Borderland Identity

“Home is where the heart is.” Well, by nature, my heart is all over the place, all the time. It always has been. Even as a child in pictures, regardless of the setting, whether it be in front of my house in Burr Ridge, IL, at the Brookfield Zoo, where I spent as much time as I could, balancing on a log at the duck pond in Cape May Point, New Jersey, or pretending to roller skate with street performers in Central Park when we lived in New York City when I was 3. . . you can see it.

There it is.

The vacant and awkward, closed-lipped, crooked, minimally dutiful, airy smile for the camera,

head tilted to the side and upwards . . .

cloudwards,

Or down a rabbit hole,

through soft, brown misty doe eyes

from home inside myself,

. . . the intersection of all the places and people and sights and thoughts of childhood. The love of my parents and grandparents, siblings, and the turmoil, too. The place on my hand where I used my father’s patience and my mother’s whimsy to coax butterflies to land. This place, this intersection, the home, was a designated location where the unmapped territories I had yet to explore would also converge. Home was the “unfinished chamber”, and so was I unfinished . . .

Home inside me was a refuge from the identity chaos, or what I must have perceived as chaos, not knowing how I fit in. But to outsiders, my inside would look far more chaotic - a spin art canvas, the receptacle of constant paint pouring, new color and the odd shiny object thrown in to add dimension. No one would understand.

I kept this home pretty much to myself - safe from misinterpretation. But home inside was hard to contain. The missing places and people I had yet to know were begging for discovery, and so home cried out for completion under the surface of my skin. In these pictures, you see a secretive child. Secretive children are usually the ones that end up lost in far off places.

Follow the pictures to chambers in my heart. These places are all part of a collection that rises to the surface when the word, “home” begs for definition. That is why they respond to this question. Where is home? Follow the pictures. Follow the headlamp. Follow the bird.

. . . I didn’t start living up to the astute nickname my parents gave me, “Birdie”, until I was around 10. I weaseled my way into a 3-week 6th grade trip to St. Germain en Laye in France. But please . . . let’s not talk about St. Germain - as much as I loved loved loved the brick laden streets, 2-hour lunch breaks, pain au chocolat, and the odd, but entertaining, clawfoot bathtub with the snaking shower head with no hanger that you get to spray your body with at will . . . or the stoic stone castles, I cannot call that place home because that place assaulted me. To talk about France, I have to talk about how my host student hated me and told me that I gave her a “head itch” with my incessant chatter and the fact that I was picked on mercilessly (“Non, merci!”) for being an oversharing little brainiac dork, which ALMOST killed my wanderlust.

And so, instead of nesting my heart and making home in this memory or any other memories of not feeling like I fit in my own skin, including memories from the town in which I spent most of my formative years . . .

. . .where I rode in the back of the bus and still managed to emerge with a head full of spitballs, and where I traipsed through sewer pipes spread eagle, straddling streams from one end of town to the other, hoping for a surprise wonderland to emerge at the other end . . .

When telling my life’s story, the France story is OUT . . . even many of the “hometown” stories are OUT. Those memories are not “home” any more than the places were when I was there in the flesh. They are not anything I would want to build my nest out of. Isn’t that ironic?

I shudder at the memory from time to time, adjusting my wings and taking flight again to another one I feel more at home in.

“ I am here because I am a woman of the border: between places, between identities, between languages, between cultures, between longings and illusions . . .”

- Ruth Behar

“Do I contradict myself?

Very well then,

I contradict myself.

I am large.

I contain multitudes.” -Walt Whitman

Is this flexible identity what some call being borderline? Land and lines. Mapping the self. Mapping places. Same difference. Home. Self. Mutable.

My nickname is Birdie. Think of me as a migratory bird. I have vestibular issues, poor eyesight, and hearing impairment that requires hearing aids. If you consider me a migratory bird with a troubled navigation system, that would adequately explain how I end up, literally, all over the place, and mistake these places for home. But I did wind up in the same place sometimes, and willfully return there even today. Places like Cape May Point, where my maternal grandfather smart-allecked and maternal grandmother dominated in Boggle, where my mother scoured the boardwalk for the best saltwater taffy makers and out-roller-coastered us all year after year, where we found ourselves caught in freeze-frame for what felt like hours at the bird observatory while my dad photographed an insect on some sort of beach flora, where there was a dispute over what clotheslines are for - my grandmother taking the conventional definition and my grandfather, my heart, and I certain a clothesline was perfectly suited for hanging wooden whirligig models of different seabirds, still dripping paint onto the semi-arid back lawn. Beach races for my brother. Lifeguards for my sister. And wrestling with the surf for me, swimming in the ocean is always a feat of negotiation. I have a ton of nesting materials from Cape May. In fact, I probably learned most of my nesting skills here. But the security of it was washed away each year with the tide, and we returned to Burr Ridge.

