“Where are you from? No, I mean, where are you from originally? And how home becomes versatile in exile”
This project is an autobiographic account of my sense of belonging as a Venezuelan born, Spanish raised individual living in London for the past 8 years. Through theories on post memory and conflict, I analyse the fluctuations of the places, the sensations and the feelings that I’ve called home throughout my life to finally arrive somewhere resembling a conclusion. In essence, these pages represent a love letter to my late mom, who, unknowingly, carried the most important place I will inhabit with her until she died.
- Marie
It was at the Cameparca cemetery in Barcelona, Venezuela, crying over my grandfather’s grave for the first time since he had passed away a couple of years before, that my mother finally confessed: “we are moving to Spain”.
My brother and I, ten and eight at the time, nodded as if we knew where Spain was. Then, I cried some more - for the loss, both of my grandfather and my home.
We were on our way to visit my grandmother in Caracas that morning of August 2000. My mom had already sold everything we owned - except for our apartment and my grandfather’s Finca. We were due to leave that week and she had packed only the necessary items into four bags.
My father Francisco Lopez, had already left in July, escaping the Bolivarian government which was set to prosecute him. He was a politician in Anzoátegui, Venezuela, at the beginning of the Chavez “Bolivarian Revolution”. My dad’s vocality about governmental issues had landed him in trouble. A commander in the Venezuelan military had delivered a threat via a loyal friend: “they told me to move away from Francisco Lopez if I don’t want to go down with him”, she told my mother.
1- My grandfather's picture, which sits on my desk in London
2- The view from our Lechería apartment
My mother Marianella, who loved her family fiercely and intensely, walked down the stairs of our duplex penthouse with panoramic views of the sea (Image 2) and exclaimed: “Kiko, we’re moving to Spain”.
Twenty years after this disruptive event, in an international video-call from London to Barcelona, Spain, my father and I discussed what this shift had meant to us as individuals, and as a family. My father, when presented with the image and films from his political campaign (Image 3, 4, 5 and 6), recounts stories that, although familiar to me, I know I only remember through his narrative.
3 - My father presenting his manifesto
4 - My father, my brother, my mother and I in our Lechería apartment
This retelling fits into the fractured postmemory (Hirsch, 2016) that I had built through my parent’s recollections of events. “Marianne Hirsch ... calls postmemory the experience of having one’s everyday reality overshadowed by the memory of a much more significant past that one’s parents lived through (Hirsch in Abu-Lughod, 2007: 79). In this sense, I had been forever affected by the political circumstances of my parents, which forced a dislocation in my sense of self and my family’s positionality, from the event until today.
5 - My father in an interview for a local TV channel
6 - Image of a newspaper suggesting my father's imminent win
These videotapes (Lopez, 2000), filmed at times in our home in Lecheria, serve as witnesses (Hirsch, 2016) and evidence (Khun, 2002); sites of family history that I can re-encounter only through their material existence. Even though memory, as Ann Hua puts it, “is a construction or reconstruction of what actually happened... malleable... contextual” (2005: 197) and open to interpretation, my father’s retelling of our history fills in the gaps that my own memory cannot. This time, through my dad’s narrative, I regress to become the eight-year-old who trusts her father to tell the absolute truth, the only version of events available at present. I, as it were, confer in my dad the responsibility of carrying the piece of identity that ties me to a global story of imagined communities (Anderson, 2016) by which I do no longer reside where I belong. During the video-call, he tells me about his professional life before Spain, each company name appears in my mind as if I had been there - though I was, but I can’t remember.
He mentions the governor's name and a song gets stuck in my head "Alexis Rosas, gobernador, el hombre que hace falta: Alexis!" (Alexis Rosas, governor, the man who's needed: Alexis!) I blurt out his slogan, remembered if by magic. Looking at the compilation of clips of my father’s campaign for Urdaneta Decide (Lopez, 2000) - my parent’s independent political party- my father remembers how, to become a politician, he was faced with the dichotomy of whether to watch his children grow or to make a better world for the community. It is ironic how, looking back, he was ultimately able to do neither, through no fault of his own.
We moved to a small city in Galicia, Spain (image 7), where my parents were destined to acquire menial jobs, as their Venezuelan degrees were no longer useful. In our recent interview, my father confessed that the socioeconomic change did not have a great effect on him: “It hit your mom harder” he lets out - but my mother is not here to ratify it.
We had become diasporic. Our identities had been fractured by the dislocation of our sense of belonging. Like nations, diasporas are communities (Anh Hua, 2005). Unlike nations, diasporas have no concrete boundaries, they exist within and between cultures. That was the case for us. Resembling Abu Lughod’s longing for home when displaced from Palestine, as his daughter Lila recounts (Abu-Lughod, 2007), my father longed to return for the twelve years that he spent in Spain.
