so lately I've been thinking a lot about home and diaspora and history and race and displacement
last week sitting down in the breakroom with my new colleages, the first thing they asked me as I settled down with my tea was what my afkomst is. google translates this with descent but it means history and culture and home and not-home. I say surinamese-dutch, they tell me they never could have guessed, they could tell I was definitely not dutch but what I was then was indefinable.
one time talking to another navy brat about three houses in 7 years, new neighborhood new climate new new new, we talked about feeling at home and she laughed and said maybe home was more a sense of displacement, of being uprooted and the really uncomfortable parts were when you started feeling settled because you no longer felt at home
I've lived in this house for almost ten years now. the faucet is getting leaky and my dads been talking about repainting the windowsills come summer, says they're getting worn. this house was shiny new when we moved here, and I never much liked this city, but now going to school in another city an hour and a half over I'm glad to come back here at the end of the day. but seeing the long shadows of summer still makes me miss home.
I realized a few weeks back that maybe home is a little more definable than a feeling of displacement. its at least, also, the sea. watching the news with my dad we talked about how scary it was to me, the idea of living away from the sea. I was born less than half an hour from the sea, I grew up a five minute walk from it, and here in this house is the farthest I've ever been, 40 minutes if public transportation is slow that day.
the town I was born in was a little navy town, with mostly navy households, a few fishermen and one bar. I don't remember much from it from actually living there, but in the years after it whenever my dads work took us there IĀ remember grey skies, howling winds and the crash of the sea on the shoreline. I spent hours and hours huddled with my brother watching the sea, waiting for my dads ship to come in, shivering cold.
so being a navy brat means home is a feeling of displacement.
all this diaspora doesnt help. three continents in 150 years is too much to hold onto, and the only thing they ever had in common is the sea, we think. its impossible to trace our family back to where they started, but we think they must've lived near the sea, to be taken across the ocean to suriname. this things are stamped into my brain, in 1873 the lalla rookh arrived with its 399 passengers and now here we are.
I've only crossed an ocean once in my life. it took me 11 hours, and I remember it mostly as uncomfortable seating and a chatty old woman next to me. curacao is less than 2000 kilometers from suriname. this is the closest I have ever been to home. I wanted to ask the pilot to turn and take me there. I wanted to set my bare feet to the soil to see if it feels different, if it feels like walking on sunlight the way the cliffs on the amalfi coast do, if it feels familiar under my toes like the crumbling asphalt at the rest stops along the A3 near salerno where we stopped so many times, where the potholes become small lakes during rainstorms and whole cars dissappear into them.
all this diaspora doesnt help. all this family history doesnt help. I have little pinpoints all over the map and the constellation of them is home.
its december in the netherlands. its cold and raining. I miss the mountains and the rocky shorelines of my hometown in an almost physical way. I hear a woman speaking italian on the news and it feels like an earthquake.
the sea is the closest I've ever been to home. when you google image search napoli you only get pictures of garbage and the sea. I can't swim and my dad is a proud navy vet. when I said the sea was boring blue he scowled and described all the shades the sea can take. when I was little he told me they nail down plates on navy ships so they dont fly off during a storm. they call the netherlands waterland, which means I should feel at home but the north sea is the wrong shade of blue. no one has ever told me which ocean the lalla rookh crossed but I like to think its the atlantic because its the only ocean I've ever seen. my uncle tells me most hindoestanis like us live in the hague or rotterdam. I think its because they're both near the sea. I think we cant let go of it.
