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Forewor(l)ds

As we sit, at a safe distance, and watch the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, we recognise the winds of war and rupture, tearing holes in lands, peoples, and cultures, splitting apart countries, human bonds, and identities. We find these winds familiar: All three of us are children of Eastern European immigrants and, in our journeys, these winds have chased us out and away, have carried us across the world, have ripped out pages from our memory books, and have torn holes in the fabrics that we are made of. Tearing, splitting, ripping, rupturing: We notice the violence embedded in these words – words that have shaped our understanding of ourselves. We are reminded of the words that have described our immigration stories, too: journey, displacement, relocation, resettlement. All of them words that imply the existence of a linear space tied to the binary system of here and there, of backwards and forwards typically separated by a great geographical distance and at least one border. Words that imply the progressive movement from one side of the border to the other, thus introducing into this system the dimension of a binary time: of ends and beginnings, of before and after, of the old and the new. Words that situate the cause for our struggle, trauma, and loss, associated with our immigratory experience, at the other side of the border, in the past tense, left behind. Words that do not speak of our here and our today.

We – three individuals with distinct personal experiences of immigration – perform an experiment to seek what lies behind the terms that have identified our experiences and ourselves. We lean into our own experiences of displacement, as manifested in our dreams, the shaping of our sense of self, and our experience of the present. Our stories stand side by side, conversing with theory and with each other. Written in a dialectic and reflective process, these distinct autotheoretical narrations derive meaning from one another’s immigration experiences, composting1 into an authentic landscape of immigration. This landscape, ever-shifting, tugs and pulls at us as we journey through life, traversing borders, and confronting the unsettling news of wars that repeatedly rupture and redefine our identities.

While we choose to present our stories individually, we invite the reader to weave their own path through them and establish their unique connections. This structure honours the personal nature of each narrative, celebrating its intricate complexities. More importantly, it acknowledges the significance of our individual processes of meaning-making. In autotheoretical research, meaning emerges not solely from our personal narrative but also from the very act of writing. As we pen our experiences, our stories are reshaped and transformed, yielding new insights. To put it differently, we write to make sense of our raw and incoherent personal experience, a sense that arises from the ways that we engage with writing.

Thus, Ania’s passage mirrors the very essence of her migratory story: immersed in loss, and driven by the quest to find her missing pieces. Throughout her writing journey, she collects fragments of personal anecdotes, snippets from the stories of others, theoretical concepts, and fragments of discussions, all with the intent to reconstruct her own narrative. Stella embarks on a different path; faced with the linguistic challenges of expressing her unique inner experience of immigration, she turns to writing as a means of accessing her felt sense2 surrounding the issues at hand and their origins. She then uses this sense to build connections between her inner perceptions and the realities, shaped by theory. Meanwhile, Alex takes a distinct approach, delving into the transgenerational impact of his parent’s immigration through performative writing. His writing unpacks specific moments of his life to reveal the layers of meaning hidden within them, illuminating the diverse dimensions that have shaped his experience.

When compos(t)ing this paper, writing alongside each other, our individual processes of sense-making transcended the personal realm. As we communicated the ongoing progress of our writing to each other, the meaning of our personal stories constantly evolved and transformed. In a way, the true sense of our inner experience of immigration, as presented in this paper, emerged from the profound act of sharing these stories with one another. Therefore, the ensuing autotheoretical inquiries that we present are to be read both independently and together, recognising that each represents a distinct story and a unique way of making sense but also noting their interconnectedness resonating across the entire paper.

Vyhr’3 (Ania’s identity landscape)

RUPTURED BOOK

Having moved from Ukraine to Greece when I was little, I have always wondered which of my childhood memories are true and which are memory moulds – supplied by my parents and filled with my eager imagination.

I am like a book whirling through a tornado, with most of its pages torn away. You can still see the ragged, cream stubs where memories used to be, but the writing is lost forever, turned to mental mulch by the violent passage of time and space. In a way, my life is spent collecting the lost pages, trying to fit them into my book. In a way, my life is spent trying to fit in.

(page 17) The fresh, cold smell of a live pine tree, scraping with its purple and gold star, the ceiling of our house in Mariupol’?

I’m pretty sure that’s real.

(page 77) Me jumping from ice floe to ice floe on a frozen Sea of Azov?

That’s probably my hopeful imagination filling in the gaps.

I don’t remember much from the journey to Greece. Two memories stand out, and both feel symbolically significant:

(page 287) One is of my mother knitting my sister a black woollen sweater on the long ride to our new home, an oversized sweater that has ended up after all these years in my own wardrobe, to be worn on rare, exceptionally cold days. Much like this sweater, my identity feels like something knitted for me by other people. The wool might be mine, but the sweater doesn’t quite fit , and it is way too warm for the Greek weather.

(page 290) The second one is of my head hitting the glass window of the taxi that eventually took us from Thessaloniki to Ioannina, as I fell in and out of sleep on the long way there.

Somehow, sometimes, it feels like I’m still on that taxi ride, the cold window on my forehead (pages 290–3097).

