Inheriting Exile, Learning Belonging
Reconciling with the land beneath me, and the one that calls me back
To be born in the diaspora, to a home still being desecrated and colonized, you are sentenced with the lifelong verdict of being both here and not here all at once. The ache of a home you know very intimately, but never materially. All while holding the opportunity that comes with being out there. A double-edged sword of being safe, yet safe enough that the pain of displacement feels it can surface and ask to be met in the absence of survival conditions.
Ever since I could fathom the gravity of the diasporic wound, it was hard to ignore the felt experience of emptiness that resided inside me despite how full life happened to be. In my early 20s, I didn’t quite have the language for it. I just roamed, looking for people, places, careers to plug what felt like a ruptured water hose. The aching was always that of a deep longing for belonging. Landing in arms, sometimes many arms simultaneously, searching for something I didn’t quite know what.
It wasn’t just people; it was also places. I would attempt to root myself somewhere only to remain hovering well above ground. Here and not quite here once more. All while continuing to resent the very place that was ever a home, if we can call it that. Jordan was the stepmother I received after I was forced away from my biological one. She was kind, nurturing, never imposing, and yet she wasn’t my mother. And so my search for belonging continued. Between laying in lovers’ arms with the unfair, and rather unconscious, responsibility I set on them to heal my wound of belonging. To foreign lands I lived in, attempting to make my own but never really knowing how to. Montreal, London, Dubai, Mexico City. Beautiful, generous, but always ephemeral.
Mexico City, in particular, held a special place. I found peace there I didn’t quite touch anywhere else. While I have much to recount on why that city is a chrysalis to one’s becoming—for whoever answers her call, she takes you in with a loving embrace, incubating your process as you take the next life turn that ushers you home, primarily to yourself. For me, it was both. Home to myself, and to the only one I had ever truly known materially, Jordan.