Time-Slips: Another Type of Homesickness

A few nights ago, Zeko asked me "so where did you think you would live when you grew up? where did you imagine living?"

and the question stumped me just a bit--in part because I have immense difficulty imagining the future (my response was "well. I don't imagine growing up--so the city was always irrelevant.") But giving it a moment's thought--I realized that the answer (if not growing up is not an option, as I am realizing it, sadly, is not with each passing day) would in some way be, 'well. outside the US.'

I've been fortunate enough to spend significant parts (and episodes) of my life abroad: with all the joy/pain/delight/culture shock that brings. While sometime exhausting, the stimulation of being surrounded by new languages, cultures, histories, ways of being and thinking delights and fulfills me.

However. there are passing moments when I see (and thus realize) the pitfalls of being part of a community (spiritually/emotionally/somewhat socially)  which I am physically absent from.
 This morning I got a facebook friend (oh how I loath how they have co-opted the word friend. but that's another conversation) request from the parent (T.) of a kid I grew up with (D). D. (T's son) and I were always one age group apart--growing up with younger siblings of my friends, but still a member of our childhood cohort--and someone whose path I cross every so often back home. Since I've been gone, T and D lost their wife/mother W. to cancer. The first photos I saw of T.s on fb were of the sign at the gate of the cemetery in our village, just behind the church. followed by flowers, with her name, inscribed on the grey granite just legible beyond the petals.

 As kids, we would play among the gravestones, or walk there for gossip or talks, or just to run and shout out child-energy. in elementary school, on memorial day, we would walk from the school to the cemetery to look at the graves of veterans, racing to find the oldest grave; to read the tombstone which a white pine has grown up against, blocking the inscription; to find the grave of the freed slave, laid to rest in our valley. Later, in high school, those stones marked the long walk home from the bus. as an adult, my mother and I have walked countless loops, starting and ending in front of this cemetery, with those stones marking the end and beginning of conversations, seasons, years.

This morning I realized, this place--however overlooked--is an integral part of my sense of place--my feeling of home.

Westminster West is an small enough community that births and deaths are rare--although as the community ages, and the young people (myself included. myself included) move away, community members passing is becoming more frequent. But W. wasn't aged and my childhood was full of her broad smile, her laugh, her Thai food, celebrating Loi Krathong and the dancing lights of our pumpkin lanterns drifting down the Connecticut carrying our blessings for the future (a far cry from the lights on the Mekong, I imagine, but still a beautiful sight).

Although W. passed a year ago this next week--her funeral was this summer, and stumbling across these photos of the family, friends from West West, a landscape so familiar--except for the name on the grave, which, even though I know she has passed makes me gasp, for just one second. Scrolling through these images in a kitchen 4,500 miles away from that little cemetery surrounded by pines, with the square steeple of the church against blue August skies, I weep. For her passing. For T. and D. and for the hole she left in their lives, in our community. For all those missing W.s presence.
and part of me cries for me too: for this absence of home--which I don't feel daily, but rises up out of these photographs, these moments when something changes--permanently. and I am not home to feel it, to experience it, to internalize it, nor to support (and be supported by) these people I love.
and it's a variety of homesickness for which there is no antibody--not to be cured with comfort foods.

(interlude while men come to change the window in our apartment).

It's moments like these where I notice the passage of time, in nearly quantifiable ways. More specifically, I notice the progression of days in places where I am not physically, but still feel integrally connected, spaces which still comprise a fundamental part of me. and where I feel 'slippage' between the present (or at least my present) and the present of places I cannot (and would never want to) let go of, I feel slightly disoriented--as if my north star(s) shift their position in the night sky. These places: my home, in many ways, remain unchanged in my memory, preserved in some internal time capsule; an exhibition in a museum; sounds, smells, movements captured by this novice anthropologist, collecting the traditions of her own life, compiling them into an archive. And when I miss home--these are the relics I paw over, the stories I revisit, the tastes I savor. but this place, this community, this Westminster West is a living tradition. and contained within that life, that vivacity (as it must be) is also death.

The problem--at least as I see it--has little to do with resisting change, but being unaware of it. being excluded physically from so many of the processes which make a community a community, which give it color, texture, substance, and (I think we can argue) meaning. and how to straddle two communities divided by language, culture, space, mentality (although what exactly that means--although it gets used oh so frequently to explain how/why things are the way they are--still puzzles me) and 4,500 miles.

This is not to say that I regret choosing to live abroad. but sometimes, that I wish that these two homes were just a little closer together.