7- My brother and I in A Coruña, Galicia.
To appease this longing, my parents filled our house with decorative macows and Venezuelan-style house figurines, a Venezuelan and a Spanish flag hung side by side on the living room wall (Image 8 and 10). We often ate arepas with reinapepiá, pabellón criollo, and hosted hallaca parties every December (Image 9). We sang the Venezuelan Happy Birthday and celebrated Venezuelan Christmas while listening to Venezuelan gaitas. My cousin hacked our gas meter so that our house temperature could remain at 30 degrees no matter the Galician weather, which was often gloomy and wet; and we moved to the ground floor of a house right by the sea so that we could still smell it.
9 - The Venezuelan flag hanging on our living room wall in A coruña.
10 - "El Pollo", my parent's friend, kneading hallaca dough.
8 - My dad and my mom posing in front of the Christmas tree, and both the Spanish and the Venezuelan flag.
There was a Venezuelan bar twenty minutes away from us, where my parents would often spend their weekends socialising with their Venezuelan peers. However, no matter how much they tried to emulate his past - it was the people, the population, that my father missed the most. That is, until he was able to return.
In 2012, after a terrible divorce and a complicated turn of events, my father found himself back in Lechería, unable to recognize what was left of it. Twelve years of the Bolivarian Revolution and, to his understanding, a cruel dictatorship, had left Venezuelans worn out, presenting patterns of behaviour that my father could no longer recognise. In opposition to Abu-Lughod’s account of her father’s return to Palestine,where he was able to use his memories to construct “a guide to a living history and a real place” (Abu-Lughod, 2007: 82), my father found ashes. He had returned and was confronted on site with the same dilemma that had tormented him since August 2000: the impossibility to return. The permanence of the Venezuelan conflict, which continued to mark his present (Abu-Lughod, 2007).
Identity has been complicated for me since the day I set foot in Spain for the first time. I was an adopted Spaniard. My grandmother had fled the Franco dictatorship to find refuge in Venezuela, where my father was born. We were lucky. Unlike my mother, whose otherness was obvious; my father, my brother and I had Spanish passports and white skin. We could, potentially, blend in. Yet, we did not.
Our accents, mannerisms and traditions revealed our strangeness. In a poem that I wrote in 2015, I confess that, reflecting on my experience of the Spanish School system as a foreigner, both classmates and teachers “reminded me where I came from and pointed out the frontiers. They painted distance with distrust and having come from Venezuela turned in its own concept” (Lopez, 2020) (Image 12).
11- The view from our A coruña house.
12 - Me in 2020, reciting my poems in La Polivalente, Málaga, Spain.
13 - My mother, the first and only time she returned to Venezuela, eating cachapas.
In fact, it was in Spain where I learnt what being a Venezuelan meant. For a couple of years, I felt like Mark, the focus of Carl E. James’ investigation of generation-and-a- half Canadians. I was “definitely Venezuelan” in the same sense that Mark, and many Canadian-Caribbeans like him, was “[d]efinitely Trini” (James, 2005: 230), even though Canada had been his home since childhood. My upbringing and traditions, as for Mark, formed my sense of home and identity.
My mother and I were able to return to Venezuela in 2006 to finalise the sale of my parents’ apartment (Image 13). As soon as we arrived at the airport, my grandmother ran towards us, not to hug us, but to rush us into her car: “lock your door” she commanded as I jumped in.
This proved, to me, that I did not know how to be at home... at home. By 2005, the crime rates in Caracas had escalated exponentially, tainting the city with an air of danger and distrust - which made me feel unprepared. I had not been trained to be a Venezuelan, only to eat and celebrate as one. We stayed for a month - spending most of our time in our family’s houses, members’ beaches and my grandma’s gated community.
Venezuela, by the time I was able to return, had become known for the soaring rate of kidnappings taking place across the country. This problem was illustrated by the movie Express Kidnapping (Secuestro Express, 2005) in which Jonathan Jakubowicz, who suffered a kidnapping in his own flesh, relates the sequence of events to warn the public of this ongoing threat. Inspired by this, during my last and only visit to Venezuela, I conducted an interview with my former Karate sensei Maria - a kidnapping survivor - for a school paper (Image 14 and 15). In this interview, which I titled “Secuestro Express... Tan solo una película?” (Express Kidnapping... Only a movie?), Maria recounts her first impressions as two hooded men took control of her car and sped away with her in the back. Maria, fortunately, escaped. However, this tale and the selling of my parents’ apartment, has come to define the truth that I was confronted with in my last visit to my homeland, and which has been echoing in my ears ever since: there is no return, there is no physical home.
