Going Home

The first time I went to London, I felt something.  Even venturing into the English countryside, there was a sense of recognition. For a time in the 1980's I moved there.  I married a journalist, connected with my long-absent legendary grandfather in Shropshire, got a National Health card, filled out paperwork for my UK passport and waited-- like a hatching hen, even pregnant with a London-conceived baby, to metamorphose.  But on trips back to New York--for gigs, for re-fueling-- I'd look down as the plane descended and feel my heart open.  Boarding for the JFK-Heathrow return, I'd feel like an emotional amputee and eventually had to admit I'd mistaken the familiarity of English novels for my soul.  I came back to New York with the excuse of giving my baby dual citizenship options, but 33 years later I'm still here.

For the last few weeks, every night at sunset, there's a gathering of African men at the north end of the park, on the grass along 110th street.  There are drums and colorful dashikis and robes and kufi caps and turbans.  Against the dull buildings there, it is a kind of visual joy.  The rhythms and chanting are audible long before I descend the Great Hill.  On weekends, women join... they dance and clap and shake. It's enough to stop me in my tracks; I want to join them sometimes... an old white lady who occasionally has 'passed' among African percussionists because they know I am a musician.   

But last night, because it was raining, there were no drums, but a small group of brightly dressed black men. They were standing in a tight circle and singing... a sort of high-pitched melody, in some language I could not possibly identify, but I stopped in the rain, to try to find a refrain-- a pattern.  The sound was hypnotic, but the song-- I could not follow.  Wet beneath the trees, my glasses beaded with raindrops, I listened to these men-- strangers in Harlem-- immigrants, celebrating their language and their homes-- different homes-- with their scars and their rituals and mutilations and the violence of families torn and challenged... singing their hearts out for maybe hours, there in Harlem where they are maybe homesick and conflicted and sad. 

The New Yorker sends me daily emails; I'm too broke to subscribe, even at their cheapest, and I used to manage to tediously read their offerings by scrolling in the tiny screen space beneath the prohibitive square that tells me I have reached the end of my free monthly article allowance.  They are hip to losers like me and now just 'tease' with an introductory paragraph.  But last week there was a reprint of Toni Morrison's piece about 'You are not the work you do'.  It's a good one.  

I've been reading Langston Hughes' autobiography-- The Big Sea.  He traveled quite a lot in his boyhood... the midwest, New York, Chicago, Mexico, had all kinds of challenging jobs. He managed after a disappointing time at Columbia University to get work on a ship bound for Africa where he discovered that he was not a black man after all-- he was brown, and mixed-- an American Negro.  

My college boyfriend did the popular junior-year-abroad program in Italy; I joined him there for some months.  It changed him profoundly. Things were never quite the same.  I think when you live for a time in another country, it seeps into you, and you can never quite go home again, as they say.  It broke us, in a way, because I felt somehow I could never be 'home' for him the way we'd been.  

At the gallery where I work, a French designer has installed pieces he made in Portugal, where he now lives.  They are beautifully made from the repurposed cork of trees that burned in a fire.  There are also black clay pots, fired in the earth with pine branches and extreme heat.  They are displayed in a circle of dirt and charred wood... so far from their home, their forms evoking the dark silhouette of mountains.  But there is one sample of the raw cork bark, as it was stripped from a tree--- nearly whole, with the char and the sense of forest. Looking at that lone symbol of the Portuguese woods and its material history, I feel a kind of recognition-- a core-sorrow-- with the sense of displacement and homesickness of the African men.  

At 4 AM last night I turned on my television and they were showing one of Pedro Costa's most sombre films of the slums of Lisbon-- In Vanda's Room.  Some of the scenes are shot in near-darkness, with the hopelessness of heroin addiction, the squalor and naked honesty of poverty, and the constant noise of the bulldozers razing the precarious structures and homes of the neighborhood while these people huddle and hunker down against displacement.  From the gallery I had the scent of Portuguese burning wood in my head, and it was like accompaniment.  

Sometimes I think about all the people that come to galleries-- the collectors and philanthropists who support artists... they seem to have multiple homes, as though they cannot quite settle.  So many of us travel to see the house or the street where we grew up; we look at old photos and films of New York-- at least I do.. and I feel something.  We are all a bit displaced in this culture-- we grow and leave our nests, and we never quite find our place.  Then we die, and our home-- our burial-- is just that.  

I have a song I wrote fairly recently... the chorus goes 'All roads take us back, and none of them go home... This one feels so close to somewhere I belong... There's nowhere I belong.' I can barely sing this without breaking my voice.  I guess I am sort of a failed writer-- in my heart I write as I walk, as I breathe and work... in dreams... the product is not enough, not yet.  I am also a bassist.  I am the work I do. It is as true for me as my 'home' which I have made here in the city, as best I can.  

Langston wrote his first really great poem as he traveled... The Negro Speaks of Rivers.  Just the title is enough.  He was not the work he did, or the work his father wanted him to do... he was this writer, and a teacher, in his way.  He was that work; he worked at it, too. Like many, he dreamed of Harlem, and the place was not necessarily the dream... but he was part of its rebirth, its rediscovery.  And like so many great men-- in literature and in history,  one often must leave one's home-- wander and search--only to return and find it.