I’m behind my peers who work, behave, and exist in a way I don’t – I feel like I exist in the realm of “never quite there.” Just like in “queer time,” the notion that queer people’s life milestones (coming out, marriage, children) are different from those of heteronormative people and do not follow the same linear trajectory,4 I’m seconds, minutes, years out of synch with the rest of the world. I’m on “immigrant time.”

I don’t remember much else, neither from the journey, nor of the first years in Greece. What I do remember is the embarrassment and the shame of not speaking the language (page 450). I remember the sanctuary of my home and of books. I don’t remember missing my past life. I miss it now. As in, “I long for it,” but also as in “I’ve lost it.” I wonder what happened between then and now, to make me feel this way: “then” I might have been embarrassed, but I was whole. I was me. Now, I am not.

LOOKING FOR THE RIGHT LANDSCAPE

I am not the first of my people to move so far away that the landscape around me becomes unrecognisable. I’m sure this statement is true for most people, but it’s especially true for the Greeks of Azov.

(page 2) I come from a long line of Greeks that thousands of years ago moved north – from Chios, from Smyrna; the initial landscape is lost, smudged with an impatient thumb on a hastily drawn map – and then south, and then east, to settle in Mariupol’. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks stayed in Mariupol’. Until the rupture of the Soviet Union, the war between Russia and Ukraine, momentous events that create tidal waves strong enough to displace people once more.

Nothing is settled.

I feel these restless people moving beneath my skin, unsettling me. As an immigrant, even one with Greek roots, I am not settled in this country. I feel uncomfortable calling it “my” country – my identity does not coincide with a place.

Egoz notes that nomadic communities are stigmatised and excluded because of their “landless” condition.5 Is this something that can give meaning to my experience? I look at urbanisation, internal migration in Greece, with the hope of better understanding movement (albeit on a different scale) that does not cause a rupture: Greeks keep a very strong connection with their villages, their places of origin. Do I feel excluded because I do not have a chorio (village)? Am I excluding myself because, although Greek, I do not have a Greek point of origin that can be safely offered when I’m asked “Where are you from?” It’s not enough to reach inside the bottomless sack of time and pull on a thread that connects me to those Greeks that left thousands of years ago. I need both the memories and a specific place to tie my identity to.

If memories, the memories of a real place, could be an anchor weighing me down into an identity (a prescribed, specific, clearly outlined identity I can share with others – not the nebulous feeling of who I am), it feels like my displacement through space has knocked my memories out of place, leaving me in an identity limbo.

This is a personal attempt at being redefined. As something more than “rootless,” “immigrant,” “displaced,” and a little less than “rooted,” “local,” “placed,” since none define me, and the linear spectrum between the two does not come close to encompassing what it feels to be me.

A recent paradigm shift in migration studies moves away from the idea of “rupture.” Migration does not need to signal identity displacement.6 Sedentary societies need not be the norm. I want to internalise this theoretical shift but it’s hard, since my real-life experience is just that – feeling displaced and lost.

(page 2157) War in Ukraine stirred things up for me, drawing connections with things I didn’t register were there (“I picked up on something untold, silenced, violently cut out.”)7 With my mind already turned to Ukraine in a way it hasn’t for many years, since we left it – an intensive absorption of information about a place I feel I’m now losing in a new, violent way – I soon come across a distant relative, a painter, Arkhip Kuindzhi. I discover he shares my amalgamation of roots, a Greek Ukrainian who lived in Russia. Inadvertently, I turn to him for answers: “Who are you? Can you tell me who I am?” He is much more than his ethnicity, I know (he once fitted a wounded bird with a sling to heal a broken wing, or so the story goes). To the question of who I am, Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, all of the above, I look but do not find answers in Kuindzhi’s life: His nationality is contested – his fame makes Ukraine and Russia both claim him as their own, while he himself strongly identified with being Greek, all the while choosing to spend his life in Russia. So I turn to his art.

And here, Kuindzhi doesn’t disappoint me. His predominantly Ukrainian landscapes feel like the answer to a question he hadn’t known had been asked of him – my need reaching back through time, or obliterating time as an irrelevant, artificial notion, and instead, elevating my identity quest into a force of nature.

I stare at his paintings – a snowed opening in the woods, a village lost in the undulations of Ukrainian open spaces – and recognise a longing, a catch in my throat. These landscapes are not only familiar. They have a smell (page 40). They create a curious feeling deep inside me: It feels like their distinct points correspond perfectly with my inner image of what space outside me should feel like. I’ve been searching for those landscapes, for that tingle of recognition. I believe that some landscape has been imprinted on me, and I’m looking for it, with the hope that if I can’t control what my memories are and whose they are, I can trust this primal imprinting: my brain moulded into an inner landscape that is a reflection of an actual, physical one that makes me feel safe, but also an imprint of any and all parts that make me into what I am.8 Perhaps there’s a single slot in my identity machine: Like baby ducks that imprint on a single face, I imprinted on a single place and then spend my life forever tethered to it with an umbilical cord made of memories, nostalgia, a need to belong.