In 2012, my father and his brother Roberto - who emigrated with us - filmed and produced the documentary “Obligados por la historia” [“Bound by History”] (Lopez, 2012).
In the film, they interview a variety of individuals - mostly Venezuelans who had been forced to emigrate - about the motives and consequences of their exodus. In it, I find myself speaking of a home that had shapeshifted as much as my accent and appearance had from Venezuelan to Galician (Image 16).
14 - Maria's interview 2006
16 – Me in Obligados por la Historia, 2012
15- Maria's Interview 2006
This video serves as evidence of the fluctuations in my memory, each shift producing a different type of identity and home. Additionally, it’s evidence of my memory’s malleability, as the viewer, who was once the speaker, does not recognise the sentiments that are described in the clip. I sit on my sofa, in my two-bedroom apartment in A Coruña - where I lived on my own - and tell the camera that “I am Galician now”. The pain and the shame that had resided in my otherness had dissipated as I was able to morph my identity to fit the Galician box. The “nostalgic dislocation from the homeland” (Anh Hua, 2005: 193) that my diasporic experience had caused, ten years down the line, had become a total rupture. I had assimilated my host culture, aided by the possibility to camouflage that my white skin offered me. In Nietzsche’s terms (Talay Turner, 2018), I chose to actively forget my past in order to build a future narrative of belonging.Diasporic identities, like memory, are based on constant interactions between the past and the present. This is, they are both created in the present in relation to the past (Khun, 2002). As my brother Francisco conveys in Obligados por la historia (Lopez, 2012), when you are displaced, you become a liminal entity, never recognising yourself as full member of any nationality.
Not only because your identity is an amalgamation of negotiations between the past, the present, there and here; but because you are read as an outsider.
17 - My brother in Obligados por la Historia, 2012.
As my brother aptly puts it “you’re never fully from anywhere. In Spain, I am Venezuelan. For my Venezuelan family, I am Spanish” (Image 17). However, I would argue that he fails to express the deeper confusion that this othering may entail. This othering, to me, involves the realisation that, in a world where humans are categorised based on their place of origin - which is presented in a hierarchical order within nations- home, for the dislocated, will always be a state of mind, never again will it be linked to a geographical location.
Here, I must stop to preface the introduction of my mother’s narrative as carried by this documentary, to express the value of the memory that this archive holds.
In the video (Lopez, 2012), my mother - who has since divorced my father and sadly passed away - cries, smiles, and expresses a whole range of emotions that, at some point in life, have also meant home to me. In my mother’s opinion, her claim to the nation and therefore, her nationality, were matters of choice (Image 18).
18 - My mother in Obligados por la Historia, 2012.
In the clip, she explains how, if she were ever confronted with xenophobia, she would let her interlocutor know that “I’m more Galician than them, because I’m Galician by choice”. Not only did my mother believe that it was her right to attach her sense of belonging to any land where she felt satisfied; but also, that this choice enhanced the validity of her claim, as it was based on emotion and not location.
Through this narrative, to my understanding, she detaches herself from the boundaries of her nationality to position herself as an active and valuable member of her host culture - to which she’s grateful for providing us with safety.
It is clear, when my mother expresses the greatest challenge that she faced when emigrating, that her sense of belonging had not emerged through an attachment to a national identity or to a land, but, as she relates in the clip: “It’s hard to leave behind the love, the places where I was happy, those where I lost my loved ones”.
It isn’t the physical place called Venezuela that she missed, but the proximity to those she held dear. However, as a tear emerges through the side of her left eye when she remembers those who are no longer there - whom, ironically, she has since joined - she wipes it off with her finger and concludes “I like it here” (Lopez, 2012)
Therefore, even though diasporic narratives have been linked to nostalgia and the longing for a home (Anh Hua, 2005), in the case of my mother, diaspora meant an opportunity, a choice to reposition herself in a new landscape. Like I did, and perhaps she had served as my example, my mother chose to actively forget (Talay Turner, 2018) her Venezuelan roots, in order to forge for herself a new identity as a chosen native of Spain.
