The following work of fiction was inspired by two things: the desperation one feels in one's bones after nearly a solid year of winter, and an identification with the narrative and analyses of the most excellent academic history ever written --
Professor Susan J. Matt's Homesickness: An American History (2011).
I've basically been living out of a bag for the last 6 years, and in the last 20 years I have not spent a continuous year in one country. In fact, this 7 months spent in NZ is the longest I have spent at one go in one country in ... well yeah.
No matter how good you have it in an adopted country ... town ... city ... neighbourhood, homesickness can be a huge issue. Despite your bravery, courage, luxury, ease, and preparedness, you still may suffer from what a physician -- up until the mid-twentieth century -- would clinically describe as "nostalgia". Literally, "home pain".
The prevailing attitude towards homesickness and its effects is that one should "suck it up" and "get on with it". You big baby! North Americans, who have a huge, almost pathological ethos of "onwards and upwards", are the grand purveyors of this attitude. I was a grand purveyor of this attitude. After all, we have a 400-odd year history of extreme individual mobility. It's in our DNA.
But the reality is that this attitude has a history (a traceable and very recent history), and it's at total odds with how homesickness was viewed and handled in the past.
Which is why Professor Matt can say with confidence that even the
new globalist is homesick.
When I lived in Amsterdam, I spent a good amount of time beating myself up for my "inability" and "failure" to adapt to my immediate environment, despite the fact that I tried everything possible to get down with the locals, to find enjoyment, to belong. I called upon all of my past travelling experience in order to make a go of it. But I wasn't travelling. The reason I moved to Amsterdam was for a job. Onwards and upwards! It was going to be the most awesome job ever! It turned out to be the worst situation I've ever encountered, and nothing I did could right it. On top of that, I moved -- only once by choice -- four times in the space of a year within the city. The weather was horrible, the landscape dismal, the culture unbearable, and intolerance and racism ruled. Even the food was terrible. The only expats who seemed to be loving it were in couples, owned their own property, had permanent jobs, and plenty of cash. If it weren't for the few friends that I worked my ass off to find, I would have shrivelled up and died. The sense of dislocation -- of impermanence -- of peregrinatory
exile -- was unbearable.
What I realise now, and realise even more strongly as a result of reading Professor Matt's book, is that, at the end of the day, sometimes you're just in the wrong environment. That's no crime. It doesn't make you immature or tied to your mother's apron strings. More importantly, YOU'RE NOT ALONE. And even if you choose to go live in your dream location ... it may not feel
like home for a very, very long time .
And so, without further adieu, a fiction born of the emotional vortex that is HOME.
REVENGE OF THE NATIVES
This slow, interminable Spring, which does not feel like
Spring, but a slight confusion.
Of past times, and memories, and faraway places. Foreign
dreams and nostalgia come to life suddenly because programmed to do so by their
origin in distant climes. A beauty to which I am naturally attached: the
diaphanous, tender, intricately veined leaves of the deciduous burst forth and
begin their impercebtible maturation and hardening off. At home, so far away,
they start such a brilliant green and dull with age and chlorophyll to their
green green and seem, even until the very last, invincible. But they will be
vanquished by dark and chill and a slowing in the sap. And then the great
explosion of colour. I once heard that the autumn is when their true selves
emerge: red, orange, yellow, brown, maroon. The blaze of the sumac. Fire in the
forest. And when spring comes again, I revel in the liquid sweetness of the
maple.
Here, against the sharp,
concrete, evergreen natives, these foreign deciduous seem a yellowish, weak
green, and hardly able to fend for themselves. The natives are hung with knives
and spears and pikes. Sentinels armed to the teeth. Some are grey-green, some
are black-green, some are olive-green. Some are thick and juicy. Some are
razor-blades. They do not swish and whisper and stir, but thwack and rattle or
stand immobile as great branches sway in the wind. They sift through the wind,
magnifying its sound until the whole world seems to be ringing out with it, as
though beaten by the wake of the four horsemen descending from heaven. They are
the transmitters of whole raging seas, and their scaffolds. The waxy, stiff
rigidity of the natives is set against the ephemeral, vivacious curves of the
oak, the lattice-work of liquid amber, the whimsical flickering of the poplar,
last messages from a world now unknown.
It is
another morning in the anitpodean spring. It is another morning of dampness and
stubborn chill. Another morning of wind and cloud. Another morning that makes
me crave the heat of my homeland, makes me nostalgic for Southern Ontario,
makes me long for hot, humid summers and the delicious, distinct smells of four
seasons. On this morning I would chop down every pohutukawa tree in sight. I
would build a bridge to home and I would see again the steam of August heat
rising up from rows of corn. I would see the baking dust of a July field and swollen
fruits and vegetables rioting in the sandy soil. I would have the deep, wet
whirring and buzzing of the riverbanks, marshes, and meadows under a full,
close, and pregnant sun. I would put on the hot womb of this world like a
second skin and dive into heat shimmers, and eat of the humid air, and
commiserate with the plaintive cry of the tree toad as I oozed away into the
thickness of heat.