I’m not giving up. With this place lost in the depths of time and across borders, I dig deeper at the intersection of place, memory, and identity. Place can be seen as “an external fundus of memory.”9 How I understand this is that we morph and are morphed by the landscape we inhabit, our memory taking form from the landscape, and simultaneously bestowing meaning to something that wasn’t there before: the “landscape.” But can this external landscape give me the meaning back? I want it to shine light on my internal world, for me to find the in-between world where the two come together.

I start to feel that the questions I’ve been asking are leading me into a cul-de-sac. There must be a world of meanings where the external and internal come together, according to a different perspective. It literally feels like my thoughts need a change of scenery.

DISCOVERIES

In the end, I feel deflated – while finding a potential primordial landscape offers some respite from my exhausting quest, it still doesn’t feel like a definitive answer. It doesn’t change me.

Having left my country of origin, finding myself with a new social identity – an immigrant – I struggle to find how this shift has affected my self-perception. Authentic bits from my past feel precious, nostalgic, and very likely misremembered or already altered beyond recognition by the passage of time and by movement through space. My meaning is created outside me – by a theoretical identity – and then narrated to me.

Throughout this quest, I realise I’ve been looking for barriers and boundaries against which I can define myself (before and after, Greece and Ukraine), because “the physical and conceptual act of being outside or inside, of crossing borders, presents a challenge and an opportunity to create self and identity.”10 I search for who I was before I came to be who I am. In a therapy session (page 2001), my therapist talks about my “rupture” (page 234), my “me before I came to Greece, and the one I was after.”

Was I not the same person? I was definitely transformed by this experience – but what else is life, if not a constant transformation by experience? Would I feel “ruptured” if no one had told me I was?

The answer comes to me, not like a page in the wind, a single artefact to grasp, but like the view from a mountaintop – it was already there, I just couldn’t see it before. I know I cannot ignore my trauma, or my parents’ trauma – but the narrative of me being “ruptured” actually tears me apart. I start to think that the tornado, the vyhr’, that threw me across the world, didn’t leave me in pieces, it just landed me at the bottom of this mountain for me to climb.

But now, from the top of this mountain, I can see it all: hidden memories, sealed places, the political implications of it all. Words sealed tight into bordered, strictly delineated meanings; these don’t leave room for the expression of a collective individuality, a collective where each individuality does not divide but comes together. Two-dimensional words don’t allow space for the three-dimensionality of individual experience. Judith Butler, in Frames of War, talks about how the political and the inner come together at the level of words, how interdependency is precluded by the meanings we use: “an ontology of discrete identity cannot yield the kinds of analytic vocabularies we need for thinking about global interdependency and the interlocking networks of power and position in contemporary life.”11 Words can divide, when they do not reflect the multidimensionality of the living world. Gabriele Schwab, in Haunting Legacies, takes Butler’s words and brings them one step further, talking about the fact that “a theory of multidirectional, composite, and transferential memory is more attuned than an identitarian memory politics to such global interdependency.”12 Memory, identity, and words, all needing to be broken wide open in order to encompass more. Just as it’s important to remember in a shared space, an inner space of shared experience and human memory, it’s equally important to come up with new meanings to describe this collective inner landscape.

I don’t know how to “come together” on my own. But I can look for new spaces where I can remember “together.” Where I can exist “together,” finding the knowledge I seem to crave in order to understand myself, in the collective experience of people. This almost obsessive, fetishistic perusal of my own story falls apart in my hands, like a loosely bound book. There’s not enough here for me to make sense – there never will be, there can’t be. My past is lost and is with me forever at the same time, just not in any comprehensive, word-ed way. I cannot describe it to myself, but maybe others have walked through their own inner landscape and shone light on different parts of it, ones forever obscured to me. If I allow myself to stop clinging to a guarded, bordered inner self and allow humanity to walk through it, into it, I can possibly, finally understand myself. If I open up my inner landscape to the world, letting go of notions of special landscapes and memories and stories, perhaps then I can become an encompassing whole, a topos of people instead of a person.

Oblaka13 (Stella’s story)

My teacher, my doctor, the bank teller stumble over the pronunciation of my last name.

The piled up consonants force their tongues onto untravelled paths inside their mouths.

The linguistic struggle seeks relief with the question:

Where are you from?

The struggle is now mine.

I search for words that could explain.

A nice clear answer.

And then move on.

But my throat contracts.

My mouth feels dry.

No vowels, no consonants.

No answer is good enough.

At home, my sister and I engage in maths.

We carefully weigh our ancestry.

We measure each component of our ethnicity.

We divide by the percentages of our inheritance.

We add up the fractions of ourselves.

And the formula works. We finally have an answer!

We are half Greek (only half).

We are a quarter Russian (just a quarter).

We are a quarter German (a mere quarter).

But I keep on wondering.

Do a half and two quarters make a whole?