Even though she chose to forget, my mother continued to embody her “Venezuelanness”. She danced salsa and tambores, she listened to Oscar D’Leon, and used Venezuelan jargon. To me, my mother - as many women do (Anh Hua, 2005: 201) - carried my family history with her, as I was not close to my father until she fell sick. She was the key to a past that I had never experienced - my postmemory (Hirsch, 2016) - the link to a family towards which I only felt kinship because my mother spoke about them. She taught me how to cook every Venezuelan dish in her recipe book (Image 19 and 21), which she had inherited from a friend in the 80s, and had kept ever since. To it, she would add new recipes that she would learn in different parts of the world, adapting her ingredients for my vegetarian diet. Shelearned to make Empanada Gallega (Image 20) as well as she made hummus. She had an arepa-eating method which she taught to anyone who would listen. I never chose to listen until she moved to the UK, two years after I had settled here.
When she moved, she brought her history with her. A full set of memories encompassing everyone I had ever met but barely remembered. I was overwhelmed by her willingness to transplant her memories into mine. By the time my mother became ill, after five years in London and my mother’s transplanted knowledge of our cultural heritage – although had called myself Galician at some point - a new complication for the formulation of my identity emerged. Again, I was faced with the struggle to answer the question: “Where are you from?” or, in Vijay Agnew’s articulation “Where Is Home?” (2005: 180)
My mother was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, which had turned into terminal metastasis by 2017. To me, my mother’s diagnosis meant something much more than my mother’s imminent death. It meant the imminent death of my home, memory, and identity. She knew as much. Subsequently, we set out to build a fantasy of a past that we could never recover, to construct a memory for a future that would no longer involve my mother as my connection to my roots.
21 - Venezuelan Quesillo recipe.
19 - My mother's recipe book.
20 - Empanada Gallega recipe
Acquiring more debt than I could ever repay in my lifetime - we travelled to Cancun (Image 22 and 23), where my brother had settled a couple of years prior. There, we would meet my grandmother, who would travel from Caracas to stay with us for a week. In a phone-call the day we purchased the tickets, my brother affirmed: “it's just like Lechería in here, you’ll see!”.
To address why, in order to emulate our collective image of our lost home, my family and I decided to reunite one last time by the Caribbean, I return to the question “Where Is Home?” (Agnew, 2005: 180)
Is it a place? Is it a thought? Is it a loved one? Is it a memory? Perhaps, it is a sense of safety and familiarity evoked by new experiences that resemble the past. For, when my mother and I stared at the Caribbean from the Mexican shore, though we had not returned, we both knew, we sensed that we had arrived... home.
Home, for me, since my initial displacement, has become a constant question that, every so often, answers itself through mediated memories that I have come to treasure. However, what appears clear to me as a result of this analysis is that, as versatile as home becomes in exile, and the many ways it presents itself - home cannot ever be, home must be made.
23 - A post from my Instagram of a picture of my grandmother, my mother, my brother, my sister-in-law and I in Cancún, 2018.
23 - A post from my Instagram of a picture of my grandmother, my mother, my brother, my sister-in-law and I in Cancún, 2018.
References
Abu-Lughod, L., 2007. Return to Half-Ruins: Memory, Postmemory, and Living History in Palestine. In: L. Abu-Lughod and A. Sa’di, ed., Nakba : Palestine, 1948, and the claims of memory, 1st ed. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press.
Agnew, V., 2005. A Diasporic Bounty: Cultural History and Heritage. In: V. Agnew, ed., Diaspora, memory and identity : a search for home, 1st ed. Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
Anderson, B., 2016. Imagined communities. London [etc.]: Verso.
Hirsch, M., 2016. Family frames. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Hua, A., 2005. Diaspora and Cultural Memory. In: V. Agnew, ed., Diaspora, memory and identity : a search for home, 1st ed. Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
James, C., 2005. 'I Feel Like a Trini': Narrative of a Generation-and-a-half Canadian. In: V. Agnew., ed., Diaspora, memory and identity : a search for home, 1st ed. Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
Kuhn, A., 2002. Family secrets. London: Verso.
Secuestro Express. 2005. [film] Directed by J. Jakubowicz. Venezuela: Tres Malandros
Talay Turner, Z., 2018. Nietzsche on Memory and Active Forgetting. The European Legacy, 24(1), pp.46-58.
Filmography
‘Educanarquía” [Educarnarchy] (Marianella Lopez, 2020) https://photos.app.goo.gl/TKmU6tPsJxnrZToz6 [last accessed 4 February 2021]
Capital Caribe [Caribbean Capital] (Francisco Lopez, 2000) https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcruvx [last accessed 4 February 2021
Obligados por la Historia Segunda Parte [Bound By History, Part II) (Roberto Lopez,2012) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h4buLGnXr0&ab_channel=RobertoLó pezDiéguezRobertoLópezDiéguez [last access 4 February 2021]
“Where are you from? No, I mean, where are you from originally? And how home becomes versatile in exile”
This project is an autobiographic account of my sense of belonging as a Venezuelan born, Spanish raised individual living in London for the past 8 years. Through theories on post memory and conflict, I analyse the fluctuations of the places, the sensations and the feelings that I’ve called home throughout my life to finally arrive somewhere resembling a conclusion. In essence, these pages represent a love letter to my late mom, who, unknowingly, carried the most important place I will inhabit with her until she died.