I am so
nostalgic—in my very bones—for the Southern Ontario spring and summer, my
seasons, my landscape, my environment, that I would chop down every rimu in
sight and build a canoe. I would race it northernward to home, and I would not
sacrifice the call of the robin in May, nor the heat of June at 6am, the
coating of sweat, the indolence of humidity, and the rolling of the summer
storms towards their clamour in valleys of fire. As the forests would droop and
sway, I, and all other mammals, would trust in their efforts to survive. Close
to the floor, the bed of pine needles, the swatting of blackflies and
mosquitoes. In the clearing, the horsefly in the middle of my forehead, death
to the horsefly as I dive into the lake, death to the horsefly again as he
makes his endless return to the middle of my forehead, I dive and I dive and
the cool, freshwater is a jewel of suspension fizzing in the melting heat. Hear
the lapping at the shore, a wayward leaf flutters and lands on the surface, the
waterspiders skid around it, the tigerlily reaches skyward, the willow dips,
the rocks hiss and crack, my skins still smells of dust and sweat, and now
maybe a little like fish, loons, ducks, turtles, frogs, otters, and beavers.
Here: damp.
Chill. Wind. Endless wind. Ever-present clouds at low ceiling. Change and
change again while yet the natives ceaselessly carry on. A challenge, perhaps.
The short and sharp thwacking of native leaves and fronds in the unending wind.
Like daggers to the soul. My head on a pike. Short and sharp the day. Here be
cold and damp for me to rest my nostalgic misery on. The hands that never warm
up, the house that never heats up, the only relief physical labour out-of-doors
to keep the body from seizing up and declaring “it” all over. A temperate
maritime prison. This spring.
Even in the
summer, it is never too hot here. Never hot enough at night to wear your
t-shirt and nothing else. Never hot enough to make you sweat in your strappy
dress on the patio of a good restaurant at 11pm. Here, in the summer, we open
up all the windows and doors with no screens so that we are almost living under
a corrugated iron tarp. The outside comes in. It is wonderful. But then, at
night, the windows and doors are all shut up against mosquitoes, there is no
air at all, everyone complains, “it’s too hot to sleep”. Were we to have
screens here we would be burrowed under blankets against the breeze and the
damp. They do not know why we have screens in Southern Ontario. They do not
know the true meaning of “too hot to sleep”.
Oh that my
bones could feel 30 degrees celsius again, trying to sleep. Windows open, outside
air stagnant, fans on, icecubes, wet cloth over my face, my chest, my
shoulders, flipping my pillow, sleeping on top of the sheets in a sundress,
fabric placed between my thighs to stop them sticking together, it is so hot I
have disintegrated, God could take me now because I am already in hell and then
I realise, “this too shall pass”, and I fall into a deep sweaty sleep to be
awakened by the first bird at 4:30am. “Oh shut up, bird! I will kill you!” And
then the orb of dawn, the lid of the rice-cooker is orange and colours the
whole world orange. I am on the lookout for the storm: “Red sky in morning,
sailors take warning”. The lid of the rice-cooker takes in the City of Toronto
and all its suburbs, the City of Pickering and all of Oshawa, the entirety of
Lake Ontario and the Thousand Islands and all the way to Quebec, all the
bullrushes, the furry mammals, the dew drippping blades of grass and exhausted
flowers. The lid of the rice-cooker is pressed down and by 6am the low
spreading glow is over all. It is not short, sharp, and stabbing. It is not the
clear, clean blade of white laser like the New Zealand sun. It is a growing,
golden stain, an arced heat-lamp, the lid of the rice-cooker is illuminated and
glowing and it pulls me out of bed into desperate shade where even still it is
30 degrees celsius and I am puffing up and taking on water and sweating, a
grain of rice fattened in the sun who will never eat but iceberg lettuce again.
I can’t even breathe.
But
there—under that maple tree, its delicate, soft, green leaves tinkling in the
light, dappling me as the hands of Manet with yellow and less yellow and a
dollop of orange, a circle of protection, there I have learned to extract cool
from even the slightest puff of breeze. There I can ooze away with dignity,
believing I am loved and cooled, and not stabbed and throttled by pohutukawa
and palm trees and laser beams. Selfish, scraggy pohutukawa, surviving with no
care for me, surviving in the battering wind, the salt spray, the army of sun.
The army of sun which marches into the very marrow of my bones and sets off
nuclear bombs. It fries my skin from the inside out, meanwhile the wind is a
cruel conspirator who hides the bomb attack in layers of annoying goosebumps
all over my body. Shivering and burning up at the same time. It’s like having a
fever.
Pohutukawa
does not care. He laughs in his bony, twisted, unrelenting way. He promises
shade that proves to be conniving and rootless. He presents a maze of patches
on the ground that leave me otherwise exposed to the elements. He chafes me and
scratches me with the points of his hideous, taunting leaves. Pohutukawa says,
“Ha ha! I will survive!”, while the white glare of the New Zealand sun bounces
off the shiny leaves of his friends and blinds me silly.
I trip. I
fall. Over a cliff, into the booming white water below. I am raked over a rocky
reef, shipwrecked, sodden in the salty sea, swirling and tumbling and battered
around by wave after wave. I come up for air, bloody, disorentated, gasping. I
raise up my arms. “Help!” I yell helplessly into the wind. It smacks me right
in the face.
Pohutukawa, clinging to the edge
of this precipice for 200 years, looks down and laughs heartily at me. He says,
“Told you so!”
