Last week, in a post entitled “Sidewalk City: On Parisian Café Culture and the Social Politics of Public Space,” I reflected on the paradoxical status of the Parisian café as a site of both sociability and solitude, on the margins of the modern city. Shortly after posting, my dear friend Arielle, who has long been a staunch supporter of my work, commented: “Love this academic piece. But what about YOU at the café?”
Where am I? Here I am.
I have spent much of my relatively short life in a nowhere city. I grew up in an unincorporated village in rural Ohio, near a crossroads called Kidron just south of Route 30, where the Amish still peddle their wares—sturdy furniture, fresh peaches, and fabric by the yard—on wooden signs posted at the end of long lanes on winding country roads. But that place is not what this post is about.
This post is about the non-places that every nomadic soul has at least once claimed as home—the train stations, the far-flung neighborhoods, the dark cinemas—those ubiquitous urban spaces whose constitutive anonymity affords a fleeting sense of belonging amidst the great migrations of modern life. This post is about a longing for home.
Arielle called my last post “academic.” I cringed when I read her comment. The allure of academia is to become an expert, and through expertise, to stake claim in a world of our own making: knowledge. Expertise is an academic’s way of belonging, of authoritatively declaring that we have something to say in this noisy, post-truth world. But ours is a lonely city.
For a decade (my god, even longer!), I have been performing my identity and my expertise by means of a language and a culture that will never be my own. Neither fluency in French nor an impeccable wardrobe will ever make France my first home. Yet when I am feeling homesick, or longing for home, I am not thinking of the corn fields and grain mills of Ohio; I am dreaming of sunflowers and red terracotta roofs. This perhaps is what the American expatriate author Gertrude Stein meant when she famously stated: “America is my country, and Paris is my hometown.” Or, to paraphrase the Algerian novelist Malika Mokeddem: on whichever Atlantic coast I find myself, from the New York Rockaways to the beaches of Biarritz, the other side the ocean will always be my home.
“Que je sois ici ou là-bas, l’autre côté de la mer, c’est encore chez moi.”
We ambiguously aspiring expatriates are a lonely bunch. We just don’t know where we belong. We’ve stretched the cord to the mother country but we can’t quite sever it. We’re licking at our transatlantic wounds. We shop and read and cook and cuss in a foreign language, but we will count to ten and fuck in our mother tongue until the day that we die.
I chose to study French thirteen years ago because the Spanish teacher in my small town high school was notoriously crazypants, and as a young, disgruntled student, I had a desperate urge to distinguish myself through the mastery of language. For years before my time, the French teacher at my high school had been waging a losing war against the school administration, and when halfway through my education the French program was unjustly cut, I took up arms by writing the curriculum for an independent study of advanced French.
My grandmother, a teller of tall tales, likes to say that from my early childhood I dreamt of one day living in my own apartment in Paris. To the best of my recollection (and my mother’s), that story is not true. And yet here I am. There is a sympathetic appeal to childhood narratives; I wish I could say that my pursuit and eventual mastery of French was the fruit of some naïve and youthful fantasy. But in all actuality, my most vivid memory of French as a child was a passion for Impressionist, and later Surrealist, painting, which my artist grandfather fervently encouraged in our frequent family trips to the Cleveland Museum of Art.
There is another story about my childhood that my mother likes to tell. As a young child, at the age of maybe seven or nine or eleven, on a family visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art, I marched up to the museum docent and demanded to see Salvador Dalí’s iconic 1931 painting “The Persistence of Memory,” on loan from MoMA. That story is true. My passion for Francophone culture grew out of an early fascination for European visual art from the turn of the twentieth century. It wasn’t so much an innate desire for France itself (Dalí, of course, was a Spanish Surrealist) as it was an attraction to radical representations of an uncertain world, where aesthetic conventions were being uprooted and reexamined in the context of colonial expansion, technological advancement, and war. The specificity of France and Francophone culture came much later.
That is not to say that my love for France is inauthentic, but it is nevertheless true that my experience is, and always will be, that of an outsider. This perhaps explains my enduring attraction to the oeuvre of the prolific French novelist Patrick Modiano, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014, much to the surprise of his own compatriots. Modiano’s novels relentlessly explore the “zones neutres,” or neutral zones, of Paris, those ambiguous, in-between spaces, perpetually haunted by wanderers in search of belonging on the outskirts of the eternal city, forever lost. Modiano writes nostalgically of cheap furnished rooms south of Montparnasse where his characters go to disappear in plain sight, of transient crowds that frequent the seedy student bars between Odéon and the Jardin du Luxembourg, and of fleeting encounters in esoteric bookstores peddling paperback science fiction near Place Pigalle.
Suspended in space and time, the zones neutres of Modiano’s novels are places of refuge, offering anonymity as a kind of protective shield. But sometimes, when traveling alone through those neutral zones on overcast days so gloomy that I am not even accompanied by my own shadow on the sidewalk, I worry that I might disappear here forever, in a nowhere city where no one knows my name.
This is the experience of marginality—a source of both anxiety and inspiration—that I endeavored to articulate in last week’s post. It was an attempt to situate my migrant cosmopolitanism within the cultural milieu of a country that I have been longing for a decade to call home.
What does it mean to occupy and to write about those solitary spaces that defy traditional norms of belonging and identity? And what if this nowhere city is my home? For now.
Solitary City 