Should I move back to France?
This week’s question is from Lola Masson:
Should I move back to France?
Yes. No. Well, maybe… I mean, it depends on what your relationship to France is, and why you want to move back.
A few years ago I hit the milestone of the place where I currently live now being the place where I’ve lived the longest. It was a strange sensation. I came to the uneasy realization that I now identify with this place more than I identify with the place where I’m from.
And where I’m from is a loaded question all on its own: I was born in Portugal. My family immigrated to Philadelphia when I was two. Technically, I am from Portugal. Yet whenever I went back there to visit my grandparents I was introduced as the grandson from America. In Philadelphia I was from Portugal. Now that I live in San Francisco, I am from Philadelphia. (At least according to my neighbors, who use this as a way of justifying why I yell at cars that don’t stop at the crosswalk. “Oh, he’s from Philly.”)
Thing is, none of the places I’m from are there anymore. They’re not a geography, they’re a point in time.
There’s an old Pretenders song called My City Was Gone (It’s a great song. You should probably listen to it while you read the rest of this.) where Chrissie Hynde sings “I went back to Ohio, but my city was gone.” Every place I’m from is gone because it’s not just a place, it’s a place at a certain time. It would take a time machine to go back.
My Philadelphia is gone. Third Street Jazz no longer sells records, Abe’s Steaks no longer does punk shows in the back room, and Tyler School of Art is on the Temple main campus now. My Philadelphia bombed itself out of existence on May 13, 1985. Our memories are never of a place. They’re of a place at a specific time. I could go back to the exact counter (it’s still there) at the exact restaurant (it’s still there) at Reading Terminal Market where someone first smiled at me, but they won’t be there. But there will be two other people sitting at that counter and it’ll be their moment, and their Philadelphia, and it’ll be amazing. And that’s good.
The past is still with us though, if unevenly distributed. When I go back to Philadelphia to visit my family (which is seldom, and beyond the purview of this particular newsletter) it is still there. Arguments which, to me, are a distant memory are still being played out in real time. In the present. With the original cast. And you begin to feel like maybe time machines are real, as the trauma of the past calls out to you, and begs you for one last trip.
And that reminds you that the future is also not just moving through time, but also moving through geography. And you return to where you are now, where you can still fix things.
I did not answer your question, but I think I tried.
Got a question you want me to answer? Send ‘em in!
I got a workshop coming up in a couple of weeks some of you might be interested in.
I am currently reading Michael Harriot’s Black AF History, and it is worth your time.
May 19 was the anniversary of the Matewan massacre. You should see the John Sayles movie about it. ACAB excludes Sid Hatfield.