- Marie
It was at the Cameparca cemetery in Barcelona, Venezuela, crying over my grandfather’s grave for the first time since he had passed away a couple of years before, that my mother finally confessed: “we are moving to Spain”.
My brother and I, ten and eight at the time, nodded as if we knew where Spain was. Then, I cried some more - for the loss, both of my grandfather and my home.
We were on our way to visit my grandmother in Caracas that morning of August 2000. My mom had already sold everything we owned - except for our apartment and my grandfather’s Finca. We were due to leave that week and she had packed only the necessary items into four bags.
My father Francisco Lopez, had already left in July, escaping the Bolivarian government which was set to prosecute him. He was a politician in Anzoátegui, Venezuela, at the beginning of the Chavez “Bolivarian Revolution”. My dad’s vocality about governmental issues had landed him in trouble. A commander in the Venezuelan military had delivered a threat via a loyal friend: “they told me to move away from Francisco Lopez if I don’t want to go down with him”, she told my mother.
1- My grandfather's picture, which sits on my desk in London
My mother Marianella, who loved her family fiercely and intensely, walked down the stairs of our duplex penthouse with panoramic views of the sea (Image 2) and exclaimed: “Kiko, we’re moving to Spain”.
Twenty years after this disruptive event, in an international video-call from London to Barcelona, Spain, my father and I discussed what this shift had meant to us as individuals, and as a family. My father, when presented with the image and films from his political campaign (Image 3, 4, 5 and 6), recounts stories that, although familiar to me, I know I only remember through his narrative.
2- The view from our Lechería apartment
3 - My father presenting his manifesto
4 - My father, my brother, my mother and I in our Lechería apartment
This retelling fits into the fractured postmemory (Hirsch, 2016) that I had built through my parent’s recollections of events. “Marianne Hirsch ... calls postmemory the experience of having one’s everyday reality overshadowed by the memory of a much more significant past that one’s parents lived through (Hirsch in Abu-Lughod, 2007: 79). In this sense, I had been forever affected by the political circumstances of my parents, which forced a dislocation in my sense of self and my family’s positionality, from the event until today.
5 - My father in an interview for a local TV channel
6 - Image of a newspaper suggesting my father's imminent win
These videotapes (Lopez, 2000), filmed at times in our home in Lecheria, serve as witnesses (Hirsch, 2016) and evidence (Khun, 2002); sites of family history that I can re-encounter only through their material existence. Even though memory, as Ann Hua puts it, “is a construction or reconstruction of what actually happened... malleable... contextual” (2005: 197) and open to interpretation, my father’s retelling of our history fills in the gaps that my own memory cannot. This time, through my dad’s narrative, I regress to become the eight-year-old who trusts her father to tell the absolute truth, the only version of events available at present. I, as it were, confer in my dad the responsibility of carrying the piece of identity that ties me to a global story of imagined communities (Anderson, 2016) by which I do no longer reside where I belong. During the video-call, he tells me about his professional life before Spain, each company name appears in my mind as if I had been there - though I was, but I can’t remember.
He mentions the governor's name and a song gets stuck in my head "Alexis Rosas, gobernador, el hombre que hace falta: Alexis!" (Alexis Rosas, governor, the man who's needed: Alexis!) I blurt out his slogan, remembered if by magic. Looking at the compilation of clips of my father’s campaign for Urdaneta Decide (Lopez, 2000) - my parent’s independent political party- my father remembers how, to become a politician, he was faced with the dichotomy of whether to watch his children grow or to make a better world for the community. It is ironic how, looking back, he was ultimately able to do neither, through no fault of his own.
We moved to a small city in Galicia, Spain (image 7), where my parents were destined to acquire menial jobs, as their Venezuelan degrees were no longer useful. In our recent interview, my father confessed that the socioeconomic change did not have a great effect on him: “It hit your mom harder” he lets out - but my mother is not here to ratify it.
We had become diasporic. Our identities had been fractured by the dislocation of our sense of belonging. Like nations, diasporas are communities (Anh Hua, 2005). Unlike nations, diasporas have no concrete boundaries, they exist within and between cultures. That was the case for us. Resembling Abu Lughod’s longing for home when displaced from Palestine, as his daughter Lila recounts (Abu-Lughod, 2007), my father longed to return for the twelve years that he spent in Spain.