The question of my ethnic origin has always highlighted a discontinuity in my being. It implies that I am here, but not from here. It implies that I am here but only in part. It evokes the vocabulary we have associated with an immigrant’s identity: displacement, relocation, and dividing borders. A vocabulary emphasising loss – loss of language, culture, and identity. This vocabulary fails me. Its words feel like knives on the continuous plane of my existence, trying to sever and split my being into pieces.

There is a dissonance between my personal sense and the words available to me. Yet, words and personal senses are highly interconnected. According to Lev Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory, the development of oneself occurs through an ongoing dialectical interplay with their environments – and more specifically, their culture and language. The consciousness of an individual’s experiences emerges from the dialectical clash between their current understanding of an experience and the words that they are provided with. In this model, the words are not merely employed to express one’s understanding of their thoughts, but they are offered as a means of creating that understanding, and realising their thoughts. In other words, thought cannot exist without the words that define it: “thought is born through words.”14

Through the words that I have been given to shape my identity, I grew to think of myself as split and severed, going through life with pieces of myself dislocated and displaced, lost somewhere behind uncrossable borders, lost in a time long, long ago. But, luckily, it has not been only words that I have been given. There have also been stories. Many stories about the different journeys of my family members’ migrations. Stories, stretching into the past, several generations back. Stories stretching across the continents of Europe and Asia. Stories, speaking of displacement, exile, forced relocation, and nomadic life. Stories that speak of rupture, yet none of them a rupturing story. Hearing those stories, as a child, I used to feel at ease. I used to trace the journeys of my grandparents and parents on the map, drawing long paths that intertwined and crossed over each other.

It is those paths,

I’d think to myself.

It is those twisting, weaving, crossing paths that made me.

These paths were made by many people but the story they narrate is mine alone. It is a story of what came before me, but also the story of what I am made of. And it is a story with no conclusion. Deeply embedded in the fabric of myself, its meaning twisted and stretched but essentially unchanged, this story narrates itself repeatedly in the now.

To understand it better, I employ a lens that can unify my past with my present on a continuous plane. Vygotsky’s term perezhivanie lends itself effectively to this.15 Untranslatable into English, the Russian word’s meaning can be rendered as the neologism meta-experience, or even better, re-experience. The term describes the psychological mechanism involved in the process of immediate interpretation of a lived experience: The new experience is processed and internalised through a dialectic interaction with the emotional and cognitive terrain of a person’s inner world – a terrain made out of the past interactions of a person with their world and their projections of their future. In this term I find the lingering effect of my migration story in my present. I see it not as a concluded event, but as an internal landscape, created by and in my past, giving meaning to my present and shaping my view of the future.

It’s not a place that I am from.

I think I am from a story.

Maybe I am a story.

A story is not here or there, nor now or then. It is my own and also of others. It lives somewhere in between, on a plane that transcends time, space, and individuality. Donald Winnicott painted the picture of a similar spatial dimension: “an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute.”16 Originally discussed as the space located between the infant’s inner world and the external object of the mother, Winnicott’s general term of potential space describes an aspect of a person’s psychology that determines their sense of themselves and their world. In the mother-infant relationship, the responsiveness of the mother to the needs of the infant, that is, the supportive correlation of the infant’s inner experience of their own needs with their experience of the external world, facilitates the creation of a potential space characterised by a sense of safety and security. The existence of this space, thus located between reality and fantasy, enables the infant to safely experience their true inner impulses. Yet, the shaping of one’s potential space does not end in childhood. Winnicott suggests that the therapeutic relationship between a client and their psychotherapist can act formatively on their potential space.17 His legacy has stretched this concept even further to include several human activities, such as spiritual practices and artistic creativity. Thomas Ogden proposes the concept of a dialectical synthesis as “a possible paradigm for the understanding of the form or mode of the psychological activity generating potential space.”18 Not unlike Vygotsky, Winnicott’s perspective sees the formation of one’s sense of self-awareness as the product of their inner experience with their external world and locates this sense on the plane of the potential space.

I was just over two years old when we left Moscow. The day has survived in my memory in the form of a recurring dream, dreamt often throughout my childhood.

I look at the great mirror of our building’s entrance hallway.

In the reflection, I see my mother holding me by the hand.

I see the street outside.

I see the sky.

A spring Moscow sky.

My mother is looking anxiously at the street.

We’re running late.

She pulls my hand – she pulls me out to the street.

But I am transfixed, looking at the mirror.

The form of an enormous cloud materialises in the glass.

Its approaching has a sound – heavy, hollow, thudding steps.

We’re running late.

My mother pulls me out into the street and we run.

We turn around corners, onto new streets.

We’re running away.

We’re running out of time.

The odd cloud’s steps are nearing.

Its gigantic form fills up the sky.

We run and run but we cannot outrun the clouds.

I think of home. Cloudless, skyless, safe home.

I want to go home.

But we are running away.

Away from home.

My dream stands as an image of a part of my potential space, formed by the internalisation of my immigration experience – its frightening aspect manifested, through my childish imagination, in the form of perilous weather. Yet, when sensing my inner world, it is not the insecurity that prevails. The experience’s formative effect on my potential space seems to transcend the fear experienced in the moment, constructing, in contrast, a space of safety.

