Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Happy anniversary, Paris.

In her essay "On the Contrary, Outside of It," Angela Ingram analyses geographical exile as more often a "getting away from than going to" a place.
With this intention, I came to Paris. Five years ago. To the day. It was a leaving, a leaping forth, from Bloomington, Indiana, where strewn behind me were several immolations of variously-attempted incarnations - a first version of me was as a graduate student in the Music School, then another Masters in the Comparative Literature Department, then, teaching assistant in the Gender Studies Department, finally, a self-styled hybrid of all-of-the-above as a tentative doctoral student. My ticket out was a teaching-exchange program designed to give me time to prepare for my doctoral qualifying exams (successful!) and write my dissertation (still wildly in the air...). Unfortunately, where my adviser's goals were proverbially pragmatic, mine were formulated less as actions items and more as mystical visions - something to do with enlightenment and actualization. I will leave the evaluative distinctions to later posts...
Armed with my French passport (thanks to my embassy-conscientious mother) and Lebanese birthplace, I was ready to be the American abroad, at least, somewhere in between. My patria was America, through my father, so it was through a reverse exmatriation that I returned to my mother's homeland.
Now, five years later, I am confronted with the task of living life less identified with the exodus and more fully rooted in the present. And in the interstices found between ambiguity and ambivalence, I can still uncover the promise of my Paris.

May your library desks and café table tops continue to support the dissertating journey...



(photo by Walter Bibikow)

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Springtime in Paris

It is my fifth spring in Paris.

Never one to be very good with chronology, it is still hard to believe that I have been here already so long. I still feel the vertigo of the recently arrived and am always a little surprised to feel the ground sure-footed beneath me. But hauled up from the depths, four journals do testify to the time spent here. Well or not - those are autumnal observations...

Reading the pages between the pastel-colored covers, each is carefully headed with dates and the locations of where each writing took place. They read like the code for a new function on google maps - a way to measure the emotional significance and biographical relevance of a geographical location.

In an entry dated from March 14, 2008 at Le Phare du Canal (appropriately, The Lighthouse on the Canal) during the days when I was living in the 11th arrondissement, I was taking notes on Guy Debord's idea of psychogeography which he described as the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviors of individuals. Exploring the behavioral impact of this urban place, I can say - three apartments, countless cafés, several continents later - that choosing to make this city my home has been one of my best decisions.

Sending lilac-scented kisses from the heart of Paris,
C