7- My brother and I in A Coruña, Galicia.
To appease this longing, my parents filled our house with decorative macows and Venezuelan-style house figurines, a Venezuelan and a Spanish flag hung side by side on the living room wall (Image 8 and 10). We often ate arepas with reinapepiá, pabellón criollo, and hosted hallaca parties every December (Image 9). We sang the Venezuelan Happy Birthday and celebrated Venezuelan Christmas while listening to Venezuelan gaitas. My cousin hacked our gas meter so that our house temperature could remain at 30 degrees no matter the Galician weather, which was often gloomy and wet; and we moved to the ground floor of a house right by the sea so that we could still smell it.
9 - The Venezuelan flag hanging on our living room wall in A coruña.
10 - "El Pollo", my parent's friend, kneading hallaca dough.
8 - My dad and my mom posing in front of the Christmas tree, and both the Spanish and the Venezuelan flag.
There was a Venezuelan bar twenty minutes away from us, where my parents would often spend their weekends socialising with their Venezuelan peers. However, no matter how much they tried to emulate his past - it was the people, the population, that my father missed the most. That is, until he was able to return.
In 2012, after a terrible divorce and a complicated turn of events, my father found himself back in Lechería, unable to recognize what was left of it. Twelve years of the Bolivarian Revolution and, to his understanding, a cruel dictatorship, had left Venezuelans worn out, presenting patterns of behaviour that my father could no longer recognise. In opposition to Abu-Lughod’s account of her father’s return to Palestine,where he was able to use his memories to construct “a guide to a living history and a real place” (Abu-Lughod, 2007: 82), my father found ashes. He had returned and was confronted on site with the same dilemma that had tormented him since August 2000: the impossibility to return. The permanence of the Venezuelan conflict, which continued to mark his present (Abu-Lughod, 2007).
Identity has been complicated for me since the day I set foot in Spain for the first time. I was an adopted Spaniard. My grandmother had fled the Franco dictatorship to find refuge in Venezuela, where my father was born. We were lucky. Unlike my mother, whose otherness was obvious; my father, my brother and I had Spanish passports and white skin. We could, potentially, blend in. Yet, we did not.
Our accents, mannerisms and traditions revealed our strangeness. In a poem that I wrote in 2015, I confess that, reflecting on my experience of the Spanish School system as a foreigner, both classmates and teachers “reminded me where I came from and pointed out the frontiers. They painted distance with distrust and having come from Venezuela turned in its own concept” (Lopez, 2020) (Image 12).
11- The view from our A coruña house.
12 - Me in 2020, reciting my poems in La Polivalente, Málaga, Spain.
13 - My mother, the first and only time she returned to Venezuela, eating cachapas.
In fact, it was in Spain where I learnt what being a Venezuelan meant. For a couple of years, I felt like Mark, the focus of Carl E. James’ investigation of generation-and-a- half Canadians. I was “definitely Venezuelan” in the same sense that Mark, and many Canadian-Caribbeans like him, was “[d]efinitely Trini” (James, 2005: 230), even though Canada had been his home since childhood. My upbringing and traditions, as for Mark, formed my sense of home and identity.
My mother and I were able to return to Venezuela in 2006 to finalise the sale of my parents’ apartment (Image 13). As soon as we arrived at the airport, my grandmother ran towards us, not to hug us, but to rush us into her car: “lock your door” she commanded as I jumped in.
This proved, to me, that I did not know how to be at home... at home. By 2005, the crime rates in Caracas had escalated exponentially, tainting the city with an air of danger and distrust - which made me feel unprepared. I had not been trained to be a Venezuelan, only to eat and celebrate as one. We stayed for a month - spending most of our time in our family’s houses, members’ beaches and my grandma’s gated community.
Venezuela, by the time I was able to return, had become known for the soaring rate of kidnappings taking place across the country. This problem was illustrated by the movie Express Kidnapping (Secuestro Express, 2005) in which Jonathan Jakubowicz, who suffered a kidnapping in his own flesh, relates the sequence of events to warn the public of this ongoing threat. Inspired by this, during my last and only visit to Venezuela, I conducted an interview with my former Karate sensei Maria - a kidnapping survivor - for a school paper (Image 14 and 15). In this interview, which I titled “Secuestro Express... Tan solo una película?” (Express Kidnapping... Only a movie?), Maria recounts her first impressions as two hooded men took control of her car and sped away with her in the back. Maria, fortunately, escaped. However, this tale and the selling of my parents’ apartment, has come to define the truth that I was confronted with in my last visit to my homeland, and which has been echoing in my ears ever since: there is no return, there is no physical home.
