ANYTHING TO DECLARE? VOL. 12
Endings are never neat, barely tidy. They happen quickly, staccato. Or are long, laborious and languid — bordering on impossible before they’re suddenly all-at-once. I can’t craft an ending to my immigrant story because I didn’t want it to end. Not then in real life and not now in my retelling. Frankly, I’m not sure it’s over yet. Maybe we’re in the middle or even still in the beginning. I’m wary of resolutions that are strictly warm and bright, never showing the scars. So, that’s not the resolution I’m going to give you. I’ll write it as it comes:
It’s pertinent to note that I am a liar. Despite my best intentions, I am not an immigrant and am actually just — sigh — an expat. I didn’t stay. I came and went. I’m not happy about it. Because it’s not what I wanted, but also because ‘expat’ has unofficially evolved to apply to westerners with freedom of movement who arrive in a country for work, often only socialize with each other, don’t intend to stay and depart without ever deeply interacting with their host country. That’s not me, but, according to the dictionary definition, it is what I am. I feel like that needs to be said.
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I mentioned scars. It reminds me of a poem I wrote on the 16th of February this year. It reads:
tingling as it mends
a signal for work
in progress
our bodies remind us:
healing hurts, too.
I’m covered in scars, much more brazen with my body than my emotions. It feels right that this poem comes back to me while I’m wrestling with compound endings, though I can’t recall what inspired it in the first place. Sometimes you’ve already told yourself what you need to hear.
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Endings seem to travel in packs. Not only is this the final volume in this series, but it also marks the close of my fellowship with Ann Friedman. Another ending I don’t want. But I must make way for the new fellows, such is the nature of things. Fittingly, winter has come to a close in the northern hemisphere and spring has just descended upon us. A season known for rebirth, a word that signifies something had to die in order for something new to grow.
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I have a book called Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda. It’s pretty intense magical realism that was originally written in Catalan in 1986. A friend gifted it to me in 2012 shortly after it had finally been translated into English. We were both living in Copenhagen then. He’s Spanish, but resides in England now — a kindred wandering spirit. I hope to see him this year.
So much of adult life is saying “I hope to see you this year.”
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Sometimes I cosplay the version of myself who was able to stay in Denmark. I think about what she’s doing and who she’s with. I wonder if she’s a mom because the cost of children is less daunting. But most of all, I think about how she sees herself. She’s confident. I come across as quite assured — and I am in certain settings — but she’s Black in Denmark while I’m Black in America. Her shoulders are a little less tense. There are still bigots around her and willful ignorance galivants around, but the racism she experiences doesn’t really sting the same way.
I’m sure it’s different for Black Danes but, for me, Denmark always felt like racism lite. Kind of like how a stranger can make a hurtful comment about my appearance and it might make me self-conscious. But if someone I care about who knows my sensitivities says the same exact thing, it will rip me to shreds. I might start hiding that part of myself for years. I believe what they say because they know who I am. Danish racism couldn’t rip me to shreds; I wasn’t theirs to hurt. But America tried me everyday.
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It was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I was 12 and walking home from the park with a Filipina/white girl friend. Our hoods were on because it was windy and a truck drove by, catcalling us. When they got in front and could see my face, one of them yelled “Eww, it’s a nigger!” My immediate reaction was to turn to her and say “that’s not true” and that is the saddest part of that story.
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In his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois opens by stating that when people ask what it is like to be Black in America they are truly asking “how does it feel to be a problem?” I find that statement, 119 years later, still outrageously apt. In Europe, I didn’t feel like a problem. I felt like an other and often disrespected, but not despised or considered something to put up with.
I don’t want to give the impression that Denmark is post-racism—it certainly, CERTAINLY, is not. It is still a wealthy, white country that harbors and benefits from deeply ingrained colonial habits and frameworks. But it was there, somehow, that race became a concept for me to think about, not my defining factor. I finally felt like I had the distance to actually start to understand what race meant to me and take ownership of it. Not just react to perceptions of it.
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In 2017, a friend from college was visiting Copenhagen on business and her mother was with her. My friend had a meeting, so I took her mother out for smørrebrød — traditional Danish lunch. I had never met this woman before but the conversation flowed easily and, having the mutual approval of her daughter and both being Black women in Europe, we were open with one another. Toward the end of the lunch she looked at me and said, “You just seem so free,” and then gazed off into the distance.
