by Lauren Elkin
Brooklyn was terra incognita to me – when I lived in the city, I could still afford to live in Manhattan. One Friday night in December, I agreed to meet some friends at a restaurant in Brooklyn Heights. Without an American phone plan, I had no Google Maps to rely on, so before I left the house I sketched a rudimentary map of the area in a notebook. I arrived early, thinking I’d walk around a bit before I met my friends. When I got off at York Street, the sky already dark at 5.30 p.m., Brooklyn looked nothing like its reputation. Where were the cobblestoned streets, the shops selling vintage clothing, and the free-trade coffee with baristas drawing flowers in the foam? I saw only an immense parking garage, chain-link fences, and towering apartment blocks. I made a few turns and found myself down some badly lit street. The buildings looked new but boxy, a bit raw. A man walked towards me, wearing a woollen cap. Friend or foe? The cold Decemberish air turned tense, the way it does for two strangers in a deserted street.
Finally I reached Hudson Avenue, which had the cobblestones, as well as a few shopfronts and a mix of older brick buildings and newer houses with aluminium siding. Inside the restaurant, it was warm, with flattering light and brick walls, the kind of place you could find in Paris or London or New York and think: this is so Paris, so London, so New York. So urban, that is, the kind of place where you know exactly what the food will be like and what kind of evening you’ll have there. Its familiarity was disorienting, as if I had woken up in a comfortable bed, but didn’t yet know whose. I climbed up onto a bar stool to wait for my friends, ordered a glass of New Zealand Chardonnay, and cracked open Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
The word ‘lost’, Solnit writes, ‘comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world’. ‘Never to get lost,’ she says, ‘is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.’ And yet when I’m lost, all I want is to slip back into the flow of people who know where they are and where they’re going. If you desert the army, even if the war is over, you never stop doubting yourself, and wondering if they’d have you back.
* * *
And so after years of getting lost in strange European cities, here I was, lost in my own. One night in the East Village some friends and I got very, very drunk with a visiting British friend and we went walking north; I think we were going to try to take the train to Brooklyn. ‘Where are we going?’ I slurred. ‘To the L train,’ someone said. ‘Does the L stop over here?’ I asked. I only knew the L as a quick way to get from the West Side to Union Square. My British friend scoffed at me. ‘I thought you were a New Yorker.’ Looking at the subway map, I see how it looks like one long train line across the East River – a thin blue stripe marking off Manhattan from Brooklyn like puzzle pieces about to be joined together, making the ride from First Avenue to Bedford Avenue look as uneventful as the ride from Broadway to Sixth Avenue. But in my mind, the East River was a major barrier and the trains that went beyond it did not extend in casual straight lines, but moved unpredictably into a terrain that could not be neatly organised into up and down, left and right. I ended up bailing on Brooklyn and taking the train back out to Long Island, feeling shamefully bridge-and-tunnel. What good were all my years as a New Yorker? While I’d been away, ‘New York’ had entirely reconfigured itself, without a single change to the map.
* * *
I have relatives who ask me every time I see them So when are you coming home? As if I were some errant member of the family flock, not one of Solnit’s Old Norse soldiers who’s fallen out of formation to return home to his family, but to take off somewhere else altogether. A deserter. They are first- and second-generation Americans, people who came or whose parents came to the US from Italy as early as the 1930s, or as recently as the 1960s. The intimation is that I don’t belong in France, but at home, where I started. Why don’t they belong in Italy, then? Or do they feel they do? I’ve never asked.
It took a few years for my father to stop asking me the same question, and for my sister to stop saying things like I get it, you can’t come back because it would feel like some kind of personal failure, right? But no one would think that. My mother, on the other hand, sighs and says As long as you’re happy. She’s the only one who doesn’t make it about belonging, but being.
* * *
I could make my own choices in Paris, and make a life for myself in a context that was mine alone. In the circle of friends I formed in Paris, we all had that in common: at a given moment, we had all chosen to leave home and move to Paris. We were all high on the same feelings of possibility.
I met people from all over the world – Russia, Iran, India, Germany, Brazil – feeling an independence I’d never imagined possible. There was a whole world out there and I didn’t have to live in America simply because I was born there. I could live anywhere I liked. And I liked living in France.
This was an epiphany. One rainy night over a pasta dinner with my flatmate, we contemplated the enormity of it. We can go anywhere. We can do anything, we told each other.
* * *
But it wasn’t true. Americans can go anywhere, it turns out, as long as we have the cash, but we can’t stay. Not without a visa. This was another reason I hated that security guard. OK, you can’t go to America, I wanted to say to him, but you can go to Spain, Greece, Italy, the UK, take your pick. The project of the European Union was to promote the free circulation of people and goods, a lesson learned from a century of world wars: that borders may serve some administrative purpose but in the pursuit of capitalism and the common good they must be easier to cross. And yet today Europe is experiencing the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War; as I write there are people, mostly from Syria or Afghanistan or Iraq, pressing on the border to Germany, trapped in train stations in Hungary, stuffed into camps in Calais, risking their lives to get to the UK, capsizing en route to Greece. Will they get through? If they do, will they be allowed to stay? If so they’ll be the Europe of tomorrow, and there are many people who don’t want to see that happen, who defend a white, Christian Europe, even if this is largely their own fiction. The far right don’t just think they will be weakened by contact with the Other. They think they’ll be the ones drowning.
* * *
Does an American belong more in America than elsewhere when most of us came from elsewhere? How to account for the violence of founding a country on someone else’s land? How can any model of American belonging function unproblematically on top of such a heritage? But then wasn’t every country in the world formed out of conflict over who owned the land? All of human history is a story of migrations and conquests. All of us are exiles, but some of us are more aware of it than others.
The real question here is whether any national identity is truly tenable. The post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha has written that minoritarian identities can be powerful, but not if they concretise into solid formations, battlements defended from behind. They must remain fluid. Americans describe themselves through fractions of other places, suturing their origins to the country whose name alone is not enough to define us or contain us. What you place before the hyphen – Mexican-American, Italian-American – defines you more than what comes after. My sister and I, with our mixed Jewish-Italian-Irish background, were less ethnically ‘pure’, so to speak, than a lot of the kids where we grew up, who were only Jewish-American, or only Italian-American, or only Irish-American. We lacked a term for our hybridity. Because we had a surplus of cultural identities, it was as if we had none.
Isn’t it the moment when these supplementary identities break down that we truly become ‘American’? I don’t think so. The way to reconcile these varied histories is not through a proclamation of essence: ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’. For me, it happens through writing; the attempt to understand, through articulating these strange configurations of identity and belonging, is the only way I can keep from being swallowed up by feelings of
rebellion or regret. Which turn to make, which line to pursue, to go down one street is not to go down another, to write about one thing is to ignore a host of others, which you have to exclude, for the sake of legibility. Every sentence a crossroads.
* * *
As I got older I grew more and more interested in my father’s Judaism and thought seriously of converting, but gave it up; surely in our enlightened times it shouldn’t matter which parent is Jewish; they shall know me by the mezuzah on the doorpost of my house.
Passages have to be marked. It is at the borders that ‘something begins its presencing’, writes Bhabha; it begins to be visible, to signify in a different way. Something happens when we push at boundaries and cross over them; some ambiguity is sustained, that cannot be absorbed into some kind of homogeneous identity. In my experience those who defend this homogeneity don’t much care for border-crossers, those who don’t or can’t respect boundaries, or, rather, respect them in a different way, by brushing back and forth against them.
It has been a privilege to be able to give form to my wanderlust, to range from the US to Europe to Asia and back again, encountering only the mildest of resistance. But I have learned that it is an act of empathy to be able to un-root yourself, to recognise that none of us are protected by place.
Beware roots. Beware purity. Beware fixity. Beware the creeping feeling that you belong. Embrace flow, impurity, fusion. ‘To be unhomed is not to be homeless,’ writes this wonderful critic named Homi.1
* * *
In August 2015, I got an email from my lawyer telling me my request for French citizenship had been approved. After eleven years of jumping from visa to visa, and two refusals, they finally said yes. You can stay.
Now that it’s actually happened, I wonder, what does it mean to me? I prod the idea to see if it releases any secret juices or heady odours. All I can think is: how will I define myself if I’m no longer tenuously poised at the edge of my everyday life?
And then what does it mean, anyway, to become ‘French’? I’ve made and lost friends here, I’ve loved here, been heartbroken here, got married here, got pregnant here, lost pregnancies here, been examined and operated on, assessed and ranked, won jobs, lost jobs, taken care of myself and my dog, bought a flat and published books, and I did it all in French.
It doesn’t mean anything, this new passport, it does not make me more French or less American; it is a recognition of this commitment to place. It means I can stay. An authorisation I don’t take lightly.
Didion’s essay, in the end, is about letting go of New York. More precisely, it’s about letting go of a fantasy of New York. The girl in the hotel has not truly inhabited, does not know a place from the inside.
I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to know Paris from within. So much of it is unknown to me, especially beyond the periphery, but which will soon be integrated into Greater Paris, as the city bursts the boundaries it has kept for the past 150 years.
And then even the places I once knew intimately, I’ll walk over them again and know them in a different way. Never the same cobblestone twice, isn’t that what they say? Because one day you’re walking with the fear that any moment they might make you leave, and the next day you’re French.
* * *
When I fly out of Kennedy, as the plane sits on the tarmac waiting for take-off, I stare out the window trying not to feel too much. My parents just got on the Van Wyck, I imagine. My mother’s still crying though she’s trying not to. My father’s wondering why I don’t just come home. And I’m sitting on the tarmac, wondering the same thing.
