The Challenge to Remap One’s Life

Some cultures encourage movement, some treasure stability. I come for a very immobile culture. I was born and raised in an Italian city. Left for certain periods, but never ceased to consider that my home. Moves were temporary, always with a sense of return in mind. This time my family and I moved for real. Sold the house, packed all our lives and relocated across the ocean.

Moving is being displaced. It is losing one’s sense of reference, familiar routes, and places. It is reducing the complexity of lived experience while at the same time acquiring a whole range of new inputs. It is taking up the challenge to remap one’s life.

Let me explain.

Home is a place constructed through multiple layers, relationship experiences. It is an emotionally charged landscape. A place constructed through one’s personal history. My first school, the playground where I used to play as a child, my high school, the buildings where my friends and family used to live and often still do, the clubs attended in different periods of youth and adult life, the university campus, the church where I got married, the different places where I worked, administrative buildings, favorite stores, doctors offices. At home, life is an itinerary unwinding through familiar points of reference. Sometimes the map expands, new places and people are added, some are forgotten…but they are there ready to be recovered if interest or necessity arises. Being at home is a feeling of being entangled in this comforting and multilayered web that connects people and places in many and sometimes surprising ways.

Far from home one looses all this. One needs to recreate the map. Start from scratch. Everything is so difficult...yet, so excruciatingly simple. Work-home-grocery store. Pharmacy. Children’s school. Hardly a web. Hardly a network. Hardly comforting. It takes time to understand where things are. And it takes effort to understand that things might not be there the way you expect them to be. Moving—and especially moving to a different country—is a change of mind set. Even if ‘daily life’ has a sense of normalcy by its very nature, it can be experienced in many different ways: and there is nothing normal once you remove yourself from the place where your idea of ‘normal’ was constructed. It is adapting to new foods, new smells, new systems of garbage disposal, new brands of detergent, new ways of washing and drying your clothes...Mundane things, but also more connected to our sense of home and belonging than our intellectual endeavors. Things that make you feel nostalgic and out of place, even when the move was the coronation of a dream. Even when one moves for the better.

Once in a Cameroonian village I was conversing with a friend while sharing a typical local meal: the scalding fufu was burning my fingers as I was trying to dip it in the rich palm oil sauce, while attempting to extract some meat from the bony smoked fish that constituted the highlight of the meal. Of course, as it often happens, food was the topic of our dinner conversation. Mary was indeed very curious to understand how we managed to survive and feed ourselves in Europe. “See, she said to me, my sister moved to Italy six months ago and she is telling me that over there there is hardly any food to eat”. While contemplating my meager fish deboning results, I decided this was something to ponder, while dreaming of prosciutto.

–Silvia Forni, Associate Curator, Department of World Cultures, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario