I don’t know when exactly I set off on this journey back. Perhaps from the first day I set foot in London sixteen years ago, or maybe a few years later. The truth is that the return was gradual, so subtle that for a long time I did not even notice I was returning.
When I arrived in London, I invested all my energy in adapting to my new home. There was no time for nostalgia, nor enough space to indulge in my Venezuelan identity.
Before I left, I started preparing from my sofa with a view of El Ávila, reading the biography of General Wellington and then Roy Jenkins’ epic biopic of Winston Churchill. I read UK news on the BBC every day and rekindled my old romance with The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and other British musicians. I was determined to start on the right foot, firm in my decision to embrace whatever experiences fate had in store for me in England.
I remember one afternoon, just days before my flight to London in 2007, driving along the Eastern highway at the height of the shopping centre CCCT, singing “Madera Fina” by Yordano with tears in my eyes, while El Ávila loomed through the windshield. It was the imminence of goodbye and the beginning of a tiring yet exciting process of adapting to a new culture, a new land, a new life.
For just three or four years, we returned to Caracas to spend Christmas with family. Then, my mom moved to the United States, and it was not hard to shift our family Christmases to Florida, which became the meeting point for those from the diaspora and those who never left.
Today I write from Caracas, after twelve years away from it. This return, though temporary — just for vacation — is very significant for me. It perhaps began twelve years ago, and even though it was very gradual, almost imperceptible, it slowly grew into a giant, a mammoth of nostalgia that I have sometimes come to define, secretly as I don’t like to sound dramatic, as a trauma. Exile has that tragic facet, described by the Greeks in antiquity as a punishment worse than death. Only when it is experienced does one understand.
Along with the mammoth of nostalgia, I also harvested a fear that when I returned to Venezuela, I would feel alien, out of place, and thus orphaned. How joyful it is to realize that this is not the case! It has been a relief for me to see that everything fits into its place, that despite the circumstances — political, social, and familial — my idiosyncrasy is immovable and therefore no one can ever expropriate it from me.
It’s possible that the return began eight years ago when I dedicated myself to writing “Madera Fina” to explore my own roots, seen through the foreign eyes of an English explorer named Walter Raleigh but above all, through the eyes of other Venezuelan women, wise and mythical, like Maria Lionza and the Amazons.
In any case, at some point, the certainty of the return became clear: impossible to ignore. I became a Spanish teacher for kids aged 16 to 18, whom I have them translate songs from Serenata Guayanesa, I tell them about the magic of the tepuis in Venezuela, and I talk to them about the beauty of our mixed race population and its impact on our rich culture. My English students laugh at the way I speak, both English and Spanish, but they happily travel to Latin America with me several times a week, and that fills me with satisfaction.
The reality is this: the more I live and adapt to British culture, the more Venezuelan I feel. Perhaps there was never a departure, nor a return. Perhaps all I had was an awakening. From the garden of my childhood home in Caracas these days, I arm myself with binoculars to observe all the little birds that visit us. I want to name them all, to take with me to London not only the song of the Cristofue and the cries of the parakeets but also their image and color, to imagine them in winter when nostalgia strikes. Now I explore more, relating to Venezuela with greater maturity and less passion.
I really like Nicolás Hochman’s interpretation of exile (2018), based on the theories of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (1996):
“…while some depict exile as a misfortune, or the greatest misfortune possible (Ovid), others experience it as a possibility, the most radical and beneficial of possibilities (Plutarch). Ultimately, ‘exile is a passage through the negative or the very act of negativity, understood as the engine, the resource for a mediation that guarantees that expropriation ends up transforming into a re-appropriation.’”
In my case, there never was an expropriation. That has been my happiest discovery on this journey. I believe we must credit our idiosyncrasy for preventing this from happening. It may sound cliché, and I don’t mind it because after coming into contact with so many cultures in these 16 years living in London, I have been able to verify it: our candor, hospitality, and solidarity cannot be compared to any other culture. I am at home, and everyone has made me feel that way, as if 16 years had not passed, as if nostalgia had never become such an overpowering mammoth within me.
These days I am reading “Cuba: A History” by Hugh Thomas. I’ve been diving into Cuban music and feel that this song captures my feelings these days.
“Amor de loca juventud” by Buena Vista Social Club, because no other country in the planet could understand us better than the Cubans.
