On Returning Home After Six Years Abroad

I've been in Europe nearly six weeks and have not posted a single thing to the blog. Ahemhem. Oops! Europe has gotten in the way of my solitary online diary, mostly because family and­­­ friends have taken precedence here; I've been spending less time alone and, in fact, more time working (several weeks building the foundations of a straw bale house at the foothills of the Pyrenees, and a little less than a week gardening and hauling hay and wrapping goat cheese in Alsace... and while I relish manual labor after four years in an office, it's nevertheless equally -- if differently -- exhausting). I've been diving into my French identity again, choosing soirees and rendezvous and fetes and full-throttle absorption over an expat's commentary; humming along to Basque folksongs, tasting all the wines of Provence and all the beers of north England, making apricot jam and picking blackberries, attending comedy shows and village festivals and circuses, cooking for twenty hungry laborers, discussing life and death and love and politics in French with two phenomenal women over tea and hand-rolled cigarettes. Naturally I feel more at home here, less like a starry-eyed outsider.

Qu'elle est belle, la vie.

The last time I was in France was summer 2003, which is crazy, as I've dreamt of returning to my French self so frequently for so long that the idea that it never happened until now is appalling. But what I've discovered is that Sara la francaise is just as present, if not somehow more so, than she ever was. I keep on saying, "C'est parce que j'avais un copain francais, c'est pour ca," (it's because I had a French boyfriend, that's why), which gets me a range of replies, usually a sly smile and a wink, or a sweet aphorism like, "l'amour fait des miracles." (Sweet, but come to think of it, rather insulting... like, hell, if this girl can speak French, there had to be some kind of miracle!) I am learning more every day, though. For instance, my heretofore nonexistent farmwork and construction site vocabulary can now help me find a screwdriver, shovel, pail, pitchfork, wheelbarrow, trowel, nail, hammer, cement mixer, and bucket, as well as gather hay, pull weeds in a greenhouse, and milk a goat. Ok, milk a goat, well. Language is of no use there. And as for sheep, now THAT is nigh on impossible. I imitated the deft movements of the Romanian shepherd as best I could, but no milk to speak of. So I gave up. Quickly. I love animals, but apparently I hate milking them. I just cant bring myself to do it properly. It seems so wrong somehow, sticking your hands between the legs of a shit-covered woolly mammal ass and squeezing a huge, nubbly sac not surprisingly reminiscient of testicles! Especially because the animals seem to find it intrusive, too -- despite the farmhands' insistence that "it doesn't hurt them. Even if you squeeze hard." Eeewww.

Now that I'm back in the blinding wealth and cleanliness of Europe, things make sense (almost too much sense -- a dizzying homecoming within homecomings; where oh where do I belong?), but that first landing was something of a jolt. Culture shock is always more extreme, I find, when you revisit what was once the norm. I felt like Dorothy as I stepped out of the Paris metro, direct from from the chaos of Delhi. When I gingerly opened the door, there I was in an entirely different world -- golden bricks, castles, emerald cities, the works. Paris can't be real, can it? It's a fairytale, a movie set. Likewise for Toulouse, Avignon, Strasbourg: they're too cute to be true, gingerbread and icing and gorgeous brunettes with Loreal lips pursed round cigarettes and glasses of Perrier. It seemed I'd flown instantly from the cowshit-strewn pathways of broiling Varanasi (the oldest living city on the planet, squatting on the Ganges for five thousand years) to streets paved with glossy shop windows, mind-bogglingly spotless boulevards, and public gardens as manicured as the painted villages inside snowglobes. The relative wealth is like a slap in the face. The price of one lunch in Paris easily equals two weeks' lodging in India. And another thing: everyone was making out. Everywhere. There were dozens upon dozens of couples cuddled and cooing on benches and on street corners and in gardens, sucking face or just tangled helplessly, arms and legs entwined on the grass. I asked myself if Paris was really that romantic, if the French were that into PDA, or was I just shocked to see so much skin and sexuality after three weeks in a country where the mere glimpse of a female shoulder is taboo?

After two weeks in Yorkshire and Edinburgh and several days in Barcelona, I bussed to Toulouse, my long lost hometown. I admit I was a bit weepy as the bus skirted fields of sunflowers and creaked into the Matabiau station, but my old stomping grounds, happily for me, haven't changed much. They've gotten smaller, of course, as all remembered places do. The strangest part was how far away it seemed, how echoingly long ago; how young I was, despite my alleged adulthood at the time, and how hard it was to remember the map of the city. I just wandered blindly till I stumbled into a memory: eating mountains of moules frites near Pont Neuf; my little corner grocery; Place St. Pierre, where the drunken college crowds (now painfully infantile-looking) would gather of a Friday night; my favorite boulangerie; where I caught the bus to go to choir rehearsal.

What I've discovered is it's not Toulouse that I miss, that I feel is so much a part of me. It's France, it's French, the language, the culture, the people, the strongest example yet of an alternate reality, another life entirely, a very real fork in the road.

Often, these last days in Europe, the idea of being American escapes me altogether. I talk to myself in French when no one's around. I wake up with French songs in my head. I coo to the dogs and cats and cows and goats, "que t'es mignon" and "allez, les filles!" I can't stop saying "pardon" instead of "excuse me" and have forgotten half the words I know in English.

Other times, when I'm tired or when my head space shifts for some reason or another, I remember that the backlog of my life in English is so much longer, deeper, richer, with so many more years of connotation and nuance and vocabulary, that suddenly I'm stuck with a lightning bolt of nostalgia, and my mouth won't focus its vowels, my brain won't recall the genders of nouns, and I'm helpless, stumbling, foreign again.

I find this troubling: the more I know about something, the less I seem to be able to write about it, to form concrete opinions about it. I guess that's just 'the more you know, the less you know,' but it's still not easy for me to answer, "What are French people like?" even in a facile, chitchat way -- I'm too consumed by the muddiness of truth and I stumble over it, again and again. Likewise for those inane queries I still get loads of, such as "so, is it true that Americans like to have guns at home?" or "Are young people in America interested in being ecological?" Um.... yes and no yes and no, what IS America anyway and why do I feel like everyone else knows a whole lot more about it than I do?

I used to think the French Sara was a different Sara altogether -- one I had to put away for years, and bring out again whole, untouched. Maybe I just know myself better now, but they don't seem so disconnected anymore, despite the fact that the only metaphors I can come up with to describe it are "self" or "side" or "identity." Now I know, at least, that I never left her in college, in Toulouse. She's come all this way with me... fragmented, splintering, and always, always changing.