When life tosses you around, you have to carry your sense of home with you everywhere you go. Borderline or not, I am and always will be a woman of the borderlands, living and writing on the border. That makes “home” hard to define. Searching for myself and my home, I have taken influence from many places.. My “homeland”, or “hometown” is a constellation within me. It’s a new place every day. It is a lowland, downstream settlement, collecting waters and sediment naturally washed in, and treasures I bring in with intention from my travels.

It floods like the homes of the people of Guinaw Rails in Senegal, West Africa, where I did a photography project with kids in 2010. But the women in those homes still stand strong, and somehow, they taught me to do the same. But that wasn’t until much later . .

Up until very recently, if you had come to my hometown at five-year intervals, you wouldn’t recognize it. It would have changed. I would have changed. The world and the places I had seen would have changed me.

Once we allow ourselves to truly inhabit our “border identities”(a mix of who we were “born to be” and the part of us that attracts us to the borders of our lives to seek out the “Other” in us), we can write in a way that explains that attraction to the border. This is who Lady Headlamp is. She is the scout in me that goes out exploring. And now, she sees things clearly. And home is the heart that changes because of it.

But as I said, I was once a lost little bird before home became integrated and my identity less fluid. So, to tell you what home means to me and to pay tribute to the places and people that make up the alchemy of home in my heart, I shed my headlamp and my ladyhood, and remember myself as a vestibularly-impaired bird with a great big open heart, red as a robin’s breast, and take you on a few more of my early journeys, so you can see what I built my nest out of..

Next destination - Casa del Sol. 1997.

. . . Sounds like a mystical place, doesn’t it?

It is.

Casa del Sol is a semi-abandoned building in the South Bronx, right under the Bruckner, around 1997. It’s a squat, held by adverse possession by a few tenants who refused to leave when the landlord went delinquent on taxes and the police raided the place to evict them all. Most of them have moved out. Prolly cuz the police tore out the plumbing and shut off the electricity and because the raids scared their children. But the garden, the Adverse Possession Art Gallery on the first floor, the Puppet Street Theater Workshop on the second (one of 3 rooms in the whole 6 story building with water), and the Sanctuary on the top floor, along with the Women’s Quarters, the Men’s Quarters, and a few apartments for the long time residents are all intact. Casa del Sol is a Mayan “monastery”, according to its inhabitants, and also home to The Cherry Tree Association, an active and thriving community-based organization with multiple local partnerships, including membership city counsel. My room has a broken window and an almost transparent silky white curtain that wisps in and out of the room all day and night. It is so quiet and calm. I retreat there after a day’s work peacefully. Irony is alive and well under the Bruckner.

No one really wants us out except the mayor, who would love to auction the building off. I make puppets with kids. I collect data for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund to protect 119 community gardens on an auction block and show solidarity with the gardeners to keep them gardening so they won’t lose faith. I run a gardening program for kids in the United We Stand garden, support the South Bronx Clean Air Coalition, and I coordinate a garden outreach program. That’s my pretty outside plumage. But underneath all that, I am a mud-caked warrior. Political and spiritual. I sleep through the winter under that broken glass window, more than 40 ft away from the trash barrel wood stove. I bucket bathe. I dumpster dive. I grow food. I wheat paste protest posters on Wall Street for the @($&)@!$#) Society. I get arrested on the steps of City Hall dressed as a ladybug with 50 others making a NY Times story demanding that the Mayor stop the auction of community gardens.

And shortly after, I whisk back to the University of Iowa to finish up my degree.

Casa del Sol is gone now, in its physical form. But that place is so alive in me - the nest of much of my inner strength. It is the place in my heart I go when I am not sure I can survive circumstances, when I don’t know if the battle is worth it, when I need to make something out of nothing, and when it is time to say no and refuse to budge, like a stubborn, south-going ladybug, “ I’m not resisting. I’m just not assisting!”

And then, there is Nicaragua. 2000. And 2002-2006.

By this time, my borderland personality was starting to set in. I was adaptable as a migratory bird.

At home in my many homes, but also in between.

Anywhere I went was home and deserves mention.

Nicaragua, Nicaraguita, proud land of jocote, zopilote, volcano and sandinista!

Where every taxi driver has an advanced degree and could easily be a published historian.

Where the guerilla spirit is in the food, the talk, the music, and the laughter of the people, even the liberals and conservatives.

