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)
