On being “home”
As soon as I walked into the swarm of people bustling to find their appropriate lines at Miami International Airport, I knew. The lines had the labels and accompanying rights, Citizen, Resident, Visitor. “US passport holder over here”, she shouted. ” The others need to be printed and photographed. This line is faster”. And when the ‘Americans’ did not respond to her cry fast enough, ” you pay your taxes for this faster service”, she added. And when I was processed, the officer smiled and said “welcome home Mrs. Ferguson”, I was reminded then of a book from my favourite Jamaican author, Anthony C. Winkler. GOING HOME TO TEACH.
And if that did not prompt my recollection of the third page, last night’s movie theatre and restaurant experience affirmed what I knew….
Living in America as an immigrant was for me like living in a vivid dream. Sometimes things were briefly clear, you saw this and that and why so and so, but then abruptly the picture would change and you feel giddy in your own denseness. It was like walking into a movie that was half over and picking up the storyline in the middle. Some things you got from the context others escaped you. The despair of it all was that you could never see the movie from the start and so were forever doomed only to dimly understand it.
I felt no love for this land. It did not smell right. Even after 13 years it still had the alien unrecognizable spoor of a foreign place. It did not smell of labouring bodies, burning cane fields, and animal dung, and smell that way whether in the windless heat of noon or in the feathery breeze of the evenings in Jamaica [and St.Lucia] did. Instead, it had the odour of things man-made and lifeless – store bought clothes or the felt of a new hat. “ Every fox likes the smell of his own hole.” Grandfather used to say. I did not like the smell of America.
(A.Winkler, Going Home to Teach. p 3)