Nicaragua was once the capital of Central America and led a torrent of revolutions aided by Brazil, Cuba, and the U.S.S.R. They ousted the Spanish and much later overthrew a dictator reversing the literacy rate - from around 20% to nearly 80% in about a decade.

The roads are all dusty, even the paved ones. Bus drivers drive like maniacs, hanging their passengers like accessories on the outside of their busses, letting them bobble in the wind as they zoom recklessly around rotundas blasting music. Except when they are on strike, which is . . . almost always. Then, they park their busses and try to stop students from burning their tires.

It’s 2002. I witness the assassination of Carlos Jose Guadamuz, a flip-flopper journalist, who is my student’s father from 50ft away.

It’s 2003. A volunteer job as an interpreter at Mombacho Volcano and another paid one teaching English at Notre Dame School. I learn to cook and dance. I am fluent. They call me “chela” (white girl), but they also call me “Nica” (Nicaraguan) and say my blood runs “negro y rojo” (red and black, the Sandinista colors). I am flattered and feel at home in the recognition. I try my best to become immune to my inner “gringa”, but I fail.

2005. Inhabited - Lady Headlamp Offers a Home to Parasites

This is the story of my romance with parasites. I had only been here for 3 days when I decided to ignore all medical advice in the name of solidarity. I had met a number of Peace Corps volunteers and the like stationed in the far reaches of the country. They could do it, why couldn’t I?

So, I broke with 9 years of vegetarianism, and decided to drink and eat anything, anywhere that anyone offered me. My delicate digestive system an insult. I needed to overcome it. I needed to prove to myself and to my friends that I was open, that I wanted to be infused. Only then could I get past my sheltered upbringing, resurrect my digestive tract from its protection-induced weakness, and essentially, be inhabited by the unknown. . . unpeeled.

So, I began to scratch, to pick, to peel away anything reminiscent of protection and take in anything and everything. “Volcan. Perico. Pollo. Jicaro. Lago. Lagarto. Carne. Agua . . . Todo . . . Todo.”

I traveled to El Campo and worked in the communities . . . and I never turned down a single scrap of food or drop of water, despite medical advice. Medical advice was just another obstacle to my mission to express solidarity and to grow into the work I planned to do for the rest of my life. Still, the nacatamales that I savored in the market were prepared by women who had no access to water to wash their hands or the cooking utensils. My beloved “fresco de calala,” was made with the same living water. Even the water I brushed my teeth with at night . . .

See, unfortunately, I come from a long line of anglo folks with a knack for adaptation to any social situation, but very weak digestion, and food and solidarity in Nicaragua go hand in hand. In order to be adopted, one must eat. So, I had to make a decision, and I decided not to decide.

I decided to try to train my bowels by taking in anything and everything. I decided to court giardia and amoebas. I fondly called the parasites living inside me my ‘pets,'' my “babies,” and I joked, “Well, I have to feed them, don’t I?” But inside I was hurting. My body was failing me. I couldn’t build up resistance. They always got the better of me, spoiling a training, or a night out with friends, ravaging my self confidence. My dirty little secret. I didn’t want anyone to know I was weak. I did not want to insult them with my special needs, but the more I tried to discipline my body, the more tired I got, the more I suffered physically, the more distanced I felt to the community, and worst of all, the less I actually contributed in my work.

Finally, I wound up in the hospital . . . Dehydration. Emptiness. Rock bottom. It took being at risk of heart failure for me to give up my campaign against my origins, my quest to be penetrated deeply by the unknown, and to value the experience and friendship I had gained. It wasn’t until I let myself be cautious in my new country, that I really came into my own – the collective part of me, and found true community. Now my system is clean, but I am still proud to say that I am . . . forever inhabited.

Home? . . . . I cannot possibly describe one place.

I am marked by many.

A lot of people bear the markings of “tourists.” This was never my problem. I fit right in. In Nicaragua, they called me, “Nica.” Years later, in Senegal (2010), they called me “Fatou”. As a traveler, I had no problem “being at home” in my new surroundings, and even blending in, but I was not always sure who I was when I was there. I thought of myself as a borderland “Other”, not a tourist, not a native, and not quite an ethnographer. If I were an ethnographer, I would have a home that I return to. I resist ethnography for the same reason that I am drawn to it. When I write, I can’t help but feel that I am always stealing stories, stealing voices for my own benefit. . . and what exactly that benefit is, remains unclear. I have never published a word. But the thirst for places and stories is overwhelming and feels wrong.

