Nostalgia
February's theme for Soul Food Sundays is Nostalgia
My younger brother is not pictured here, but is dearly loooved!
Welcome to February y'all! This month’s theme for Soul Food Sundays is nostalgia. Up until about a month ago, my understanding of nostalgia was a “seeking to be in the past,” or anything having to do with reminiscing. In a poetry workshop facilitated by George Abraham in January, I learned of nostalgia in a context I had not been familiar with:
"From the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, nostalgia was considered a wound and a serious disease afflicting people who had been taken from their homes and families by colonization, war, enslavement, industrialization, and globalization. These massive displacements not only separated peoples from their native countries, but also separated them from the natural environment, since many migrations arced toward urban centers. Climate change has increased this kind of migration."
- From Craig Santos Perez's Teaching Ecopoetry in a Time of Climate Change
This past week, I reunited with this concept of disease & nostalgia while listening to a podcast conversation with Teju Cole. The episode heavily discussed Teju Cole’s photo book, titled Fernweh, which is a German word which approximates to “farsickness”, which is the opposite of Heimweh, “homesickness.” For me, I never much meditated on the "sick" in homesickness. Heimweh was a word that described a missing of home that often resulted in a physical sickness as well.
I’m thinking now of displacement and nostalgia. Thinking of forced migrations. Thinking of histories & lineages & languages “disappeared” and the magnitude of displacement that can be accessible physically, mentally, and spiritually.
I put disappeared in quotes because I am also thinking that nothing can completely disappear. In the book Moonwalking with Einstein, a book dealing heavily with memory, we are introduced to EP who “had two types of amnesia” that made it so he couldn’t recall many old memories, nor could he form new ones. Yet still, other forms of learning remained at work in his life. As an experiment, EP was given 24 words to memorize, which he was unable to do. However, when shown those 24 words alongside 24 new words, EP was significantly better at reading the words he had encountered earlier that day, even if he wasn’t conscious that he had seen them before. EP still had access to unconscious learning.
If nostalgia was considered a disease, what was the medicine? What happens when the place longed for is no longer accessible? Is nostalgia a disdain with present, a wound between the past. Is nostalgia an insistence that past is not past, that past is here, not disappeared, and yet, still the distance remains. Is nostalgia a haunting? Something elsewhere telling us to look again, to look back, and look well? Something, out of reach somewhere, somehow.
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