A Single Story of the Past

The past is not something fixed with an independent existence, a once-and-for-all set of events. The ‘past’ is the remembered past, and as such, it is something that is constructed and reproduced in a multitude of ways. In other words, what we refer to as the “past” is our historical memory a particular period of the past that is possible to hold.

From the perspective of conflict transformation, people can have too much of the “wrong” type of memory. With such memories the pain of the past never dies and the “ill” memories are reproduced and transferred from one generation to the next, into a future that has already been determined." --TrasnConflict, describing the work of The Center for Research, Documentation and Publication.

It's a provoking idea--not only as a history teacher, where the verb 'is' (or it's equally static relative 'was') appears just a bit to frequently--that we are (always) playing an active role in (re)making the past. And that not only do we possess our memories, but we choose--at least at a subconscious level--what to remember and what to forget. Oh Milan Kundera.

And, just engaging in a bit of retrospection, I see this process within myself--the choosing of what aspects of the past to celebrate, those to let slip to the side. The past--our experienced past, as well as transmitted (from relatives, culture, schooling...)--is received with the same subjective lenses through which we experience the present. Yes. Ok. on some level, I cannot dispute the existence of facts. Yes! Things happened in the past: things are built, destroyed, maps made, lines drawn. people killed. but the language with which we describe, memorialize, remember, reify these events--those simple words hold a world of subjective interpretation. did he die? was he killed? was he murdered or executed? a martyr or insignificant casualty of the cause? an insurgent? a civilian?

None of these words change the hard truth that he (she/it/they) are dead. but alter significantly how we make sense, how we explain this particular event. and which story, which narrative we choose to insert it into.

And one of the challenges of history is that there does not necessarily need to be one question, nor one answer. The way we approach the question--and the manner in which it is answered, is again, dependent on the questions we want to ask--and perhaps the answers (or kinds of information) we want to receive. One event can--and will be--remembered in a plethora of manners. And that the manner in which events are remembered depends (in part) itself on history.

Except--and one of the eternal challenges in contexts of oppression/violence/post-violence--is that these memories seem/do/act to serve concrete purposes--within the lives of individuals, and, perhaps in a slightly different manner, within the trajectories of communities, societies. Trauma--for individuals, especially when compounded with current/persistent/perceived oppression (often related to that trauma) makes it so much more challenging for that aspect of identity to be placed back within the spectrum of identities we all hold. new experiences, new understandings of events are then interpreted and catalogued within the context of this injustice.

(for example: in this, a patriarchal society, I feel my identity as a woman challenged in this community, which makes me even more acutely aware of (and willing to defend) my women-ness--this is the aspect of my identity that gets brought to the forefront, and shapes my perception of interactions, my understanding of history, of dynamics within society. It becomes increasingly difficult to take of my 'woman glasses' (and in turn substitute them for another pair, another perspective) until I feel I can express my femininity/womanhood without question, without challenge. And. just to be clear, this is an example, and perhaps a small one, for while the patriarchal system is certainly problematic, and ever-present--it perhaps is not the epitome of discrimination in this community.)

And this is also not to imply that these, my perhaps utterly obvious notes on trauma, pass undetected by folks at TransConflict, or the CRDP. but I'm still trying to understand how, through what processes, through what channels of education (formal and informal) can we equip people with the strength, courage, ability, belief in the reality of change (if we only make it) to critically examine our constructions of history--personal, communal. and constructively explore the wealth of identities available.

which brings me--perhaps in a very circuitous route to a TED talk from a few years ago, which still haunts me: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's The Danger of a Single Story. While she's exploring these issues within a different context--confronting colonial legacies in East Africa--but her insights on assumptions informed/(mis)guided by our single stories still provoke me.

And what I find so powerful about her talk--is that she also turns to scrutinize why and how others (namely the West/America) created single stories of the African continent (how did these stories come to be? what was their purpose? their function within larger contexts of domination/control/imperialism...)--and then how were these stories used to 'know' (or think they know), to define, understand her. How were these stories written onto her, by others.

In seeing how she created her own single stories--she could understand how others constructed their single stories. Seeing, identifying, challenging single stories is inherently a reflective practice, that confronts the systems of power interwoven through society, internalized by individuals. She says, "Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person...The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar."