I’ve thought about that for years. Constantly. Neither seen nor spoken to her again. A stranger could so quickly detect my ability to move through the world differently than she. Which is to say: not as a problem.
Now, in 2022, I’m surprised how much it seems I relate my loss of Denmark to a loss of racial freedom and personal depth. The opportunity for safety and a different kind of acceptance. When I cosplay my Copenhagen self, that’s what I think about. Who would I flirt with, where would I go, how would I walk, when would I cry, what tone would I take if I didn’t live in a society that thought of me as a problem to be fixed or reined in? I wish I could know that version of myself. I wish she could have lived a full life and not just seven years.
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If I were Muslim or from an Arabic country (or just looked like I was), I would have still felt like a problem.
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There was another version of this essay that had a clear, tidy ending. It finished on a positive note, but I didn’t like it. I took a shower to try and suss out the reason for my dissatisfaction. I realized it was simply a story, I was giving sequential details of events but not sharing myself. As the sound of the water hissed in my ears, I imagined telling my trouble to my little sister. I imagined her instructing me to “share myself because people will make up the story themselves anyway.” So then I got out of the shower, dried off and I’m writing this to you now.
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In 2012, I sent her The Storytelling Animal by Jonathon Gottschall for her birthday. It uses a combination of psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology to explain how creating stories is essential to being human. I don’t know if she finished it, but maybe it’s the reason my shower-apparition of her would give me such advice. I took that book from her things recently and now it sits on my shelf.
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My sister died suddenly in September. She was 29 and a writer, too.
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I thought of her unexpectedly yesterday. I immediately got worried that a thought of her could be unexpected. Then I realized I hadn’t thought about her for a while, over a day, and felt extremely guilty. Today, I reasoned that anything we think about compulsively is usually destructive. I would like my relationship with her to be healthy, even in her death.
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I remember it was she who inspired that poem on February 16th. I was thinking of the tough healing she had been in the midst of, and all the tough healing me and my family now had to do.
My brother, parents and I all found out about her death at the same time. I was with them in my childhood home less than three hours later. I was there before the coroner. I don’t enjoy thinking about what it would have been like for my cosplay Copenhagen self to get that call, so far away, unable to see her sister’s body one last time, unable to grieve with her family without the pressure of an approaching return ticket. I realize a lot of people experience loss alone, from afar and without any ritual for themselves or the departed. Without the ability to truly say goodbye, death can feel even more like theft. I know that’s been the case since March of 2020 for so many and it cracks my entire heart into rough and jagged pieces.
Maybe getting kicked out was a good thing if only for that. Or, maybe, if the universe chose my cosplay alternative reality and I was still in Denmark, she would still be alive. Maybe we’re meant to be apart.
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You may feel I’m digressing from the topic of endings. Maybe I am. Making sense of the past is a divergent exercise and inherently connected to the present. I warned you: never neat, barely tidy.
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I suppose many of you are wondering where I am. After leaving Denmark in 2017, I spent about a year bouncing around. I still wanted EU citizenship and wasn’t keen to return to the US. In September of 2018, I ended up in Dijon, France with a student visa and hopes to hop on a fast track to citizenship. As the months progressed, it became clear that I wasn’t all that happy in France and gambling five years on the possibility of a passport seemed a little foolish. The relentless hurdles of visas and forms and stamps and deadlines and fees no longer seemed worth it when I wasn’t surrounded by friends. I guess it was a true rebound affair. So, in November 2019, I accepted a position in Los Angeles and moved back to The States.
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Danes often asked me, “What do you miss the most about home?” My answer was, without fail, “The mountains.” You can see a ridge in the distance almost anywhere in California. I’ve always felt protected by them, those ‘purple mountain majesties,’ and I feel a resonant gratitude whenever I glimpse them. California is breathtakingly beautiful all the time — no matter what she’s wearing, even when she’s on fire.
I’m still here in LA. Having moved four months before a pandemic made strangers the most dangerous thing in the world, you can imagine I’m in need of more friends. Drop me a line if you’re around. I’m almost right back where I was when you met me, slightly different this time, but there once again: Broken up, and, hopefully, near love.
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The end. C’mon spring.
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~*Stay tuned for an announcement next week about the continuation of this newsletter.*~
This is the final volume of a 12-part mini-series exploring my experience with immigration. It was edited by Ann Friedman. Start from the beginning here.