I am much older.

I am nine.

I am thirteen.

I am twenty-two.

I am thirty-five.

I am in the car, being driven away.

I love being driven.

I relax in the sensation of the car’s gentle gliding on the asphalt.

I quiet down watching houses, street lights and forests flash by.

We are so fast.

And there’s plenty of time.

I savour our ceaseless, passive movement forwards.

I imagine it lasting forever.

From the window I can see the clouds up in the sky.

They look like they are gliding along with us.

The clouds and I, in a perpetual movement forwards.

Giving me a sense of peace.

A sense of home.

This sense of home is what Winnicott describes when discussing one’s capacity to be alone. In this state of pure relaxation, one “is able to become unintegrated, to flounder, to be in a state in which there is no orientation, to be able to exist for a time without being either a reactor to an external impingement or an active person with a direction of interest or movement.”19 In this state, one’s whole existence is contained within their potential space. Immersed in the landscape of their own inner world, any impulse or sensation that emerges cannot but feel deeply personal and profoundly real. No words can describe better the satisfaction of the experience of being absorbed in one’s own inner landscape than Winnicott’s term: ego orgasm.

To reach this climax of the sensation of myself, I need to be submerged in a space that is not divided, but continuous. For, how can I experience my true self, how can I feel at ease within my inner landscape, when that is broken and divided, rigidly segregated into regions of ethnic identity, of past trauma and heavily bordered regions?

I am much older.

I am in the car, driving across Europe.

As I sit in my seat, the world around me forms and deforms.

I see the land stretching on and on.

I see the smooth open fields explode into dense, pathless forests.

I see the flat land undulating into green hills.

I see the hills rise to rocky mountains towering over us.

I see the mountains slope into serene lakes.

I speed on motorways, past massive, unrecognisable cities.

I slow down into single file country roads.

I merge back into the motorway.

I drive for days.

I drive through days.

From the window of my car, I see no borders.

I search for words to describe my inner landscape as a place that unites my past and present, my moments of trauma and moments of ego orgasm. Words that allow me to experience the sense of myself as continuous and constant, yet soft and flexible. I find such words in the mathematical realm of topology, “from which rigidity was long ago banished and only continuity holds sway. The land of topological transformations, which can bend-and-stretch-and-compress-and-distort-and-deform [...] but not tear or break.”20 I want to narrate my story with such words. A story of how the world twisted and bent to bring people from far away together. A story of how languages and cultures intertwined. A story of how time and space can stretch to fit all of me in it. A story of continuity and wholeness.

Where are you from?

Ah, well… It’s a long story.

Cartof21 (Alex’s trip-ing)

I

My mother smokes.

She always did.

Many cigarettes,

Many packs of cigs,

Smoked away

Over the day.

A pack,

A new pack,

Started with a twirl of the plastic wrap.

Unwrapping the top of the pack

And her palm crinkling away that plastic wrap…

[As I write of this moment,]

[I find my mind]

[Swelling in the sounds]

[The smells]

[The here heres]

[Of this moment.]

[And I want to play.]

[But…]

[I’ll leave that for another day…]

With a burning lit cigarette,

My mother would shift through the ash in the ashtray.

Swirling it round around

Side to side

Around side

Backside

Inside…

Ash to wonder in.

Ashes to wander with.

A way to connect to

Days that were over

Days that were away.

Over and away days

That are today days.

Today days percolate with away days

Pulsing always with days

That are over and done

And yet undone.

You see…

As my mother smoked away those cigarettes,

I understood,

I learned,

That those days,

Those undone days

Live today.

My mother smokes.

Everyday

All day All days.

You’ll find her smoking even todaydays.

There she is

In the kitchen

On the far end of the table

Near the window

Twirling those wraps

Baking those tips

Shifting that ash

Smoking away days…

Smoking awaydays into todaydays

twirlingbakingshifting days

III

Why do you write like that? Latour asks Serres.

You start in one place, and end up in another.

Why do you write in such disconnected ways?

Some would say your writing is poetry.

I don’t find any offence in that.

Well, some would dismiss your writing as simply creative writing.

Negating your writing as playful embellishments and not knowledge.22

My writing is not linear. It is not flat. There are no borders to defend in my writing.23 Rather there are spaces, times to fold into. Spaces and times to unfold and to knead. Poetry, creative writing, helps us access knowledge hidden or tucked in. Words, the rhythm of these words, the space of these words – what I mean is the writing of these words can help twist, bend static symbols to more than their indications. Writing words can bring out more meaning in words. Poetry, creative writing, I would call it performative writing,24 can reveal what is in-between a symbol, a word. That line in the ground, a border, can simply be understood as an indication of separation. Separating Romania-Yugoslavia, mine-yours, before-after, lost-found. Its flatness helps us stand or understand, but it does hide the complexity of what is in between that line. Not in between the points of the line – No. I am speaking of an expansive, flexible space in that line. A width-ening of the line. What is gathered in the width of that line? What complexity of relations does this line hide? What complexity of relations does this line hold? As I fold into, tuck into that line, I access the life in that line. The understanding of that line in the ground shifts with writing. My understanding of that line no longer lies flat under my feet, but rather fills my mouth with soil. That line, with all those critters living in it,25 with all that time living in it,26 is a space that nourishes thoughts, minds, hearts, identities.