To counteract that vampiric, or dare I say, colonizing tendency, to avoid stealing agency, for many years, I intentionally turned myself into an intersection of people and lives, with no fixed or reliable identity of my own.

There were lovers along the way. And I wonder, with my identity so malleable, who colonized who.

Most relationships last as long as they have to for you to learn the lesson, and then they stop, colonized by the two new beings born of that learning. But some will last forever because the transformations are subtle and they can weave themselves through the cycles of time without barely being noticed. My younger relationships stretched me out of my skin, and made me burst through my own surface, swollen and bruised, covered in pollen. Then, I tossed about in the wind awkwardly for a while, my new vocabulary like a foreign babble that gained me entry into new worlds – accumulating. Eventually, by force of life, I looked up at the sun, learned to drink water from my roots, and waited, poised perfectly. And when the real One came (less than two years ago), I was uncannily ready to stand tall by his side and offer a place at my hearth instead of being plucked and trampled - without chattering, without wandering, without tremble. Seasoned with just enough temperature change and precipitation to know how much to let in and how much to give. But this change had been a long time coming, and I was plucked many times before that . . .

The Golden Flowers

In the skirts of the volcanic craters, golden flowers grow scattered like jewels along my path. I try to divert my attention away from them, but between observing the mangled roots, which hang or wrap themselves around the curved trunks of trees, or searching among the branches for Mombacho butterflies, migratory songbirds, or red opossums, I glance furtively down at the ground.

Even the deep-throated, thumping scream of howler monkeys warning me to watch my step is not enough to divert my attention from the magical little golden spheres.

I covet them like I’ve never coveted anything else before.

At first glimpse, there is nothing exotic about them. I convince myself that plucking one would constitute the most harmless opportunity to take a piece of this tropical paradise home with me. They won’t be missed.

But I must take heed.

Perhaps while the Spanish soldiers were busy conquering the indigenous villages, their wives and children walked along these same paths, and thought the same. But the locals say that anyone who picks a golden flower from the cloud forest, will disappear, never to return to his or her family. Some say that those who pick the golden flowers are immediately transformed into flowers themselves, later only to be picked by the next visitor, and to wilt away in an hour’s time, or be tossed aside and trampled on the path.

At the risk of inadvertently colonizing others’ territories, my story, my sense of home, and my view of myself are forever inhabited, like a changeling, who reads and writes her imperative for immersion in the reality of “others” in order to find and reclaim the lost worlds that were with her in the womb and somehow, as she was raised by “her people,” got filtered out. While we are busy mapping places, processes, systems, and our own brains, the world cries out not to be ordered, but to have its borders broken down! It calls on humanity to “unmap” itself. And I unmap myself and stand naked before whoever wishes to know me. At the risk of getting colonized or lost.

If you, the reader of this place, have ever felt desperate to feel at home in your own body, you will understand my longing.

I appeal to your sense of longing by giving it voice.

2004. The Lady With the Headlamp Sees the Old Lady in the Crater . . .

I climbed up Mombacho volcano, where I collected these stories, declining an offer to ride in the Volkswagen tank that was brought over during the Contra War and is now used by Fundacion Cocibolca to carry tour groups up the trail to the top. Howler monkeys warned me nothing would be different, mocking me, “Ooh, ooh, ooh!” a sarcastic tribute to my plain-ness, which I imagined was being whisked away with the wine-flavoured nancite wind each time I entered El Guanacaste. I could drink the coffee right off the bushes and change the color of my skin. I intoxicated myself with the thrill of my dangerous flirtation with romanticism, fancying that the mica (the monkey lady) was out looking for me. I was sure I’d see a zariguella tonight hanging upside down, rat tail wrapped around the branch of an ancient guanacaste. I’d brush the red tufts of fur lining her face away, stare into her big round eyes, and witness my rebirth.

The sun was level with the crater when I reached the log cabin biological center and started down the path to the smoking sulfuric fumarolas. The moss climbed my boots as I walked. Roots wrapped around me, and I became one with the forest spirits. Howler monkeys always mock – it’s in their nature, I assured myself. I was confident I’d find what I was looking for this time. When I got there, I looked down into the depths of the Cocibolca crater lake and I saw . . . the same girl I’d seen every time, just another cultural tourist. I couldn’t even make the waters shape-shift my image into a more enlightened creature by squinting or opening my eyes up wide. The old woman of the crater had failed me again, or I had failed her. What would it take to get her to conspire with my desire for transformation?