Sometimes, walking this line (or at least trying to) feels like a cop-out: in many sticky situations, this feels like the easy route to take, the easy words to say: 'but from the perspective of...'. It's hard words to take a stance with, or take a stance from, if the primary assumption is that there are always multiple grounds to stand on--and that each plot a person stakes out for themselves, has some justification (however crooked, twisted, misinformed or illogical--or at least crooked-seeming from another's perspective) we all draw our conclusions somehow. But. these conclusions change, shift, are burned and born again as our perspectives grow, modify, molt, grow new feathers. take flight.

There Is No Big Picture, Yet

First-Year Teaching Fatigue.

Now. Before I begin let me just clarify: this is not fatigue of teaching, but fatigue from teaching.

Which, in my book, are entirely different things.

Even with parent meetings which kept us at school until well past 6 pm last night, and even with an entire weekend ahead (and with the end of the quarter looming--for both teachers and students) I know some part of me is excited to see my students again--Monday morning bleary-eyed, rumbling along at half speed, and to carry on.
There are those moments--when I ask a student a question and you can see their brains starting to churn, mulling over ideas--old and new--trying to find the connections. and that expression--not totally present with us in class, but wandering off somewhere in the outer-reaches of the cerebral cortex, to me is just beautiful.

So. what I want to write about has nothing--or at least very little--to do with the teaching part of teaching.

I knew that this would be challenging for me from the get-go: but one of the hardest parts of teaching for me is turning off teaching: stopping myself from thinking about teaching day in and day out; stop replaying lessons in my brain, scrutinizing them for hidden hints for how to teach better; stop worrying about homework or lesson plans or documentation for the Ministry of Education. Even though my body goes home at the end of the day, sometimes it takes a while for my brain to disengage from schooling and make that same journey home.

and I'm finding that this is getting exhausting. like get in bed at 7:30 on a Wednesday kind of exhausting. almost to tired to walk the block and a half from the apartment to the corner store to get milk for the morning coffee. although--for the record--I haven't been reduced to taking the lift the two flights up to our apartment--that still seems ridiculous.  (the time change hasn't helped at all, either. nor the 5am call to prayer).

I'm sure that the challenge is also compounded by being in an dual-immersion language context (and being an introvert) and that other than holing myself up in our apartment, everything; from going to the store to buy milk to going out for coffee, to sitting with the neighbors chatting or eating dinner, to just walking around town involves some sort of language-input-processing (and then sometimes switching between languages). I miss the true quiet of nature--which finding usually involves a drive up into the mountains. I think because last year I trained my brain to take as much in as I could, to use every waking second, every instance of language contact to soak up just a few more words, I'm also having a hard time 'turning off' that stimuli as well. or finding the energy to stay fully engaged. because--by now, I can follow a lot of what gets said--but there's always details which are just beyond my grasp. things I can't quite catch. and the more I understand, the more I want to understand even more. it's a vicious cycle.

I think part of the challenge ahead is shifting the way I use energy in the classroom--so that I'm not depleting my stores quite as quickly, part of it is finding/making time/energy to do things unrelated to school which fill me with satisfaction (like taking an online course on political theory with Zeko. and again I wonder 'just how did we find each other?' or learning songs to sing while I'm waiting for the bus to come, or making pickles (so delicious!)) and part of it is patience.

Sharr, near Leshnica.
a different sort of 'big picture' 

Talking with Nicole--one of the Elementary School teachers, and one of the other two Americans at the school, she noted that first year teaching is even harder because you don't have the benefit of seeing the big picture: "there is no big picture your first year" she said. "You're making it."So I don't have the instant gratification of seeing my students improve, because Monday to Tuesday, to Friday to Monday, the changes are incremental: sometimes invisible, and sometimes I get just a glimmer that something is changing somewhere. and I know, or at least I hope, these small changes are adding up. But really I don't know. because I don't know fully where my students (and here I am again. talking about my students. I promise I will write something where the word student does not appear. not even once. but it may be challenging) started from. Or what they were like last year. So my students can see their 'big picture,' especially the ones who were struggling last year, they see their grades improve. But to me, this is just the way they are. I would never have guessed that some of my students--who to me are focused (or as focused as 11th grade guys can be) responsible, on the path to becoming mature individuals--were receiving Ds and Fs last year, having major behavior problems, constantly in the principal's office. And no. of course this dramatic change is not my doing, but theirs. Maybe I'm helping. maybe not. That's not exactly the question, at least for me. but how to I help. more. better.

it's a hard question to turn off.

and if anyone has suggestions or ideas--especially with coping with fatigue: I'm ready to hear them.

so with that said: I'm going to clean the apartment. tune out and listen to NPR. catch up with the world.