When I communicate, when I write, according to Serres, I am engaging with time. Sharing is time. As Carlo Rovelli27 so poignantly explains, time is not constrained to the ticks of a clock. These ticks are a way we have found to measure time, but time is beyond a measurement. It would be similar to making sense of a living organism by simply connecting with the measurement of weight or mass. Time is an event and communicating is eventful.28 Through this engagement with time, these channels, tunnels, passages to other spacetimes are accessed. When I write/speak of theGranițaBorder, I am in time and I am passing into space, spaces.

This is why Serres writes in such disconnected ways.

This is why I write disconnected.

This is not a story that conquers. This is not a story that flattens. This is a story that shifts roundaround. A story that nourishes. That gathers, grows, and complicates.29

that line no longer lies flat under my feet,

but rather fills my mouth with soil.

II

A pack,

A new pack,

Started with a twirl of the plastic wrap.

Unwrapping the top of the pack

And her palm crinkling away that plastic wrap…

A lift of the lid

And you would hear

A slip

or a slid.

A lid slid.

And then

A snatch

And a catch

At that foil flap.

A pluck

To reveal what’s tucked

Inside–

Cigarette tops

Packed-in

Side by inside

With a smell

Packed-in

Tucked-inside as well.

A swell of

Mmmmm…. what a smell…

A final pluck

With a cig slid

And a tuck into

A lip-press-pucker-lip.

Then a click of a light

Do you have a light?

A click
To light

The tip.

And with that cig tip lit,

Mmmmm… what a smell!

Another swell of a smell.

A burning cig tip,

A tuck in

Correction – A suck in,

And it bakes...

Burning warm, burning red.

The cig tip bakes

Baking…

Baking…

And a memory swells.

IV

I search for words. I’ve been searching for words since I was a child. Struggling with reading since the beginning, I remember sitting in class searching for the words that I couldn’t read. Searching so that I could sound them out before it was my time to read out loud to the class. In a defining moment of this search, I remember standing in front of the class, where Mrs. Arnold had summoned me to stand and search for the word “drum” in the text we were reading. An act to shame, an act to illiter-ate, an act to somehow prove I was not doing my work… I don’t know. And, I didn’t know. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t know if it started with “d,” or “‘j,” or “gd.” Was it an “a” vowel or “u,” maybe an “o,” and sometimes “y.” No matter how hard I looked, no matter how hard my eyes pressedforcedinto the letters on that page, I couldn’t find that word. And, I remember, I remember returning to my desk feeling bad. What I understood then, was that I was feeling my dumbness. I have this distinct feeling of recognising this empty space in my mind in me that was my dumbness, my stupidness… my incompleteness.

When I didn’t know the words.

When I didn’t understand the language.

When I couldn’t get what people were talking about,

This empty space in me would be felt.

A rere-knowing that…I don’t know.

I can’t know.

I am not from here so…

I won’t know.

Ever.

A landscape that is inaccessible. Flat. Distant. Away. Out of reach.

And, yet, inside me.

III

And I sit

On the other end of the table

Watching her

Wondering about where she is

Mami, what are you thinking of?

Shifting in the ash,

Staring away

She lets out

Potatoes

Potatoes?

I’m thinking about cooking a tocăniță today.

Go and check, how many potatoes are there...

Rushing – because I LIKE being helpful – I check in the basket under the sink.

One.

Only one.

Mami, we only have one, Mami.

Tocăniță is a stew made with potatoes or rather made of potatoes. You boil the potatoes until they begin to melt away, making a thick, chunky stewiness of a stew.

It is starchy – comfy – homey – – You need a sack of potatoes for tocăniță.

We can’t make tocăniță with just one potato, Mami.

A shift, a stare.

One… Only one…. Hmmm.

I can go! I can runrush to the store. I’ll get a bagsack of potatoes.

So MANY potatoes we’ll make the best tocăniță EVER!

Shifting round

Swirling roundround

No…Leave it, leave it. We make it with one. Only one.

Mami! But I can go. I can go outside. I’m fine – It’s just down the street. I’ll runrushrush and be back in five minutes – FOUR minutes! TIME ME!

No leave it… It bad out there. Look… the wind. It winding cold. Just... stay.

Stay here. Stay home.

Shifting swirling

Baking burning

Smoking

Mmmmm…. what a smell

Don’t worry. It nothing to worry. One potato is enough for us.

We make it with one. Only one.

These todaydays were days that were better to just stay in. Leave it. Don’t trouble yourself with going out. Out there.. Away… It was a slow day. A lost day. A day to lose time – to loosen time. Days that felt suffocating give me space yet safe. Days that made you crave for a space a weird space. An inside-outside space. A behind space. I want to jump into that space at the back of kitchen cupboards. space My mother was never nervous with her smoking. There was always time given. Time being created. Time being given its time when she smoked. No runrushing – tapping – fidgeting – No leg shaking ticking ticks. None of that. Instead… a stare, a shift, a swirling with time. A loose time which for my mother was a time to lose, to loss, to let loose. A todayday of awaydays to loselossloosenlost.

