Clearing Brush - or - Pirates of the Caribbean 2

            I’ve spent hours in our garden since we’ve returned, clearing brush, as George Bush used to call it, pulling out the giant weed plants that have sprung up since we left. (Note for the next year abroad: black plastic cover.) It’s about the most intellectual thing I can muster up right now, though I have a deal of work to get started on, and I have managed in quick spurts to do things in my office at school.

            Everything is very familiar here, almost as if I lived here for eight years already. I recognize people, and places, and I know my way around completely. But I haven’t remembered how to be here, quite. It’s slightly disorienting, because I have a routine I struggled to lose that I need to acquire again, even as I also work to hold on to some of the perspective I gained in Indonesia. I haven’t lost any ambition, I don’t think, but I hope I’ve lost some of the angst about it. Perhaps my reluctance to commit to re-entry has to do with a concern that the whole ocean of my previous life will surround me as soon as I dive in. So I’ve just been dangling my feet, sometimes pulling them out and retreating to the garden if the water gets too unwelcoming. There, I watch the weed free places grow, taking spatial satisfaction in doing work that I would have, two months ago, paid someone $2 a day to take care of, and my body is sore, from squatting and pulling and lifting and digging, those physical tasks I was protected from as an expatriate elite in a servant culture.

            Seamus the other day described return as like Pirates of the Caribbean 2 – “the first one was so great, and you get so excited about the second one, you build it up, and you think about it, and you rush out to see it, and it turns out it just isn’t as good. It’s a little disappointing.” I wouldn’t describe my return like that – I don’t feel disappointed, for example, in the same way Seamus is feeling, because Laura and I have been welcomed home by our friends with enthusiasm and curiosity, and I am glad to be here, but I understand the sensation of strangeness, when you return to a place that you know and it turns out things have shifted a little, but you can’t pin down how.  Those shifts must feel a lot larger for my kids.

            People talked about reverse culture shock as a phenomenon of return from a year like this, and I believed it, but I didn’t know what it meant. It took me far longer to get my sleep back to its neurotic normal rhythm this time, so that was part of it. There is nothing like a sense of disgust at American excess (unless I eat the whole meal) or disdain at how we do things here. It’s a more personal experience than culture shock in Indonesia was: there, it was simply a sense of exhilarating displacement, a lack of clarity about how to physically move around spaces I had to map from scratch in my head. There was discomfort and uncertainty, but of course there was, because nothing was familiar. Here, I am in a place I supposedly know how to be in, and where everything is familiar, and it feels like it should be normal to be home. And so far, it isn’t quite, though the sensations are becoming less strange and more pleasant as the days continue, two weeks after return, as the garden becomes cleaner, as the piles of garden waste grow, as friends aren’t surprised to see me again. I know this place, and to be honest I can’t pin down, quite, what makes it feel so weird. But I feel it in my body.

            I’ve connected a little with a group of Middle Eastern students who are part of a program at MSU I used to help organize – I delivered a lecture to them on Monday, and met with them on a couple of other occasions; they are smart driven students from parts of the world that will need them to be on, now, as sweeping changes move across the Middle East. A Bahraini student was expelled, just as her course of study was completing, because she protested against the royal family. An Egyptian student stood in Tahrir Square in Cairo, helping edge out Mubarak. A Yemeni student complains because no one is paying attention to the 5 month long revolution against a president who has been an ally to the United States in the “War on Terror,” a phrase I can only type in quotation marks.  And of course sitting in the middle of it all is the Palestinian-Israeli quagmire. Talking to them, in my bucolic, green, spacious, wealthy home city, reminds me of how deeply connected my life is to the lives of these students, to the lives of my former students in Indonesia. Perhaps that is the basis of my sense of displacement upon return; perhaps I brought those spaces with me, and I am trying to understand them, overlay them on this space, recognize them together, try to figure out what those connections are. That’s a long project, and it will happen again when I step into a classroom, or go to a conference, and at times and places I cannot even anticipate.

            I need to go clear some brush.