The airfield at night, in the dark, is so beautiful, suggesting that New York is still the kind of haunted place I’d need it to be in order to stay. Layers of yellow, red, blue lights so the horizon looks rimmed with fire, and the blue-lighted Cross Bay Bridge beyond. The planes hang in the sky as they approach, flashing their lights to signal their descent. A subway train runs alongside us, miles away, a string of lights on a track, the A train on its way to the Rockaways. And then we’re forty-five degrees from the earth, and the yellow lights of home arrange themselves geometrically and become a grid until they disappear behind the fog and clouds.
But on the other side is Paris.
The poet Marilyn Hacker understands this; she also lives in a New York/Paris dialectic. I once heard her say that when her plane takes off from Paris she cries and cries. Her poetry is deeply sensual, witty and sharp, but I think what I love most about it is her instinctive juxtaposition of New York and Paris. In her collection Squares and Courtyards, a pair of poems about the Long Island Rail Road face a poem about the Place du Marché Sainte-Catherine. And in a poem from Desesperanto, she writes: ‘Paris, elegant gray / godmother, consolation / heartbroken lullaby / smell of the métro station / you won’t abandon me.’ But it inevitably does. Living between cities, we are abandoned by them as much as they are by us, because if they gave us all we needed, we wouldn’t have to leave.
Since I left New York, guilt is more a part of my life than it ever was when I lived there – and I’ve inherited the instinctive guilt native to both Jews and Catholics. Living abroad, I miss weddings, funerals, hurricanes and everyday life, maintaining a lifeline to my parents, sister, friends through Skype, Facebook, WhatsApp. I see New York, now, through the open windows of my computer screen. I see it, like the rest of the world, from someplace else.
When I visit, I feel astonished by how strong the tie is. Heading down the East River Drive, towards my sister’s place in Battery Park, under the three bridges as my mom recites the song of the city – Williamsburg, Manhattan, Brooklyn – is enough to make me want to throw in the towel and stay. I’m overcome by their rusty solidity, the way they span across the sky, sublimely industrial as they plunge into the soft side of the island. My great-grandfathers built those bridges. In fact, my grandparents met because their fathers were building those bridges together. I come from a long line of engineers, on both sides, building the city brick by brick, tunnelling into the East River silt. You forget, when you’ve flown off somewhere to live your own life, that the minute you near the place where you began, the force of gravity reasserts its hold and claims you to the ground.
My city isn’t mine any more. And yet it always will be, more than any other. We get to know our cities on foot, and when we leave, the topography shifts. We’re no longer as sure-footed. But maybe that’s a good thing. It’s just a question of looking, and of not hoping to see something else when we do. Maybe it’s good to keep some distance from the things we know well, to always be slightly out of sync with them, not to pretend mastery. Beneath the cities we don’t recognise are stacked all the cities we do.
Having left New York helps me see it anew. En route to the city, on board the Long Island Rail Road, I think of how it used to be such a boring trip, something to be endured, not enjoyed. But since I moved away, I’ve been learning to love the industrial palette of the mix of suburbs and city it passes through. The back ends of superstores. Trucks loaded with slabs of wood. Trees, two-storey brick estates, coffee cups littering the carpet of fallen red leaves. Farmingdale. A balcony done up for Christmas. A plastic bag tangled in branches. Neo-colonial two-storey buildings with columns and fake clapboard siding. Pine trees manicured to look like Tuscany. (If you can’t live in Italy, plant your own.) All Island Truck Supply LLC. Checker cab station. Pools closed for the winter. No Trespassing. Backyards. Some fenced, some not. Susan’s Pub: Home of the 75¢ Beer. Bethpage. How to isolate and disentangle barbed wires from energy lines, the asphalt from the concrete from the bricks? Form follows function in a jumbled anti-aesthetic of small suburban industry. Hicksville. Mineola. Jamaica. The pseudo-countryside becomes the city. Red sheds top buildings defended with coiled barbed wire. Piles of garbage. Boundary Wholesale Fences. Terraced houses with tiny backyards. Satellite dishes point at the sky, ready to receive communications from other solar systems, or at least from a faraway home. Tunnels. Ten-storey buildings. Fire escapes
: the architecture of the tenement. Tudor facades. (If you can’t live in Tudor England, pretend you do.) Twenty-storey buildings. Cars parked on roofs. Thirty-storey buildings. Build everywhere. Build anything. Is it cheap? It will do. Put it in brick. Deck the balconies with plastic Santas. A low-flying plane. Semi-detached pastel-coloured houses. Far off a building with Thai accents on the corners of a brilliantly tiled roof. (If you had to leave Thailand, rebuild your own.) Woodside car wash. Back of a billboard. Crayola-box graffiti. Brick landscape. Milestone Kitchen & Bath Corp. Men in orange and yellow safety vests. ‘Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?’ (Lamentations 1:12). Steel grey, concrete blue, rusted iron, beneath the preppy thrust of red-and-white-striped smoke stacks. Spokes of the bridges my grandfathers built. Majestic steel skyline. Art deco sharp. Southern anchors gone. Next stop Penn Station. This is me. This is me out there.
EPILOGUE
FLNEUSERIE
One of the most famous images of a woman walking presents a scene the meaning of which no one can agree on.