I Go to Stay

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...”

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I came to Virginia because I wished to experience diversity, to embed myself in people who were different to learn that we are the same, and not, when I ceased to learn and change, be someone who had not found her place in the world. I did not wish to live in a homogenous society, not when diversity is so rich, so nourishing, so real; nor did I wish to claim to know and understand something of which I had no direct knowledge when I had an opportunity so rare that to decline would have been cowardly. I wanted to cast a net of faith in humanity and be caught up in the strain to sieve understanding and respect, to carry others ashore, to dry tears and arm children to fight the battles in their future.

I came to Virginia to teach the diverse students on a military base. The setting may as well have been foreign, so I adhered to the advice of friends: it's best to go there without knowing what you're getting into. Pragmatic friends, they were. I left on a crisp autumn flight from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and arrived in Baltimore seven hours later, taxied to a hotel, slept, bused to a train station, clattered down the rails to Quantico, disembarked at a small station in 100% humidity and 85 degree heat, called for a taxi to the commissary where I rented a car, drove across base to my school, and received a hug from my principal. The day not done, I mapped out the nearest JCPenney and ventured my Corolla onto I-95, the bottlenecked traffic corridor from hell, to purchase a shower curtain, foam pad, bedding, bowl, pan, plate, silverware, and towel, jumped back onto I-95, wide-eyed, white-knuckled, and rolled over an undulating topography held captive by dense hardwood forests alternating with high-density housing. My exit found, I spurted from the three-lane interstate to a congested four-lane thoroughfare lined by big box stores and fast food restaurants, stopped at a grocery store for essentials and cleaning supplies, loaded back in the car and determinedly, followed the hash marks for fifteen miles to a subdivision where our sight-unseen rental yielded a respite from this urbanscape lashing. I found the stashed key, opened the door...and stepped onto a linoleum floor so steeped in grease that I tugged my shoes up with each step forward across the kitchen.

An open mind and positive aspect were essential if I were to hang any hope on the existential journey that I envisioned. Fortunately, I found that the pace of traffic belied the pace of people in the stores or at the library or in my school. Many had lived all over the world, and they were adept at negotiating new relationships, transience, change. Their ability to avoid colonization by inherently accepting the "temporal process" of signifying time and place left the door open for me and others from around the country to enter and be assimilated (Bhabha 142). In my first class, I welcomed seven nationalities of students. Here was the diversity I had craved, and each student was beautiful and unique and felt like an honor bestowed on me to serve. But the nature of a military base is movement, so each year, a third of the students left. No teary good-byes, no elaborate send-offs. Just sign the form with "good luck" and they go. One student, a senior, was making her thirteenth move in twelve years. She was anxious to go; she had never finished a school year at the same school she started. I learned from them not to ask where they were from, where "home" was. Most hadn't known one in the same way that I had, so most didn't seem to care.

They are a great experiment in dis-colonization. And while a move can evoke rebirth, a reset socially, tabula rosa, so much personal reconstruction might incur a loss of self, a persistent liminality that threatens growth and maturation (Bhabha 147). The tradition of the move and its inherent instability provides a temporal quality to students' life narratives such that the larger culture is signified by this instability (152). The coming and the going relate to status, and they reflect the tragedies that are a reality for military families.

For me, too, life in Virginia is temporal. I enjoyed the culture, drank the wine, tilled the soil, but I resisted the colony. I came to go, to live and teach abroad. "From the desire of the possible in the impossible,...emerge the ghostly repetitions of other stories...," which I recognize in my mother's journey to the U.S. from England to become a nanny in the isolation of northern Wyoming, in my first son's journey to Italy on exchange and then to stay and marry and live, in my second son's journey to Nepal to teach and hike and connect (Bhabha 156). So, now, I go, too.


I leave for Belgium to become colonized, to submit to the subordination of my culture through Derrida's anthropological war (Spurr 4). Two cultures, confronted, must open their communication and submit to an initial recognition of difference and classification before discovering a uniformity and continuity in beliefs and character (Spurr 4). The Belgians control the language and, therefore, the authority to transcribe their culture on my own (Spurr 7). I submit willingly. My "self-inflicted sabotage" will force a reconsideration of belief systems and assumptions (Spurr 12). Through this imbalance, this destabilization and cultural assimilation, an opportunity emerges to construct new understandings collaboratively (Spurr 7).

On this journey, I will encompass a larger vision for my personal imprint, including my family relationships, my professional efficacy, and my citizenship in the world. But such a personal challenge and commitment to altering one's life creates a "tension between this process of self-fictionalising and [one's]...claims to veracity" (Bassnett 235). While I imagine the new, I live in the now and renegotiate compacts with myself to attain the actualization I desire. Therefore, I must consign the past to memory and embrace the future, knowing that it will change me, wanting it to. To live deliberately is to become someone unexpected, and as I experience all that Belgium is, I will confront the potentialities of the traveler.


Sources:

Bassnett, Susan. "Travel Writing and Gender." The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, Ed. Peter Hulme, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Bhabha, Homi K. "Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation." The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994.

Spurr, David. "Introduction." The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration, Duke University Press, 1993.