In 2012, my father and his brother Roberto - who emigrated with us - filmed and produced the documentary “Obligados por la historia” [“Bound by History”] (Lopez, 2012).
In the film, they interview a variety of individuals - mostly Venezuelans who had been forced to emigrate - about the motives and consequences of their exodus. In it, I find myself speaking of a home that had shapeshifted as much as my accent and appearance had from Venezuelan to Galician (Image 16).
14 - Maria's interview 2006
16 – Me in Obligados por la Historia, 2012
15- Maria's Interview 2006
This video serves as evidence of the fluctuations in my memory, each shift producing a different type of identity and home. Additionally, it’s evidence of my memory’s malleability, as the viewer, who was once the speaker, does not recognise the sentiments that are described in the clip. I sit on my sofa, in my two-bedroom apartment in A Coruña - where I lived on my own - and tell the camera that “I am Galician now”. The pain and the shame that had resided in my otherness had dissipated as I was able to morph my identity to fit the Galician box. The “nostalgic dislocation from the homeland” (Anh Hua, 2005: 193) that my diasporic experience had caused, ten years down the line, had become a total rupture. I had assimilated my host culture, aided by the possibility to camouflage that my white skin offered me. In Nietzsche’s terms (Talay Turner, 2018), I chose to actively forget my past in order to build a future narrative of belonging.Diasporic identities, like memory, are based on constant interactions between the past and the present. This is, they are both created in the present in relation to the past (Khun, 2002). As my brother Francisco conveys in Obligados por la historia (Lopez, 2012), when you are displaced, you become a liminal entity, never recognising yourself as full member of any nationality.
Not only because your identity is an amalgamation of negotiations between the past, the present, there and here; but because you are read as an outsider.
17 - My brother in Obligados por la Historia, 2012.
As my brother aptly puts it “you’re never fully from anywhere. In Spain, I am Venezuelan. For my Venezuelan family, I am Spanish” (Image 17). However, I would argue that he fails to express the deeper confusion that this othering may entail. This othering, to me, involves the realisation that, in a world where humans are categorised based on their place of origin - which is presented in a hierarchical order within nations- home, for the dislocated, will always be a state of mind, never again will it be linked to a geographical location.
Here, I must stop to preface the introduction of my mother’s narrative as carried by this documentary, to express the value of the memory that this archive holds.
In the video (Lopez, 2012), my mother - who has since divorced my father and sadly passed away - cries, smiles, and expresses a whole range of emotions that, at some point in life, have also meant home to me. In my mother’s opinion, her claim to the nation and therefore, her nationality, were matters of choice (Image 18).
18 - My mother in Obligados por la Historia, 2012.
In the clip, she explains how, if she were ever confronted with xenophobia, she would let her interlocutor know that “I’m more Galician than them, because I’m Galician by choice”. Not only did my mother believe that it was her right to attach her sense of belonging to any land where she felt satisfied; but also, that this choice enhanced the validity of her claim, as it was based on emotion and not location.
Through this narrative, to my understanding, she detaches herself from the boundaries of her nationality to position herself as an active and valuable member of her host culture - to which she’s grateful for providing us with safety.
It is clear, when my mother expresses the greatest challenge that she faced when emigrating, that her sense of belonging had not emerged through an attachment to a national identity or to a land, but, as she relates in the clip: “It’s hard to leave behind the love, the places where I was happy, those where I lost my loved ones”.
It isn’t the physical place called Venezuela that she missed, but the proximity to those she held dear. However, as a tear emerges through the side of her left eye when she remembers those who are no longer there - whom, ironically, she has since joined - she wipes it off with her finger and concludes “I like it here” (Lopez, 2012)
Therefore, even though diasporic narratives have been linked to nostalgia and the longing for a home (Anh Hua, 2005), in the case of my mother, diaspora meant an opportunity, a choice to reposition herself in a new landscape. Like I did, and perhaps she had served as my example, my mother chose to actively forget (Talay Turner, 2018) her Venezuelan roots, in order to forge for herself a new identity as a chosen native of Spain.
