Vous êtes pas chez vous, madame.

"You are not at home here, lady."

How do you respond to a statement like that ? After five different apartments in nearly five years, obtaining fluency in French, multiple trips to the dreaded Prefecture, odd jobs and various schools, having a panic attack when confronted with moving back to the US, failed romances, and one ongoing successful one, how can you tell me this is not my home ?

And yet Monday afternoon was not the first time I had been told this. I'm sure they meant nothing by it, but I can't count on my two hands the number of times I've been at a party and been innocently asked by a French acquaintance: "You've been here how long ? and when will you go home ?" as if our concept of home doesn't adjust itself over time. As we get older. As we find our best friends. As we fall in love. Sure, my little island in Maine will always occupy a terribly special place inside of me, but why are so few peoples' concepts of home portable ?

I was never a girl who dreamed of moving to Paris. I chose to take Latin & Spanish instead of French when I had the choice. When I dreamed of going abroad in high school, I spent hours flipping through guidebooks with glossy photos of Ecuador and Venezuela. At 15, I read The Poisonwood Bible and became obsessed with the deepest, darkest parts of Africa-moving on to all literature I could get my hands on about the region. In between trips to America's labor & women's history landmarks, my parents took me to Italy to visit friends, and to England and Scotland to learn of my ancestry. Despite all of the travel, and all of the dreaming, I never once stepped foot on the soil of La Republique. But then something happened. I fell in love with opera.

I had spent a couple of summers in Italy with family friends, and had taken German my first semester at Oberlin, so I had relevant comfort in 2 of the 3 big opera languages. My notions of French were close to non-existent. And so to France I went. I somewhat stereotypically arrived with only a backpack & a messenger bag full of music. My intention was to stay for a couple of months. Never once did I realize I had started building a life. 

I'm not sure at what point Paris became my home, but I can trace so much of my life's history through it's streets. I was standing outside a bar on Rue de la Roquette when I learned my grandfather had died, and outside of the metro at Place de Clichy when my adopted brother called to tell me he was getting married. It was in the balconies of the Theatre des Champs-Elysées that I remembered why I wanted to become a singer, something I had forgotten in a far corner of the 16th arrondissement. And it was on the intersection of Rue de Sentier and Rue des Jêuners where I first kissed a boy- a boy I later realized I was in love with while riding a bus across the Pont D'Alma.

And while Paris may not always be where I choose to make my home, I'm rendered nearly speechless by the idea that someone (this someone being a terribly rude neighbor) would it find acceptable to tell me I don't belong here. I don't like to write sweeping generalizations about a culture of people. I've encountered too much of that living & travelling abroad. But I am very much struck by the amount of xenophobia that exists here. This is not only the stuff of passing rumors and the occassional New York Times profile. It is real. I have seen it.

I've seen two Algerian bus drivers turned away for lunch because the restaurant could not (would not) accomodate their muslim diet. I've seen the line of people asking for asylum outside of the police Prefecture in Creteil, and I've spent hours inside the prefecture listening to their stories of migrancy and rejection. I've seen a young African immigrant pushed to the ground and kicked in the stomach by a policeman who assumed he was pickpocketing, when in fact he was merely an innocent bystander. And I myself have been told by an officer of the French government that if I was was not happy with the way the country was run, that he would be more than happy to reject my request for residency and put me on the next plane 'home'.

So why would I want to stay ? Stay in a country that seems to want me, and every other hopeful immigrant to return 'home' ?

I think back to those first months in Paris, when I had no plans of staying. I wandered through the streets writing poems in my head about how I would remember my time here. I took mental photographs of couples on street corners, and old women wandering home with fruits from the morning market. I sang songs about new love, and about lost love, and about hope. How could I leave, when there was so much yet to learn, to have, to experience ? I read the words of French authors, bottle of wine in hand, on the Quais of the Seine thinking about langourous ecstasy. "C'est la nôtre, n'est-ce pas ? La mienne, dis, et la tienne. Dont s'exhale l'humble entienne, par ce tiède soir, tous bas."*

And then I wandered through winding Parisian streets -- home.






*from C'est L'Extase, Paul Verlaine

"It is ours, is it not ? Say that it is mine, and yours. Which breathes this humble hymn, so softly, on this mild evening."