On assignment to cover this thing called life, writing with my former student: Nostalgia
The assignment: I am on assignment to cover this thing called life, writing with Ariel Rose, a former student of mine. She is a bomb writer, damn that girl and her words—I hope she publishes one day. This all started when she posted on FB the other day…if only I could get myself to start writing again…to which I commented, it’s due on Friday, 500 words, then added, actually, let’s do it together.
“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” Isak Dinesen
I had the start of an urban farm in Portland, just off Columbia. It had been a dream for so long to quit moving, to have a home, to have a garden. To throw dinner parties and know my neighbors, and settle in the evening listening to birdsong.
I often wonder how Isak Dinesen, Karen in the movie version, could leave all of Africa and the life she’d built there to return to England. The beautiful hills and valleys of Kikuyu land. The expatriate life steeped in gin and regret and ignorance for the damages of colonization. But a life full of beauty, too. The opening to Out of Africa has always seemed the most nostalgic line in literature.
I hear the line to a beatbox rhythm as I think of my own leaving and returning.
“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
I had that home on Seward just off of Columbia. I bought it cheap on a deal from the teacher’s credit union and as I unpacked the boxes that had arrived from Maui, I thought “I never have to move again.” As I took the boxes to recycling, I pushed out the memory of the scent of pineapples as I ran in the fields at sunset every evening on Maui. As I painted walls, I pushed out the memory of the blue of the water and the waves I’d watch from my front lawn of an evening. As I made curtains for the bathroom, I pushed out the memory of my canoe paddle hitting the water. I pushed out memories of pau’ hana at the beach with friends from work. I pushed out the dream of living on an island. I pushed out the fear that drove me back to Portland.
You see, before I had my urban farm, I had a plantation house above the north shore of Maui, along the slopes of Haleakala.
The first time I landed at Kahului airport, I heard a whisper in my mind saying “this is home.” That was twenty years ago. I go back, but less and less often and the sense of “this is home” is now a worn veneer.
In literary study, it is said that there is the stated reason for going (the character’s motivation) and the real reason for going. For Dinesen I know the stated reason for her going from Africa was grave illness; I can imagine her real reason was to have distance to remember, the distance of nostalgia for her place-making in a time and era gone by. The reason I gave for going was career trajectory, to return to my teaching position at a high status school in Oregon; in reality, Maui was my first real failure—at age 40, I had failed at my job and at my relationship. That fear, brought on by these two failures, was my real reason for going.
My nostalgia is steeped in tropical musk, vibrant and visceral.
Last night, over dinner on a friend’s patio here in Seattle I somehow was transported to one of the last nights I spent living on Maui. I was at a party in Kula. I was in a yard swing with my boyfriend, drinking tequila and eating a brownie, Brazilian music lulling across the lawn from the house. I looked out across the water and wished my leaving there didn’t have to come true.
