(Im)possible returns: thousands of migrations, a single history
Browsing through the Europeana website I was literally struck by the strokes of this clock, telling a family life of displacement and memory. The idea of a clock travelling by coach and catamaran from Germany to an island off the coast of Croatia sparked my imagination, as I started wondering what one leaves behind when faced with a life of departures and landings, what is lost and found through the wobbly and sometimes uneven path of migration. Not an easy feat, one would say.
How do we perceive time and change when we migrate? How can objects like an old family clock help us to cling on to memories and arouse a sense of belonging? One seldom realises how profoundly little artefacts, objects and pieces of furniture, or maybe sights, sounds, smells and flavours can help to shape our sense of identity, of being rooted to a specific time and place. However strange it might seem, our sense of reality seems to lie in the tiniest details, in the comforting rituals of everyday routines and habits, in the multicoloured layers of our existence.
Still, when nothing is left behind, diaries are, and have always been, a great memory-binder for generations of travellers, migrants and common people alike. So why not build a house made up of diaries, where the conversations shaping one’s identity and private history make up a paper-ship that can literally carry your imagination to distant lands and worlds? “Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away”, echoes the mellow voice of Frank Sinatra in my ears whenever I set off for a new destination and would rather not leave what is nearest and dearest to me behind.
Other times it is the call of our mother country that pulls us back, enticing us with its smells, flavours and magic. So even the memory of the Mediterranean can trigger synaptic connections with one’s homeland, making one feel no longer displaced, as it is the case with this oil that a migrant to Belgium has delivered to his new country on a regular basis: the everyday-ness of a squalid plastic bottle filled with a local treasure, carrying memories of a distant past.
Other times it is only the voices of our family members, the music we listen to or the sounds of our country that stick in out mind, becoming our only passport to a new reality, when nothing else can be carried away if not the comforting sound of our voice. The soundtrack of our history, one might call it: everyone of us has their own “eventful-moment playlist”, marking the milestones of their lives. More than once in history the painful burdens of migration have been accompanied by sweet yet mournful chants, from the spirituals sung by Afro-Americans slaves in the tobacco and cotton plantations to the 1900s’ songs of Irish migrants leaving the Emerald Isle because of the potato famine:
2. The emigrant’s farewell to Ireland, Irish Traditional Music Archive, Public Domain
In the first song of exile the migrant mourns for a long-lost Erin, the longed-for Ireland one can never return to: unlike wild animals, finding rest in their safe shelter in the woods, the speaking voice of this chant “(has) no refuge from famine or danger” as “a home and a country remain not for (them)” (lines 10–12). “Adieu, adieu, my native plains” (7th stanza, lines 1–2) cries instead the author of the second song, hoping for a better life in Quebec. If one could only have a magic carpet to be carried back and forth at their own pace and will, so that the experiences of leaving and arriving could be be melted into one single piece, and distant homes could be rejoined together! Or maybe just dream of it, as the Romanian owner of this family carpet did after landing in Limerick, the village in Ireland other people had necessarily left:
Even for the lucky few who get the chance to return, even for a little time, to the beloved country they have left behind and forget “the isolation of suburbia” (or, as the old Romans would put it, the “sub-urbs”, i.e., what is “under” or far from the centre of urban life), the reconnection with one’s past may make them realise that “geographical and emotional distance go hand-in-hand”. Whether it is a possible or impossible return, everyone’s attachment and belonging to a place (call it home, mother-country or simply a favourite, comfy spot) is the single unit making up the big mosaic of human migration. And we are the little bits of a bigger picture.
See full story on https://www.europeana.eu/item/2084002/contributions_35ca84d0_641b_0137_6a65_6eee0af60c63
