Friday, November 23, 2007

thanksgiving wishes

the day after thanksgiving, i find myself ensconced in my robin-egg blue apartment, reading george lamming's "the pleasures of exile." this was a title i chose from my pile of exam books primarily for its title, hoping to counteract the last conversation i had with my mom. while trying to share with her the sense of emotional alienation i was feeling, thinking of all the family back in new york, around the most inviting table which marie-hélène and micah had set, she said - in what i am hoping was a very tough love sort of wisdom: "well, i have already given you many warnings of exile..." and perhaps it is this line that i am trying to navigate: the line which inevitably draws together the multiplicity of the exilic experience - the hybridity and the isolation.

what does help to serve as a beacon during this navigation is this sort of email which i received from my advisor in bloomington: "...Just to say I'm thinking of you. Trust you didnt' forget Thanksgiving..., or Bloomington..., or a friend that loves you. I'll call soon..."

a buoy for which i am grateful

thanksgiving in paris

This is my second Thanksgiving spent in Paris. And with this cyclic repetition, I feel as if my life here is gaining some sort of primacy as opposed to a feeling of seasonal aberration. Last year, I had a very late Thanksgiving dinner in a 24-hour Parisian bar with my two favorite Buddhist lesbians who were visiting me from Chicago. This year’s celebrations involved drinking cranberry-flavored liquor before an evening of French comedic theater and Chinese food with my Italian lover.
Such moments of joy fill the hollows that are carved out by the suspicion (the fear?) that your life is elsewhere. Because in moments of so many family reunions, the panic that geography – that tricky shapeshifter – has foiled you once again, can be overpowering.
These moments (the ones in which you realize that the people you love are there while you are here) can make you remember, with a thud, that geography is not a metaphor. And while this lack of abstraction can be existentially troubling, the palpability of this displacement can be liberating. I have been dislocated from my own center of the world, and that world has been shifted from my center. But for this possibility of imagining different stories for myself, I am grateful.