Revenge of the Natives

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!”