It starts at the airport, on the plane from London. The cabin crew doesn't even attempt to speak to me in English, even though they can. Just by looking at me, they assume that addressing me in Italian is the right thing to do.
When, out of habit, English slips out of me first, the flight attendant is taken aback, I can see the question in her eyes. She switches to English and I switch to Italian. We both laugh.
Over the last 18 months, I have had the call to go “home”. I use quotation marks because, as a third culture kid, home is in more places than one and nowhere at the same time.
The call started softly, whispering, and has grown louder and more urgent over time. I had the strong sense that I needed to go back to Sicily, not for a week or two, but for long stretches of time. That I need to take her in slowly, getting to know her on this side of growing up, allowing myself to romance her and be romanced by her. Hesitantly giving her my hand and seeing if we can fit and dance together or simply sit next to each other in peaceful silence.
For most of my life, I have rejected my Sicilian roots, my upbringing too tight, outdated, and strangling for an immigrant child. Sicilian mentality was not something I could identify with growing up in Germany, and in many ways, I never will.
And yet.
There's something to be said about being in a place where you are recognised. Where nobody asks you where you are really, originally from. Where nobody feels the need to question you, because you look like them and everyone looks like you.
Here, you're not “racially ambiguous” looking, nobody wonders. You just are.
Recognition.
My hand gestures come out more here, my voice changes, and I realise how much I tone myself down in England. A side of me spills out here that I rarely meet and barely know. Who would I be if I stayed here?
When I moved from Germany to England as an adult, I somewhat made my quest for belonging even harder. All parts of my identity felt like they were drifting apart uncontrollably, like black ink in water, spreading in a way I can’t contain or shape, with a mind of their own.
It’s the fate of the immigrant child to either fully reject their place of birth or romanticise a place they don’t really know. Ideally, you'll find an accepting space in between, forever being a bird that circles from the top, never landing.
I have always been hypercritical of my homeland, rejecting it to the point where I didn’t even have Italian friends for 33 years of my life. Never fully identifying with my mixed heritage beyond my looks, which are laced with Middle Eastern, African, Greek, and Spanish influences, undeniably Mediterranean. I couldn’t help what I looked like - but I could reject everything else.
I told myself I was ‘neutral’, sitting on the fence between two (or three) worlds, overlooking, accepting, at peace.
But really, my heart was never at peace with my roots because it didn’t fully want to know them.
This time, I am choosing to look at Sicily with rose-tinted glasses. I am fully embracing the joy of every pasta plate, as if it’s the first one of my life, the corny tablecloths in my grandmother’s house, the fact that everyone talks at the same time and nobody listens; or cars just stop in front of you in the middle of a busy road to speak to someone they know. I am consciously overlooking the small minded comments that would normally make my eyes roll to the back of my head. Like an over-excited tourist, I choose to see it all as beautiful and part of the package - something I have never done before when it comes to my island.
No matter how many times spiritual gurus shout that “you have to belong to yourself," belonging to yourself is not enough without a physical place to rest your bones. Not for me at least.
Belonging to yourself is not the scent of your grandmother’s house, it’s not the settling of your heart into your mother tongue, belonging to yourself is nothing without people who bring you food when you’re sick, who stick it out with you in your dark days, belonging to yourself is not the same as recognising your own features in your aunt’s face, it’s not the exhale of knowing home.
Belonging to yourself is nothing but one piece of the mosaic of belonging.
One day, I suddenly fell in love with you.
You spoke to my soul this morning. I have felt this way but didn’t have the words to express it. “belonging to yourself is not enough without a physical place to rest your bones.” 🖤🙏🏾
Read this while I was traveling last month and I wanted to get back to it, because it brought up something I've been grappling with. "Recognition" is such an articulate word to express the feeling you are talking about. I had never heard it in that context but it makes so much sense. I grew up where I was born, even though I lived in different places and countries since, and I don't know what it's like to grow up with the feeling of being an immigrant. So I read with curiosity about your experience with your Sicilian roots and the beauty of reengaging with them in new ways now.
Side note: it's funny, because there's something about Italy that has always made me feel like home when I'm there, even though (as far as I know) I'm not coming from Italian lineage. And I am totally romanticising Sicily in my mind. It has long been a place I'd love to discover (probably like "an over-excited tourist" which I loved your portrait of).
"Recognition", personally, reminded me that, beyond geography, the people who have known me the longest (aka biological family) turned out to be those that seem to have the most difficulty actually recognising me. I know this is the experience of many. I'm still slowly letting go of the illusion I was living with, that we were/are a "close and truly connected family". There's a particular kind of pain and grief that comes with this realisation, that I'm still processing.