This afternoon, Ra lead a faculty forum on exiles and expatriates. The anchor to this dicussion is seated in Edward Said's work on education and exile. Now that I'm back in my office trying to parse out the scribbly notes that I took and filter the thoughts swimming in my mind, I ultimately feel -- depressed.
When I first looked at Ra's notes on Said's Intellectural Exile, I prepared some notes and thoughts on James Joyce and Ulysses -- namely the fact that Joyce himself was a self-placed exile on the Continent for the majority of his professional writing career. To delve into the ficiton, Leopold Bloom himself is an exile in his own city of Dublin -- perceived to be Jewish, alienated from his wife (possibly due to the loss of his son), not fully understood by his 'friends.' Stephen Daedalus, the proverbial son, leaves Ireland for the Continent, only to return back to Ireland and find that he has become an exile in his own country -- specifically in the intellectural vein. I will have to pursue this observations further at a later time; perhaps use them as a starting point in which to write a critical paper for an admissions paper.
To circle back to the forum, Ra touched upon a negative aspect of exile/expatriate experience -- the loss of home environment. A statement made in the roundtable was, "We yearn to to return home, from the place where came from." I started to think about where exactly I am from, where I most identify home as being, and at first I drew a blank. But as I thought about it some more, I would have to say that, ultimately, I'm looking to return to the provincial Vermont life of my childhood. But even in those years, I was consciously aware that Vermont was not home, that my father and mother both had families somewhere in this place called Iowa/Ohio (I'll admit, aurally I couldn't tell the difference between Iowa and Ohio when I was a child), where I had lived for nearly a year, but retained little memory. In the vague recesses of my memories, I knew that we had, before being a part of the West Rupert community, been a part of a community in Africa. When we moved to Michigan, I desperately wished to return to Vermont, and couldn't wait until I graduated from high school to be able to return to those green mountains and hills. I moved to Marquette and no longer yearned for the lower peninsula or Vermont -- the UP was a perfect hybridization of my childhood and the intellectual stimulation I so craved. I lived in Austria, but did not fully integrate -- neither linguistically, socially, or institutionally. East Lansing felt as if I were placed on the 'just visiting' square of the Monopoly board. And here, four months in, I find it difficult to connect with either Saudi culture or expat culture. But do I yearn for Vermont still? Perhaps. On a sentimental level -- yes. Vermont provides me with the natural aesthetics that I've come to enjoy. Intellectually, I yearn for office visits with Burn, Boe, Strauss, and Ventre. But ultimately, I yearn just to live, to be the free agent that I was this past summer in California, Ireland, Central Europe, Lithuania. To wake up from bed in the morning to a powerful stream of natural light and understand that the onus was on me to find nourishment -- for my spirit, my mind, my body. To accutely understand and fully trust that the Lord will provide my daily bread and wish nothing more than to embrace God's beauty on my journey -- in His people- and landscapes. To understand that the world is not mine nor anyone else's and be humbled by that notion and make more meaningful decisions as a result of this notion.
How do I reconcile the understanding that I've received and the restlessness that I feel within. Can this dialectic simply be summed up as a complex case of homesickness?
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