The ‘That’ Which is Not ‘It’: On Homesickness and Steady Disruption
I haven’t been in England for two months, and there is a sense of nirvana my subconscious drags up when I think of it that has nothing to do with reality. In the face of Guardian reports on Irish border negotiations and Theresa May having full bodied seizures in Kenya, my mind gives me memories of walking down Wigmore at dusk, and an indulgent melancholy at missing the first episode of Bake Off. Homesickness is an odd malaise. It is predicated on various kinds of dislocation: body, mind, reason. There are all sorts of paradoxes bound up in missing home — England is all the more perfect to me because I am not there, and the ‘me’ I insert back into it isn’t necessarily true to form, either. A month in the Mediterranean has created a series of incremental differences between the body that left, and the body I’m delivering back: darker; slimmer by ten pounds; criss-crossed with tan-lines. Voice newly husky with laryngitis, and legs peppered with bite marks. Last week, to soothe out the sun and sea-water induced damage, I took some scissors to my hair, and for all intents and purposes I know I am basically the same as before, probably instantly recognisable to the friends and family I’m returning to, but this morning I shook out a t shirt I had left to dry in the sun and caught a whiff of something strange — unfamiliar fabric softener, newly bought Chanel no.5 and sea-air — before I registered it as belonging to me.
I find I am less averse to having my picture taken after these couple of months than before. All those little unfamiliarities are enough of a novelty to make looking at them like looking at someone else, and it’s not an uninteresting process — looking, looking, until it is me in the photograph again. But there are other things. Lately, my mother has taken to calling me so that she can complain about how long I’ve been gone, and I find familiar pieces of myself in acts of love like this. There is the memory of what I feel like in her arms. When, for a moment, I ignore the pastel slope of Sicilian houses slung across hills to catch up on gossip from my old work friends, then I feel something old settle comfortingly side by side with the new, blurring them into a soft mess. I am trying to unlearn this feeling, to maintain a sense of distance, when I think about flying home.
The England I am returning to is not wholly the England I am homesick for. I am homesick for cups of tea, a certain quality to the air as I take my morning walk; for custard creams, the National Portrait Gallery and (unbelievably) the smell of the tube. I am homesick for these things whilst my best friend, an Italian, tells me she is worried about what sort of Brexit deal will be negotiated, and how much a visa to stay in London, where she has lived for the past three years, will cost her. Now, more than ever, is a particularly dangerous time to be assailed by blind patriotism. Last night, as if by divine intervention, a piece by Jennifer Schaffer for The White Review landed on my feed and shamed me back into consciousness: ‘Britain has always been a nation capable of telling itself a good story.’ On my first day in Italy, the same best friend asked me, while we were floating on our backs in the sea, whether I thought Prince Phillip had ever done the dishes in his life. It seemed like a charming bit of idle small talk then, and strikes me as infinitely sinister now. In my mind, bound up in it is the paradox of going home to a nation that gave me Zadie Smith and Grenfell, the LRB and Windrush.
Because I look nothing like what popular European imagination says my passport should dictate, I have spent the last two months being periodically asked where I am really from. It remains a disappointingly familiar and irritating question, but I can begin to appreciate it in a new light — now, as another gag in a series of dislocations. I’m from England. It’s complicated.
