Estrangement

by Ana Negut

Barn Quilt is a stunning work of Fidencio Fifield-Perez. The art piece is composed of rather delicate paper cuttings, cut out from used maps collected over time. Although structural aspects of the work evoke the homely, protective comfort of a barn quilt, the shadow that is cast by the paper cuttings creates a border-fencing-like image behind it. The imagery is reminiscent of hostile wired fences and clear physical borders. The artist manages to capture this contrast in a visual retelling of his experience as an immigrant in the US, thus exploring the debate over borders. What struck me is the duality of such a beautiful piece of art, the idea that the same object can both offer protection and signal estrangement. I started thinking about the importance of such objects in my life: my passport, my debit card, my tenancy agreement, my plug adapter. All of these flimsy pieces of paper or plastic hold such significance for my experience outside of my birth country. As I’ve been travelling across borders, a passport, for example, has become a symbol of both familiarity and estrangement.

The same object can both offer protection and signal estrangement

My passport is a way to return to both of my homes. It holds a portrait of myself from a few years back when my dad drove me to the city centre to get my picture taken and then had ice cream with me on a typical summer day. My passport is also what keeps me outside of the UK arrivals line at the airport. It is the oddity that I need to carry with me on my nights out, when my national ID card won’t help me get in. So many objects serve as a reminder of who I am and who I am not, a reminder of what I call home and what home is supposed to be. They capture a subtle feeling of alienation that is hard to explain and even harder to overcome. I’ve been wondering if this makes me a tourist in somebody else’s home, but I wish to reject this hypothesis. The fact that I find myself in a place that I love, with people I’m deeply connected to, in a city that loves me back, is what makes me call the place home. Where there is a strong connection, I believe a passing feeling of estrangement is a reminder that the bond can grow stronger.

Is there even a standard for what it takes to call a place home? Is there any way to explain the feeling of belonging that fills my heart when I’m having a picnic in Kelvingrove park on the first sunny day of spring? Is it dangerous to fall in love with the way a city smells after it rains when you know you will eventually have to leave? Is it wrong to feel familiar someplace just because a stronger foreign accent slips out of my mouth at times? During the last few years, as I was contemplating these questions, a strange new feeling arose. Suddenly, I became a stranger in two cities.

Every time I travel back home, I find myself experiencing just a hint of unfamiliarity. I was taken aback by landscape changes, I was unaccustomed to the public transportation system and I started forgetting the trivial details of my high school experience that my friends were still talking about. I couldn’t use a foreign student card for price reductions. Unanticipatedly, I was stranded in a universe that felt parallel to the one I had left years ago and I was unable to navigate it. I once even found myself accidentally replying to customer service workers in English. When feelings of estrangement start creeping in, I start questioning if I do belong anywhere after all. If the years of history in a city count for nothing during my return, calling a place your home has to mean more than that.

The inconspicuous feeling of alienation never truly leaves, but a distinct sense of belonging starts to form. Sooner or later, the objects that made me feel out of place are just an afterthought to my appetite for discovery. I forget I have to carry around a foreign passport to get into a club because once I’ve gotten in, all that truly matters is that I’m dancing to synth-pop with my favourite people in the world. When I’m dining with people I’ve known forever in the city where I used to live and I embarrassingly let out a random English phrase, it’s just some inconsequential situation we laugh about for the next two minutes. There is a duality in the feeling of estrangement itself: its presence is agonizing, but its existence implies that your circumstances can get better. Places grow familiar.

A perfect relationship with the city you live in is as hard to cultivate as a perfect relationship with yourself. I write this as I’m packing up my entire life and getting ready to return to Glasgow for the fall semester. Inside my bag, there are many objects which at times have made me feel out of place. Next to those, there are worn-out sneakers I’ve danced in during the best nights of my life, a lipgloss that was coating my smile as I met dozens of interesting people and a notebook in which I’ve sketched so many city-centre buildings. “That’s what the world is, after all”, in the words of Haruki Murakami, “an endless battle of contrasting memories.”

As humans, I believe we are always running over the same old ground and experiencing the same old fears. I try to think of ways of overcoming them: I wander around cities, I grab drinks with older and newer friends, I look for the best lattes I can find in local coffee shops and I buy tickets to random gigs.