I've been reading.

In Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, the main character compares her new American life to her old Irish one and thinks to herself that she felt that she belonged her hometown and didn't feel as though she belonged in Brooklyn.

 

"She was nobody here.  It was not just that she had no friends and no family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor."

 

"Nothing meant anything.  The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there.  In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar."

 

"Nothing here was a part of her.  It was false, empty, she thought."

 

Homesickness is something a lot of people experience when they move away from the place in which they are raised, especially if they're sensitive to the ways in which the place has shaped who they are.  The language Toibin uses to describe how Eilis feels in Brooklyn instantly evoked for me how I felt when I first moved to DC, before I had any sense of what I was doing there (besides going to college).  Sometimes, it goes beyond homesickness as I understand it.

 

I missed my family and my friends from home, certainly.  But the deepest loss I sensed was that of New Orleans, the place.  I remember being struck by how unfamiliar the air, the light, the ground felt in what would become my home for 10 years.  I remember, distinctly, acknowledging that I'd probably not ever feel of that place and accepting it because it was temporary.  I'd never live there permanently, I knew that.  I'd never raise kids there, perish the thought.  And I didn't feel that way because DC was horrible or unrelatable.  Plenty of people like it fine.  I knew that the place I belonged was the place where I wasn't a ghost, that's simple.

 

What I fear, as my experience of the days continues to be marked by a feeling I can only describe as pre-nostalgia (or more accurately, pre-saudades) for this place is that missing New Orleans won't be temporary after each new loss.  Katrina taught us the lesson of our precariousness.  Katrina gave us a language for loss.  It also gave some of us a sense of survivorhood.  If we can survive Katrina, we can survive anything.  I'm not sure about that.  

 

"She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing.  Not the slightest thing."

Comments

[Carolina Gasolina]

Thanks for the pics. Sobering. Sad that this is the kind of parade the little boy is participating in. The stories in the nytimes are ridiculous.

You will always be a NO girl. Lets just hope your native habitat is not destroyed...