Even though she chose to forget, my mother continued to embody her “Venezuelanness”. She danced salsa and tambores, she listened to Oscar D’Leon, and used Venezuelan jargon. To me, my mother - as many women do (Anh Hua, 2005: 201) - carried my family history with her, as I was not close to my father until she fell sick. She was the key to a past that I had never experienced - my postmemory (Hirsch, 2016) - the link to a family towards which I only felt kinship because my mother spoke about them. She taught me how to cook every Venezuelan dish in her recipe book (Image 19 and 21), which she had inherited from a friend in the 80s, and had kept ever since. To it, she would add new recipes that she would learn in different parts of the world, adapting her ingredients for my vegetarian diet. Shelearned to make Empanada Gallega (Image 20) as well as she made hummus. She had an arepa-eating method which she taught to anyone who would listen. I never chose to listen until she moved to the UK, two years after I had settled here.
When she moved, she brought her history with her. A full set of memories encompassing everyone I had ever met but barely remembered. I was overwhelmed by her willingness to transplant her memories into mine. By the time my mother became ill, after five years in London and my mother’s transplanted knowledge of our cultural heritage – although had called myself Galician at some point - a new complication for the formulation of my identity emerged. Again, I was faced with the struggle to answer the question: “Where are you from?” or, in Vijay Agnew’s articulation “Where Is Home?” (2005: 180)
My mother was diagnosed with cancer in 2016, which had turned into terminal metastasis by 2017. To me, my mother’s diagnosis meant something much more than my mother’s imminent death. It meant the imminent death of my home, memory, and identity. She knew as much. Subsequently, we set out to build a fantasy of a past that we could never recover, to construct a memory for a future that would no longer involve my mother as my connection to my roots.
21 - Venezuelan Quesillo recipe.
19 - My mother's recipe book.
20 - Empanada Gallega recipe
Acquiring more debt than I could ever repay in my lifetime - we travelled to Cancun (Image 22 and 23), where my brother had settled a couple of years prior. There, we would meet my grandmother, who would travel from Caracas to stay with us for a week. In a phone-call the day we purchased the tickets, my brother affirmed: “it's just like Lechería in here, you’ll see!”.
To address why, in order to emulate our collective image of our lost home, my family and I decided to reunite one last time by the Caribbean, I return to the question “Where Is Home?” (Agnew, 2005: 180)
Is it a place? Is it a thought? Is it a loved one? Is it a memory? Perhaps, it is a sense of safety and familiarity evoked by new experiences that resemble the past. For, when my mother and I stared at the Caribbean from the Mexican shore, though we had not returned, we both knew, we sensed that we had arrived... home.
Home, for me, since my initial displacement, has become a constant question that, every so often, answers itself through mediated memories that I have come to treasure. However, what appears clear to me as a result of this analysis is that, as versatile as home becomes in exile, and the many ways it presents itself - home cannot ever be, home must be made.
23 - A post from my Instagram of a picture of my grandmother, my mother, my brother, my sister-in-law and I in Cancún, 2018.
23 - A post from my Instagram of a picture of my grandmother, my mother, my brother, my sister-in-law and I in Cancún, 2018.
References
Abu-Lughod, L., 2007. Return to Half-Ruins: Memory, Postmemory, and Living History in Palestine. In: L. Abu-Lughod and A. Sa’di, ed., Nakba : Palestine, 1948, and the claims of memory, 1st ed. New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press.
Agnew, V., 2005. A Diasporic Bounty: Cultural History and Heritage. In: V. Agnew, ed., Diaspora, memory and identity : a search for home, 1st ed. Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
Anderson, B., 2016. Imagined communities. London [etc.]: Verso.
Hirsch, M., 2016. Family frames. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Hua, A., 2005. Diaspora and Cultural Memory. In: V. Agnew, ed., Diaspora, memory and identity : a search for home, 1st ed. Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
James, C., 2005. 'I Feel Like a Trini': Narrative of a Generation-and-a-half Canadian. In: V. Agnew., ed., Diaspora, memory and identity : a search for home, 1st ed. Toronto Buffalo London: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
Kuhn, A., 2002. Family secrets. London: Verso.
Secuestro Express. 2005. [film] Directed by J. Jakubowicz. Venezuela: Tres Malandros
Talay Turner, Z., 2018. Nietzsche on Memory and Active Forgetting. The European Legacy, 24(1), pp.46-58.
Filmography
‘Educanarquía” [Educarnarchy] (Marianella Lopez, 2020) https://photos.app.goo.gl/TKmU6tPsJxnrZToz6 [last accessed 4 February 2021]
Capital Caribe [Caribbean Capital] (Francisco Lopez, 2000) https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcruvx [last accessed 4 February 2021
Obligados por la Historia Segunda Parte [Bound By History, Part II) (Roberto Lopez,2012) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8h4buLGnXr0&ab_channel=RobertoLó pezDiéguezRobertoLópezDiéguez [last access 4 February 2021]
