Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

It will happen again in Houston:
The Houston air is thick with heat and humidity, which slow
everyone’s movements to a sluggish, lazy saunter. The humidity is layered
with so many smells that I detect a whiff of a Krakow summer among
them, and it shoots me through with a sudden longing, as for a love one has
almost forgotten to mourn. 21
It will always happen. It will happen to me as well. The perfume of
lime blossom, for example, more than anything else, precipitates me into the
very much alive childhood memories. For me, that is the smell of pleasure, of
freedom. When the lime trees blossomed, it was the end of the school year and
the summer holidays made our children’s dreams reality. We played, climbing
to the highest branches of the trees, competing with the boys, gathering the
flowers and bringing them home in cotton bags to mothers who put them in
white rags to make dried flowers… We were used to the sweet fragrance that
invaded the houses and then, during the winter, to drinking lime flower tea
to calm sore throats which appeared with the first cold…The smells and the
sounds of childhood appear unexpectedly in our immigrant lives whenever
least expected. It happens to everybody, of course, not only to immigrants. But
perhaps our memories have an extra layer of pain because we are aware of the
impossibility of their repetition, both in time and in place.
Often, our lives are linked to non-places and, with reference to time, that
in exile is not layered. However, landscapes with which an immigrant cannot
identify are not an issue for me. I have always been a convinced admirer of the
most different landscapes in the world, able to find some sense of belonging
to them. It happened in faraway Norway when I was going through the forest
and breathing the bright fragrance of the cool waterfalls, on the steep slopes of
the volcanic mountains that fall into the cobalt sea in the Greek islands, in the
steep clefts that I crossed in the little villages in Sicily… It happened also in
grey and damp Edinburgh and in the intense colours of faraway India. I would
have been able to appropriate these and other landscapes without suffering,
with only a minimum of effort; all of them could have become ‘mine’, or at
least that is what I believed. To me, they are landscapes of discovery, of acquisition,
not of loss. But this is only a condition of the soul. Your tesknota, which
is my tjeskoba 22 invades me when I feel that I have lost my roots at home and I
21
Ibid., 171.
22
Both expressions, the first in Polish and the second in Croatian, are close to the sense of Portuguese saudade
(nostalgia, melancholy, desire…) Note the similarity of the Polish and Croatian terms.
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