The Strangeness of Coming Back
by ALEXIS OKEOWO
To anyone who has lived abroad for a long time, "repatriate" is a misleading word. It’s similar enough to "expatriate" that it almost seems friendly or, at the very least, benign, like a mole that’s been on your neck for as long as you can remember. As expats, in whichever foreign country we are living, we play a game with each other. In order to figure out how serious a person is about committing to living abroad, we ask them two questions, "So how long have you been here?" and "How much longer are you here for?" If the answer to the first question is not long, the answer to the second better be much longer. If not, we dismiss you as a backpacker, an aimless traveler who has no interest in really learning about or contributing to this country we’ve now started to call home.
But the truth is that most of us will leave our adopted homes at some point. It may take a few years, or a few decades, but that word, “repatriate,” will squirm its way into your consciousness and refuse to leave until you finally pass through America's overbearingly bright customs terminals. Even then, it lurks at the corner of your mind, reminding you how easy it is supposed to be to come back home, as you find out how it is not easy at all.
A trick to permanently leaving a foreign country where you’ve lived for at least two years is to pretend that you’re really only stepping out for a run to the corner store and will be back in a flash. When you see friends at bars and parties in your last few weeks and they express sadness over your departure, tell them, "Oh, it’s just for a little while, I’ll be back in a few months!" This statement, which both you and your friends know is a lie, nevertheless eases a little the pain of leaving, soothes for a few minutes the betrayal of moving back to the States. When you go to your regular hairdresser, greet your neighbors in the hall, and walk up to your favorite street vendors, cheerfully tell them you’ll be going "home" for a while, but that you’ll see them later on in the year. Do they need anything from America? The problem with this trick is that you start believing the lie, this illusion you’ve created of global jet setting and minimal responsibilities. You have fooled yourself into thinking that nothing, even your impending return, is permanent, until it is.
This trick, though most helpful for people who have lived for several years abroad, is also useful for perpetual wanderers, who spend short spurts of time in various lands until they also finally tether themselves down. College students spending their junior semester abroad should be fine.
Except for the last seven months, I have lived all of my adult, post-college life outside of the United States. For two years, I lived in Uganda, then another two in Mexico, with a hazy month-long interlude in Cuba. On holidays, I visited my Alabama hometown and New York, seeing family and friends, bringing exotic gifts, and repeating stories of adventures and disasters abroad. I thought New York was great, constant celebrations and good food and drink. Then I moved here. I feel that I should issue a disclaimer at this point to say that I have grown very fond of New York, but when I first came, I hated living in this city.
I didn't realize until I settled into my new room in Brooklyn that my friends who had moved back to America before me had not been completely honest about the strangeness of coming back. They told me about the initial shock, which I quickly experienced – the surprise at the rushed, orderly transportation system, the over-purified abundance of food and water, the relatively reserved people. They neglected to mention the lingering discomfort that would follow me as I went to work, did my grocery shopping, called my parents, met friends for dinner, went out on dates. I felt like a giant, hulking alien, one who didn’t belong in a sea of people who all seemed to know what the hell it was they were doing. (Get a monthly subway card, get into one of the hundred lines at Whole Foods, dinner tonight at Babbo then The Jane, OK?) The discomfort became physical, a tingling sensation of friction that rubbed against my skin. Not feeling at home in Havana was expected; in my own home country, it was unsettling.
The quiet was the most jarring. When I woke up, it was to the sound of my insistent iPhone alarm clock – not to people laughing, chatting, and selling things out of wagons and trucks in the street outside my window. When I stepped into the subway, except for a few crazy, welcomed instances, the lulling calm in the car was stifling. When I entered my office, the quiet receded to a hush. I relished when a beggar started yelling in a subway car, or hawkers tried to push Broadway tickets onto me in Times Square. Everywhere, it seemed, there were layers of silence upon silence upon silence. One fall afternoon, I got home, Skyped my best friend in southern California, and screamed.
So I refused to let go of my past lives. I carried in my wallet coins from the countries in which I had spent time, large, shiny Mexican pieces and small, grooved Ugandan and Kenyan shillings, knowing that I should purge my purse of them, but secretly enjoying the feeling of nostalgia when I accidentally pulled one out and gave it to a confused cashier. I hung out mainly with other ex-expats, hunting for authentic-tasting Mexican restaurants and reminiscing about trips we took together. I moved into a sublet in a building where most of the residents never spoke English and cooked rich, heavy meals, the smell creeping in under the door to my apartment. I looked up support group meetings for returned Peace Corps volunteers, supposedly for a story I wanted to write. I went out with very nice boys who looked at me blankly when I told them I was dying to move back to east Africa, and soon ended things with them. I was becoming that girl who had lived abroad for a long time and had come back the bad kind of eccentric, and I didn't mind.
The Washington Post recently ran a story about a group of American high school students who were forced to evacuate Egypt – their parents work for the State Department – and move to a Virginia suburb. The article says of the students:
Some of these students wear high school athletic uniforms with the word ‘Cairo’ emblazoned on their chests. Some refuse to change their watches from Egyptian time. They get news through friends' Facebook pages, where Egyptian classmates have posted photos from Tahrir Square and exultant messages in Arabic.
My friend Emily, who lived in Africa before moving back to New York, gleefully sent the article to me and said the kids reminded her of us. These kids also reminded me of other people I knew, people who both had and had not returned and their myriad idiosyncrasies.
I have a friend, a talented photographer, who spent her college years getting one grant after the other to travel across Mexico to do multiple photo projects. After she graduated a year and a half ago and moved home to Arizona, she felt listless and spent some more time in Mexico before signing on to a nine-month volunteer program in Sudan. When she returned home after that stint in Africa, she enlisted in the Peace Corps and now lives in rural Zambia. She says she just can’t settle in America. Another friend's dad has lived in Thailand for many years and will never return to California, my friend tells me, because he is "too dysfunctional to ever live here again." A good friend who moved to Philadelphia after years of traveling and studying in Asia and South America has had it bad, battling periods of depression as we both experienced our first American winter in a while.
There are businesses devoted to providing repatriation services, and they boast that they can help smooth the transition of any professional (with or sans family) from the exciting and unpredictable life he once had in a foreign country, to the more mundane existence that awaits him in his hometown. Learn how to make small talk about current events and gain friends for a modest fee. But the truth is that life abroad isn't really that exciting. It is thrilling and challenging, but no one uproots her life to go to a distant place so that she can be shocked and startled every day. She wants to carve out a life, meet people, find a nice apartment, pay her bills on time, maybe go to the beach a little more often.
I watched the movie The American several weeks ago, after abandoning it the first time I tried to watch it a few months prior. I thought the slow pace had turned me off the film, but on second viewing, I realized that it was because the title character was achingly familiar. George Clooney excels in his portrayal of a man who embodies the tragedy of never feeling – or being capable of feeling – at home. There has long been the trope of the stereotypical expat who lives abroad because he is running away from something. In reality, that figure is less common than you may think. In The American, the protagonist is an assassin, but he may as well have been one of the expatriate artists, teachers, journalists, aid workers, designers, or lawyers that I know. The random, fascinating people we met and places we explored, and the absurdity of always being the foreigners, made our lives wonderfully messy and worth the comfort we left behind. It's not that coming back is so awful; it's missing what we are abandoning.
But, eventually, you recognize, as I did, your tendency to idealize your life in one place and not appreciate the wonders of your life in this place. The itchy feeling of friction wears off, replaced by a familiar restlessness. I reunited with the friends who I had deeply missed when I lived far away, allowed myself to make connections with new people, and remembered why I thought New York was such a striking city. I was grateful for the luxuries of blending into a crowd again and feeling like I had membership in my country of residence. You do adapt, mainly because you know that you will end up going back into the unknown one day. You now despise that damn word "repatriate."
Alexis Okeowo is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She twitters here, and you can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about her favorite novels. Photographs by the author.
"Exodus" - Daara J (mp3)
"Karibu Ya Bintou" - Baloji (mp3)
"Partir de Cero" - Anita Tijoux (mp3)
