by the Modern Languages Association, there was a 127% jump in Arabic class enrollment between 2002 and 2006, pushing it into the number ten spot.

Almontaser’s case dragged on. After a painful stretch with no movement and no news, earlier this month, a gleam in the distance: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that the New York City Department of Education had discriminated against Almontaser “on account of her race, religion and national origin” when they forced her to resign in 2007. Days later, the current principal stepped down.

I wrote about the Khalil Gibran saga over one year. Here’s an excerpt. Better brew some tea, it’s a hefty one.

(more…)

Ryszard Kapuscinski, lonely in Lagos with “some sort of tropical infection, blood poisoning or a reaction to an unknown venom, and it is bad enough to make me swell up and leave my body covered with sores, suppurations and carbuncles,” fought his hot, sweaty affliction with Claude Lévi-Strauss. Ryszard quoted Claude, and now I quote both:

By whom or by what had I been impelled to disrupt the normal course of my existence? Was it a trick on my part, a clever diversion, which would allow me to resume my career with additional advantages for which I would be given credit? Or did my decision express a deep-seated incompatibility with my social setting so that, whatever happened, I would inevitably live in a state of ever greater estrangement from it? Through a remarkable paradox, my life of adventure, instead of opening up a new world to me, had the effect rather of bringing me back to the old one, and the world I had been looking for disintegrated in my grasp.

Then then he went back to Poland, where he no longer existed. Friends would pass him in the streets, looking quizzically at the apparition. What are you doing here, stranger? You’re supposed to be gone, off reporting from somewhere tropical, alive in your dispatches. Existing in abstract. He went away again and was revived.

Realness is a slippery eel.

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.

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.

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.

.

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

Are you sure you want to do that?

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.

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.

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.)

Un monde étrange avec son langage, ses musiques, son goût pour la violence, où l’on brûle les voitures après les avoir volées et où les centres commerciaux forment le décor et la cible les émeutes urbaines.

There’s something about assimilation that has always struck me as violent. It’s a colonization of self, isn’t it? No one is invading your territory, but as they welcome you onto theirs (reluctantly), a list of prerequisites comes attached. Speak our language. Adopt our dress. Bend your cuisine. Adhere to our norms.

I couldn’t tell you what it feels like to have one particular way of life or culture imposed, because it didn’t quite happen that way for me. Maybe if someone had told me how to behave, which flag to carry, which team to root for, I wouldn’t be so patchwork. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt adopted by so many peoples.

Le rejet par la société des enfants de la seconde génération immigrée peut conduire à l’apparition d’une nouvelle forme de communautarisme. Celle-ci est le fait de sujets socialisés par l’ecole qui ont adopté le genre de vie des jeunes de leur milieu social et de leur generation. Malgré cette intégration culturelle, se manifeste le sentiment d’une identité distincte, construite en réaction à l’expérience de la xenophobie. Le retournement du stigmate en revendication identitaire, le fait de s’affirmer avant tout Arabe ou “Black,” quand on est Français, et qu’on a établi tous ses repères dans la société française, s’apparente moins au retour à la difficulté de vivre simultanément la réalité de l’intégration culturelle et la ségrégation sociale.

The quotes are from “La peur des banlieues” by Henri Rey. It was one of the first books I read when I moved to France in September, and was a harsh and ugly introduction to the mentality behind segregation, laïcité (state-enforced secularism), class divides, and racism. I hated it, but I read the whole thing. It is about insiders and outsiders in the most literal sense — if you are a true and well-to-do Parisian, you live within the city’s borders; if you do not belong, you are banished to the outskirts. Ban-lieue, the lieue de ban, place of exile.

La peur des banlieues, c’est encore la peur de l’etranger et, pour être plus précis, de l’Africain, Arabe d’abord, Noire ensuite, même quand il est Français depuis quelques générations ou quant il vient des départements français d’outre-mer. Refoulés d’une histoire coloniale ponctuée d’épisodes tragiques, la crainte et le rejet de l’étranger marquent de leur empreinte une tradition, peur revendiquée mais coriace, de notre culture nationale.

I had never heard of the principle of laïcité before I moved to France. In a part of the world formerly dominated by the Church, it makes perfect sense — a separation of politics and public life from religion. But holidays still revolve around Christian feast days and saints, and on Sundays, the Lord’s day, you’d be hard-pressed to find too many points of commerce open beyond the most tourist-heavy districts. Pesky details! Under this principle of secularism, the people of France are protected from discrimination and religious oppression. Unless, of course, you’re Muslim. In which case, you, your scarf, your skin, your body are enemy number one.

One arm beckons in a show of welcome. The other holds a stick, in waiting, lest you forget where you belong. The borders framed by flesh and bone are the most complex of all.

Yesterday I saw a woman crouch between two parked motorcycles on my street, lift up her skirts, and pee.

This afternoon it was a little boy at a bus stop across the way. As his mother fussed with his baby sister, fastening the pink straps of her stroller, he unzipped the front of his pint-sized pants and peed onto the sidewalk. His four-year-old urine mixed with the rain.