IIX(

I search for words. I search for words I don’t have. Words that exist somewhere between language, between languages. Words that exist between us, between I. And I search for words that don’t exist at all, knowing only that the words I do have just don’t hit the spot. So…

I write.

I write a word.

I write at the word,

Write into it.

I scratch at the word. Not at the meaning, but at the feeling.

I write about what happened. And in scratching at it, I feel something in my belly happening. And I find that in between these words is where Mmmmm… the scratch hits the spot. I now write of a happenedhappening. Words that don’t make sense. Words that don’t fit. Lost words. Missing words. Words that speak of not being from here. It winding cold. These words, the writing of words that don’t exist, is at times ignorant writing, illiterate writing, and at other times poetic writing, lyrical writing. In searching for words that I don’t know, I sense the fear of being called out: Stupid, Foreigner, Can’t you read! What’s wrong with you? Speak English! In searching for words that I don’t know, I can fall into the disempowerment of the words I speak, of the language I do have. Stuck with sounding out words, fitting myself into them, spelling them correctly, is not working from that potential space.30 It is getting lost outside of myself. It is letting go of mespace. And, in holding on to Serres, in losing words, speech, I lose time; time being the eventful happening of life that connects us, connects space, connects life. I lose that which kneads us.

V//

My mom ran across the Border. Mama a fugit Granița. The border being the one between Romania and Yugoslavia. I never understood the Granița Border, to be a line, a boundary that separated two countries. Rather it was a space, a whole space with an up and down, with a length, width, and depth. A whole, full space that was roundaround me. I knew the Granița Border as a space where something happened. A dimension of understanding which when taking in the landscape of the Granița Border is lost. Similar to when one finds the Granița Border on a map, the depth of this space is lost. I remember (or maybe I don’t remember) a larger-than-life map in my third-grade classroom. I can feel my fingernail scratching at this line on the map between Romania and Yugoslavia. Picking at it – Digging into it to reveal something that the map does not show.

A space where something still happens. Inside that flat line, inside that flat landscape, this passage that happened is happening – a happenedhappening. Now, right now, I find myself handing over my passport to the border agent and I feel something in my belly shifting. Now, right now, I walk up to the UK Border Force desk at Edinburgh Airport and my belly is churning. Now, right now, I scan my passport at the e-Gate at JFK and my belly is twisting. Now, right now, I am driving. Driving across the border, that border – – the Granița Border. I roll my window down and hand the border police officer my passport. Glancing down at my passport, then staring off towards the cars waiting behind us, the officer asks, Ce zice aici? What does it say here? Showing me my passport, with the officer’s finger indicating Place of birth I read out loud – Brooklyn. Inspecting my Romanian passport, the officer asks, Cum este posibil? How is that possible? I feel something in my belly shifting, churning, twisting. I grab onto it. I respond to the officer, Mama a fugit Granița. Seeing me grab at my belly the officer asks, Ce ai în mână? What do you have in your hand?

Nimic. Nothing.

I lift my arm up and away to show,

N’am nimic. I have nothing.

And yet there –

Here–

In my lap,

I find resting against my belly a... Potato.

One…. only one.

I fold into it, lean into it, grab at it, and hold it.

I look up and I am inside that landscape of the Granița Border.

Me with two others hunch behindinside a bush.

We sit near each other.

We sit on top of each other.

nearontop inside eachanother

And this potato in my lap,

This one potato is for us on this passage.

As the potato passes roundaround

Kneading between us,

Kneading us,

We bite into the potato.

And with it raw,

Each bite cracks.

Each bitecrack tastes of dirt.

Each bitecrack fills our mouth with soil.

Each bitecrack smells…

Smells of the ground.

And, Mmmmm… what a smell!

I am here.

I am hidden. Each bitecrack hereheres us.

I am nourished.

Don’t go out. It winding cold. Stay.

This one, only one potato is enough for us.

Again, staring off towards the cars waiting behind us,

The border police officer hands me back my passport,

And lets out,

Ce noroc.

I take back my passport

And I drive away.

I repeat his words,

Out loud, but in a whisper,

Ce noroc.

My partner, in the passenger seat asks,

What’s that?

I repeat it louder.

Ce noroc.

The officer said “Ce noroc.”

What does that mean?

What luck.

Or… How lucky.

that line no longer lies flat under my feet,

but rather fills my mouth with soil.

X?V

Somehow, somewhere

In writing

I found that drum

And it reminded me of being dumb

And now I write of a drumdumb.

A drumdumb

Is a space where

dumbs and dambs

dombs and doombs

Come out to play.

An empty space

Inside me

Wherewhere

Somewhere I can play.

An empty space that I can be lost in,

Because I’m okay… I’m okay… I’m okay

I’m okay being lost.