The Guanacaste villagers are sure-footed navigators of the wilderness, but only the bravest and strongest venture out into the night to scurry the edges of the craters. Many men used to hunt the zariguella (a red possum) in these areas at night before Fundacion Cocibolca put a management plan in place and the area was protected. In these times, it was often reported that an old decrepit woman had been seen crawling on all fours among the subterraneous roots that wind along the wall of the crater. Sometimes they say her eyes are green, sometimes red, sometimes orange. When spotted, her eyes flash and she clambers away, mumbling, indecipherable utterances that sound like curses. Crossing this woman’s path is viewed as either being very bad luck or a sign that important changes in one’s life should be expected. That is what the villagers had told me. But I had seen a scuttle or two across my path one too many times and had been disappointed by the consistency of my ordinariness. It was so much easier to be a hero when I was a child.

“Damn it,” I cursed at her imagined shadow, threw a piece of dried out orchid root over the cliff, and wrinkled my nose at the sulfur fumes rising from within the volcano. I’ll be honest. I collected and wrote these stories for myself and other butterfly-counting, coffee-buying, twitty soul-searchers like me. . . . See how they draw you in and bar you from getting too close at the same time? If the only path into this mythic territory were through the lens of a cultural tourist, would you take it? Or would you turn around and walk proudly back down the trail to the bus stop at the bottom of the volcano and congratulate yourself for resisting the urge to indulge in a little voyeurism, a little ordering of symbols, a little dangerous flirtation? I pushed on further, shoving gigantic fern leaves out of my way, because I knew I had come here for some reason. I might as well find out what it was. Fearlessness means acknowledging that you came to some place for some reason and not being afraid to find out why, even if it is ugly. Strength is the ability to transform ugliness into something useful.

1996. I was kidnapped, you know.

Before Casa del Sol. Before Nicaragua. Time doesn’t matter in this homeland. I like to dance over that chapter of my life if I can. I’d be lying if I claimed I never find myself in a nightmarish sweat stuck in a car, as a passenger. . .

Watching escape opportunities whiz by behind glass window panes,

Heart pounding in my head,

Thoughts swarming.

That feeling comes back to me when opportunity knocks, when I start to feel at home anywhere, sometimes.

It would be a lie to tell you it is impossible that my inability to settle could have been exacerbated by this 48 hour car ride,

exacerbated by the smell of stale cigarettes,

by pure adrenaline.

No, . . . Fear.

Plots to escape crouching like a tiger waiting for the variables to align just so.

I won’t say that grey car isn’t parked somewhere inside my home or that I know what to make of it. It is there somewhere, lingering, and I am confounded by it.

If I drive, I take control of that space within me and the memory. I celebrate my clever escape. I own some dignity.

But if I get in, I also face all the fear of the memory. So, I don’t go looking in the woods for that car often, and I don’t burn it to the ground either.. I hold space for it with cautious respect.

I also respect the water-birthing pool I rented in 2012 to give birth to my son, still deflated, because his father would not agree to a homebirth. He belittled me from the beginning. Eventually, I had to break that union, and I am in a good place now, but I remember the birthing pool. I mourn the fact that it never got used. But I celebrate my son, who is everything I ever dreamed of, and lights up every corner in this homeland.

When he stands at the shore in Cape May Point, not far from where I balanced on a log and spaced out, he takes the whole ocean on, inside and outside him. It crashes and he yells back into the grey-green power and foamy settling tide, chasing the foam until it dissolves, and dancing spitefully until the water gathers itself and chases him up the sandy beach again, eliciting squeals and alighting sandpipers. This is the home of my grandfather and grandmother. I came here each year of my childhood to wipe my slate clean. Here is where I decided that clotheslines are best utilized to hang painted wooden models of birds made by the 3rd generation than to hang clothes - and so it shall be law in my homeland as well. That and any other law my son decrees on my heart.

In a lot of ways, he supersedes it all and is a whole new home for me. I have learned not to wisp about quite as much for him. Now I have to gather all these places and be the place and the person standing where they all meet, so I can offer all their riches and all the good they have done me and the world to him. I have to actually think about home. You know, like “home home”. A nesting place for my little bird. I have to go out, but not far, and bring him food and stories, and lessons learned.

Every place we have gone together, and our home, with our kindred, Joe and Nathaniel, his cub. . . the Unwritten School, which we have just opened, all of these identity markers are rising to the surface of home, giving it a more solid definition. Beautiful. None of that would be possible without the other places. Without the vacant look of the wanderer, without the bullying, the kidnapping, the chaotic ordering of the memories, and the traveling. None of it can be excluded from the definition of “home.” Truly exquisite. Full. Ripe. Alive. Large. Full of contradictions because it contains multitudes. And it is the perfect place for all of us. 468