After More Than Fourteen Years Abroad
Personal reflection · written in 2019
After more than fourteen years abroad, memories feel like an ever-present dream. Many years have passed since my grandmother made Valencian paella for my twenty-first birthday, but it feels like only a few days ago. I loved cooking and helped her however I could, trying to learn every step of that century-old recipe passed down through my family. I was grateful for the chance to cook with her, but I also felt frustrated and bored when her memory faltered, a kind of blindness that came in waves.
Memories of my friends return too, people I love and will always hold close to my heart. So do the smells of the attic in my grandparents’ house and of the wardrobe I used to rummage through as a child.
After fourteen years, memories sometimes blur or change shape, but they are still there. They ebb and flow, like the contraction and relaxation of the heart: two parts of the same cycle.
Those memories are now part of my identity, because I cannot be anything other than that past, however distant it may seem. In that bag of memories is Denise Dresser’s speech about Mexico’s problems and their roots. Today, I find her diagnosis more relevant and more accurate than ever. I recognized myself in what she said about the homesickness of living abroad, about moving forward in small steps through memories of sounds and smells, birds and smiles.
When I heard that speech, I had been living here for three years. The homesickness was brutal. While my friends were finishing university, I was only halfway through and had no clear sense of where I was going.
All those memories make me who I am. I am neither from there nor from here. Quite the opposite, in fact. Above all, I am unable to put down roots anywhere. I detest the thought of dissolving into something that feels so foreign to me, even though I am neither a purist nor a traditionalist.
I have learned to defend my identity amid an unfamiliar culture, another language and a different set of ideas. That encounter has also been revealing and liberating, because it has led me to question the ideology that had been programmed into me. It has been a process of constant questioning. I cannot even call it learning. It is more like dismantling my understanding of culture, identity and ideology: the ideas that form the foundations of the self.