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Expatriate Angst
You really can't go home again.
By Robert de Ville
I grew up in San Francisco, but have lived most of my life in other countries where my career has taken me. Now I am happily settled in Peru, and I really like it here. So I feel some what perverse by touching on a feeling of melancholy that strikes me occasionally.
Usually two or three times a week I go to the web-site of the San Francisco Chronicle just to see what is going on there. It is interesting, but usually nothing really grabs me. Then the other day, I came across a part of the web-site where the Chronicle has photographs of San Francisco from the past. On an impulse I decided to check it out. There are many photographs of events in the past, famous people, but what really touched me were the photos of some of the beautiful parts of the city that I had known and loved.
This, then, evoked a whole stream of memories that really tugged at my heart. They brought back times when I was with my father or other loved ones that were very special to me. It is pleasurable to bring back these memories, but it is also sad. That is because those times, and those people are gone. These are things that can only be experienced in retrospect. They will never occur again.There is a divide between the past and the present that cannot be breached.
This musing then brought another reflection. This pertains to someone like me who lives outside his/her country for a period. I have found that when return to California, it is different from what I remembered. Isabel Allende has written beautifully about this phenomena in her book, Mi Pais Inventado. In the book, she quotes the famous Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda:
“ For whatever reason, I am an expatriate. One way or another I carry my country with me, and though faraway, I have the essential spirit of my homeland.”
She writes about her own nostalgic feelings for the Chile she left as an exile. When she visits her country now, though, it is never as she remembered. Therefore she refers to the Chile of her past as “an invented country”.
She stated in her book:”You return and find that things have changed. People have moved on. However, mentally, when you arrive it is as though you just left, but you do not find a familiar situation. You have changed profoundly as well. Your perceptions are different, but your memories are from the past.”
This gives one an odd sense of displacement. Sometimes it makes you feel that you are not really anywherenot in the past of your memories, not in the present of your native land nor in the place where you currently live. Because you are an expatriate, you are not really part of the culture of your adopted land. You are on the outside. You are a stranger both in your former home as well as in your present place.
Maybe this is good most of the time because you can train yourself to just enjoy the present. At other times, such as experiencing the photos of the Chronicle, we may feel a sweet sadness, a reflection about times that we enjoyed in the past. Our memories: of times and places that will never be again.
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