Soutie

Two halves of each country make one whole home.

I have begun, written, panicked and deleted this article many times. I have two finished versions in my drafts folder that I can’t bring myself to read in case they are terrible, or worse, better than this one. This is the first time, since getting Substack about 6 months ago, that I have been a scaredy cat about an article (perhaps I should have been a bit more of one with previous pieces). But, I think I am right to hesitate. How do you talk about the strange, fragmentary, lonely, beautiful, real, liberating experience of emigrating to a new country when you have been able to do so with flights and visas and money and help, seeped in privilege like butter slathered across skin.

When we were in our last year of High School, we sat on the lawn at break time and discussed what we wanted to study. “I don’t know what I want to study, but I know I want to study overseas,” said my friend. Everyone nodded in agreement. Where ‘overseas’ was, was not specified, it could have been Papua New Guinea, Naoshima or Swindon. At our The Best School, we had been bottle fed ‘overseas’ like sugary, stolen tea until our milk teeth rotted from our gums. In our waspy, white homes we were continuously reminded that ‘overseas’ was superior, that it was our chance at something important, that it was a goal. We ate it up, asked around, waved goodbye to our crying mothers, boarded humming jet planes, and we left home and country.

To have the choice to leave, the ability to dream at eighteen from a school lawn, the visa or the passport, the miracle to be let through another’s border, the financial support to afford to eat and sleep there - is to exist in the tiniest percentage in the world. This tiny number shrinks every moment as many more millions of people become displaced by uncontrolled, unlucky, unbelievable and horrific fates. So, I write this with caution, with relative discomfort, with a hollowness in my chest and a fullness in my throat. Like a confused moth, I flew out of the warm womb of Africa and into the cold shoulder of Europe. Into ten days of Heathrow Hotel Quarantine.

I stared out of the suicide prevention windows at the grayscale and sepia and I didn’t turn back. I was lonely. I was nervous. I was too excited to sleep. Then they released me like a screaming banshee on this polite country where you flush your wee and hold your breath and form an orderly queue, please. I learnt to like beer, I learnt to use the tube, the post, the library, the park. I learnt that I had hardly any commonalities with the majority of my new countrymen apart from language and skin colour. The differences we had grew more the deeper I dug. Like a hole. But, if our shared ancestors have taught us anything it is to not focus on the unimportant differences between human beings.

So, I had done it. I had arrived at the perceived top of the hierarchy of countries. Of homes. The country that was better than mine. We all know that ‘first’ is meant to come before ‘third’. And in which category do we measure this firstness, this bestness? If it be by sport, food, transport, crime or beauty, then that hierarchy would shift back and forth, upside down, downside up. Why are we primed to leave our home countries, to be lawyers and doctors overseas? The sad irony, after benefiting from the ‘best’ education, ‘best’ facilities, ‘best’ lives.

And, it’s all a bit complicated, a bit confusing, sometimes a bit silly. My friend explained how, since leaving India for the UK many years ago, she no longer feels that India is fully her home. But, even now that she has received her British citizenship (and had to revoke her Indian one to do so), she says that England will probably never fully be home either. We agreed that the place we left would now be half-home and the place we had moved to, the other half. We realised that, by making a home in our new place - we would never have one whole home again. Instead, two halves.

The stakes were obviously higher for her. I look the part, I speak the part (after some wine), I am greeted with enthusiasm at border control. But, I was not raised here, my family do not live here, I do not hold a passport, I do not know how it feels to be of this country. And for obvious reasons, I would not describe myself as an African. If I look at my citizenship, I am a South African - however, a bit more tentatively after these few years. I am in between, made up of halves, fragmented across continents.