I have had home “home” on my mind.

I confess this might have something to do with a screening of Black Panther I attended over the weekend, with the greenery and music and female-forward utopia evoking a sense of belonging, pulling at each and every one of my predictable heart strings. I felt good in Wakanda. Wakanda could be home.

I would be remiss to omit that Wakanda somehow conjures feelings of a place I like to think of as my ‘spirit home.’ There was something familiar in the drumbeats and brightly-colored fabrics, in the sustainable coexistence of human and animal creatures. And then a place of sheer beauty, spectacularly enhanced by remoteness and isolation.

Of course my spirit home lacks in some of Wakanda’s utopian details, rich in neither resources nor female warriors. Yet still, Wakanda and my spirit home somehow remind me of each other, the former a face you know looks familiar, and the latter the image you’re finally able to identify it with. It’s as if the two places were painted in different colors but with similar brushstrokes. I pause to note I look neither like the natives of Wakanda nor the locals of my spirit home. The color of my skin is different. This makes me altogether more curious about my sense of relative belonging.

As if subconsciously trying to belong in my current city – far removed from my spirit home in longitude, latitude, and overall character – I’ve begun to adopt some of Lisbon’s rhythms. I’m tending towards the Portuguese, I’ve been told, and if driving were the relevant metric, as measured at a red traffic light in the number of acceptable seconds between the shift to a green signal and reprimand-by-honk directed at the drivers ahead, then I’m halfway to citizenship.

But Portuguese I am not.

I was reminded of this over a minor parking incident last year. I should explain that a good parking space in central Lisbon is the city’s prime real estate, over which the generally mind-mannered and gentle Portuguese can be known to unleash the instincts of a lioness protecting its cubs.  I experienced a Lisbonite’s transformation from Jekyll to  Hyde last year, with the object of the metamorphosis being the best spot in my gym’s parking lot.

It was my day: I had landed the jackpot of gym parking, having maneuvered my car into the tight spot directly in front of the building’s entrance. (I can see there is no logic in my delight here – I was at the gym to exercise, no?) As I indulged in the greatness of my fortunes, angry signals from the driver of a white Mercedes Benz stationed in the middle of the street, theatrically featuring its emergency signal like the blinking lights of a theater on Broadway, escaped me entirely.

As I locked the car and made my way towards to gym, I was approached by a woman dressed fully in white and teetering atop golden platform wedges, which struck me as its own type of special workout. I identified her to be in attack mode, a state of being I recognize too well. She addressed me, and I gathered from her furious Portuguese that, as she saw it, I’d taken her spot. I tried to explain in nervous, broken language that I hadn’t realized, but, when you’ve experienced life in a mother tongue, the prospect of confrontation in a foreign language feels like an unconscionable ask. It is a rigged match. In that moment, I had that “strange feeling” James Baldwin writes of in Notes of A Native Son, in which he recognizes that previously useful ways of navigating the world become obsolete in a foreign country: “my weapons would never again serve me as they had.”

As I stumbled over the clumsy words that couldn’t do justice to the adult thoughts I sought to express, the Mercedes woman spun on her golden heels precipitously to lay claim to the handicapped space that had become available next to my parked car. “Go back to your country,” she said over her shoulder, and disappeared into her SUV.

This encounter transcurred too quickly for me to immediately process what had happened. In its aftermath, there was first only a sting. And, as I ruminated over the incident while in the company of a treadmill, I was left with a bigger, fascinating question.

Where would go?

This gave me pause. I considered the options. The letter-of-the-law choice would see me off to my place of birth, but I am afraid the only thing I have in common with Atlanta is a deeply inculcated reverence for the Coca-Cola brand. And the rest of the country? My insides were raw from the outcome of the 2016 election, and I struggled to watch that particular brand of self-destruction that is made possible only by copious amounts of willful blindness.

In terms of the big American melting pot, I don’t seem to quite blend into the native mix. Over time, I could. Naturally, at this point, I don’t. I can’t fairly blame it on my Chilean side, because I can’t with sincerity claim Chilean-ness outside of my fond recollection of time past and the people I’ve shared it with, evoking a feeling of memory that is more powerful than my individual recollections. Isabel Allende addresses these subtle aspects of memory and identity in her memoir Mi Pais Inventado, positing that nostalgia moves like a slow, circular dance, with memories shifting and ephemeral, like smoke. I have here only paraphrased her words, which communicate most powerfully in their native Spanish: “Asi es la nostalgia: un lento baile circular. Los recuerdos no se organizan cronológicamente, son como el humo, tan cambiantes y efímeros, que si no se escriben desaparecen en el olvido.”

As I considered my home country options, it occurred to me that I’m too South American for America, and equally, too American for Chile, and far too much a creature of the Americas generally to find a ‘native’ home in European cities. Paris, London and Lisbon have, for me, been punctuated by the thrill that comes with the sense of just passing through. Also, I happen to feel slightly Japanese, which is a confusing thing altogether.

Please don’t misunderstand. This lack of a home country does not a victim make me. Consider the Tantric approach, which defines ego as that which we each think we are. If we see nations as a human construct, it then follows that national identity is merely an illusion, an aspect of the ego. Tantra’s approach to the ego is not to suppress it, but to purify it by infinite expansion, until the ego “melts into all that is,”[1] unlocking higher states of consciousness.

The home country void can be filled with, and expanded into, multitudes.

Home country void is a vehicle for freedom, not in the least because I can sincerely cheer for everyone involved in any given World Cup match or Olympic competition, highly increasing my opportunities for celebration. I am at once Team America, Chile, Japan, Bahamas, France, England, Brazil, and so on. This sentiment somehow finds its way back to the Wellsian notion that “our true nationality is mankind.”

James Baldwin takes the idea further, proposing that “[p]erhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” This resonates deeply with me, ‘home’ having never taken the shape of an edifice or driveway or town. If the condition of home comes with a feeling, as Baldwin suggests, for me, it would be that of life unstripped: of pretense, obligation, expectation, of shoes.

This past weekend Lisbon saw spring-time weather in February, with a windless Sunday afternoon featuring soft sunlight and the quality of warmth that can be felt inside the skin. The banks of the Tagus river witnessed what felt like the entire city of Lisbon come out en masse in a diverse spectacle of dog-walkers, tricycles, hand-holding lovers, melting cones of ice cream.

I went for a late afternoon run. For the first time this year, I ran free, in thigh-revealing leggings and a midriff-bearing sports top. This was home.

I spent sunset by the river, with Haruki Murakami’s words in mind as I found myself “running in my own cozy, homemade void.”

 

Reference: [1] Wallis, Christopher. Tantra Illuminated. Petaluma: Mattamayura Press, 2012. Print.