City as toilet. Even with so many free public potties dotted throughout Paris, I’ve still seen more street peeing in my time here than anywhere else I’ve been in the western world.

Public peeing knows no race, no age, no class. It knows only desire.

The town’s hygiene workers have to clean an average 56,000 sq metres of urine-splashed surfaces per month — a figure that rises to 65,000 in summer.

The highest penalty for urinating in public was dealt to Pierre Pinoncelli, a Frenchman who was fined 45,122 euros (£31,400) in 1998 for relieving himself into artist Marcel Duchamp’s modern art urinal, called Fountain — said to be worth £1.9 million.

He described his “attack” as a surrealist act.
[Source]

Parisians have battled the public pipi for years. First, there were the pissoirs — open-air urinals, geared mainly toward male offenders. Next came the Sanisette — a multi-purpose, self-cleaning WC, mostly free and happily open for use by men, women, children, bums and tourists alike.

Yet despite their ubiquity, these public loos have not deterred even the most casual of urinaters. Paris is their turf, and it is there to be marked. They may not own their homes, have gardens or access to green spaces, but the sloped streets — yellow trickling downhill — are theirs.

Between the hours of 4 and 10 pm, the traffic below my window is especially bustling. Buses, low to the ground and packed, labouring up the Clignancourt hill. Scooters slipping between cars and sidewalk, cyclists, soundsystems, children, drunkards, hoods, shoppers, baguette-chompers, chicken-roasters, crepe-makers. People making dinner, no curtains to protect my neighbours’ spacious, classy apartments from view as they flit about from room to room. Home. Arms dangling from balcony railings, smoke breaks, watching the scurrying or slowed-down bodies below in between drags.

Something like 15 years ago I read a scrap of a poem on the front cover of eye magazine. I have not come across it since, but the first stanza has echoed and flashed in my memory — brightly, sharply, and especially on evenings like this. The poem is called The Brave Never Write Poetry, and the poet was Daniel Jones.

The brave ride streetcars to jobs
early in the morning, have traffic accidents
rob banks. The brave have children, relationships,
mortgages. The brave never write these things
down in notebooks. The brave die & they are
dead.

All of my photos are overexposed. One week of climbing mountainsides in double-digit temperatures, and my eyes could not adjust to the brightness. Spring colours popping. Air sweet with eucalyptus. Conversations heavy.

This time, it wasn’t my accent that made me feel foreign.

There is something about wandering, lost in the rain, that is still the greatest way to get to know a place. Not so great for curly hair or suede boots, but sacrifices must be made. A slow, steady stroll. Bridge over the vast, grand cemetery. Hills must be climbed. Nooks uncovered. And at the top, where the view stretches beyond the the towers and arches to the city’s southern walls, there’s space to breathe it in.

.

I was having trouble writing. The beginning of my plot was buried deep in my chest, and I was too scared to dig it out. Troubled by an elastic deadline, a patient editor, and a paralyzing inability to press fingertips to keypad when anything I really care about is on the line. (It’s been like this for years; have not yet learned how to out-run it.) The loose topic was homeland, the specific was self, and I don’t think I got more than a few hundred (painful) words out over the course of weeks.

This entire blog started as an exercise in home-finding. That word, nowarian, the closest I’ve come.

So, CL-H suggested I write about that senator from Chicago. That guy just might be president some day, he said, and he’s a nowarian.

On June 4th, the day after Obama clinched enough delegates to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, he spoke at a session of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, with the intention of assuring American Jews of his allegiances. Once more, he invoked his own story and told of how, when he was eleven, he first learned about Jewish traditions, history, and the “dreams of a homeland, in the face of impossible odds”:The story made a powerful impression on me. I had grown up without a sense of roots. My father was black; he was from Kenya, he had left when I was two. My mother was white and she was from Kansas, and I’d moved with her to Indonesia and then back to Hawaii. In many ways I didn’t know where I didn’t know where I came from. So I was drawn to the belief that you could sustain a spiritual, emotional, and cultural identity. And I understood the Zionist idea — that there is always a homeland at the center of our story.

From here.

Part of the obsession with home and roots is tied tight with the idea of person value. Without a home, in essence, you ain’t shit.

This plays out on a streets-level; the homeless, reviled, ignored, punished, shunned and lesser. Their smells the soundtrack to an internal amongst-us exile.

And then there are the stateless. Millions of them, uprooted and kicked out through centuries. Without a home of your own, you necessarily occupy the space of another. At their mercy, at their whim. Not woven in their fabric, excluded from their power definitions.

There is this tugging question: is home to be discovered or created?

&

Are there a finite number of home-spaces in this world?

Because unless those lands are limited, I can’t see how displacing one people from their physical home to create one for yourself can ever be justified. But no, wait, that’s even worse…

Those uprooted by war, hatred, expressway construction and condo developers know you can sustain home in your head. You can carry it in your chest for generations, draw comfort from it, and point to your center, your belly, when you need a reminder. But without a home for your body, how long before that home in your heart just starts feeling heavy?