Those days my head is hitting the glass window of the taxi

Those days I am in the car, being driven away

Those days I am smoking todaydays into awaydays

Are all days I’m okay to sit…

And be lost.

loselossloosenlost times

Through these passages, these journeys, I am understanding my capacity to be lost. My capacity to get lost and still hold on to mespace. A capacity that opens an empty space, landscape, an emptyscape within me to create in. A shift from a loss in me, to a capacity in me to lose myself. When one is lost, really lost, the first thing one does is “roll our eyes up”31 and away from the static image in front of us. One goes inward, tuning into one’s sensation-al self our fleshy self to register the quality of where one is. It is in this mespace that the outside space loses its boundaries. In this lost space, space becomes eventful. Space becomes something in time and one needs their flesh to flesh it out.32

When we are lost,

We pull our eyes from the flat map in front of us,

We pull our eyes away from the letters on the page,

And let our head fall back,

Our eyes roll up,

And our mespace

stretchestucksfoldskneads into

A drumdumb

A happenedhappening

A widthening

A scratch that Mmmmmm…. hits the stop.

My eyes roll back,

My head follows,

I fall into me.

And I feel alive

Because I’ve arrived.

Afterwor(l)ds

As we sit around the table, theorising about our identities and inner landscapes, I imagine us as three transparent bubbles that provide windows into a continuous, shared, endless space – an imagined inner landscape, a shared potential space that morphs and transforms, mirrored back to us as our separate gazes focus on different parts. Our stories intertwine in an eternal dance, forming a collective “We” that is greater than the sum of its “I”s. Yet despite the interweaving, our stories are not fused. They retain their individuality, anchored to the complexities of each “I.” In the doughy meaning that we are kneading, they leave room for gaps – spaces where interpretation and significance reside. These gaps serve as an antidote to marginalising the reader’s personal experience.33 They invite in additional narratives, creating room for other “I”s to contribute their unique intersectional complexities. They become blanks, waiting to be filled by the distinct felt sense of each reader’s experience. By preserving the separation of our stories and honouring the emptiness in between, we allow for the “We” of the authors to expand and envelop the reader.

This inclusive approach forsters a shared sense of belonging, inviting the reader to become part of the collective tapestry – this interconnected we-space – woven from our shared experiences. It also embodies the topological essence of our understanding of inner space and time, as well as the intricate interplay between personal and shared experiences. In this light, the multiplicity of our migratory experiences becomes timeless, transcending the individual boundaries, and proclaims our demand: the need to articulate our immigration narratives using a vocabulary that captures not only the rupturing nature of our geographical displacement, but also the enduring continuity of our shared inner experience of life.

1 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

2 Eugene Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning : a Philosophical and Psychological Approach to the Subjective (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997).

3 Vyhr’: whirlwinds, such as tornadoes, in Russian. In Slavic mythology, a dangerous wind, born out of malevolent forces.

4 Dustin Goltz, “Queer Temporalities” in Oxford Research

Encyclopedia of Communication, ed. Jon Nussbaum (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2022).

5 Shelley Egoz, “Landscape and Identity: Beyond a Geography of One Place” in The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies, ed. Peter Howard, Ian Thompson, and Emma Waterton, (London: Routledge, 2012) 272.

6Aivar Jürgenson, “Between Landscapes: Migration as Rupture and Its Expression in the Landscape” in Ruptured Landscapes, ed. Jonathan Miles-Watson (New York: SpringerLink, 2015), 111.

7 Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 43.

8 Nadia Lovell, Locality and Belonging (London: Routledge, 1998).

9 Charis Lengen, Christian Timm, and Thomas Kistemann, “Place Identity, Autobiographical Memory and Life Path Trajectories : The Development of a Place-time-Identity Model” Social Science & Medicine no. 227 (April 2019), 21.

10 Ibid., 23.

11 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso Press, 2010), 31

12 Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 31.

13 Russian for clouds.

14 Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. Eugenia Hanfmann, Gertrude Vakar, and Alex Kozulin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012),

270.

15 Lev Vygotsky, “The Problem of the Environment,” in The Vygotsky Reader, ed. Rene Van Der Veer and Jaan Valsiner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

16 Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 2005), 3.

17 Donald Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (Milton, England: Routledge, 1984).

18Thomas Ogden, “On Potential Space,” in The Winnicott Tradition: Lines of Development – Evolution of Theory and Practice over the Decades, ed. Margaret Boyle Spelman and Frances Thomson-Salo (London: Karnac Books, 2015), 121.

19 Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development, 33.

20 Ian Stewart, Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So (London: Macmillan, 2001), 89.

21 Romanian for potato.

22 Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres Interviewed by Bruno Latour, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

23 Ibid.

24 Ronald Pelias, The Creative Qualitative Researcher: Writing That Makes Readers Want to Read (London: Routledge, 2019).

25 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

26 Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

27 Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, trans. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell (Harlow, England: Penguin Books, 2019).

28 Serres, The Parasite; Michel Serres, Variations on the Body, trans. Randolph Burks (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing, 2012).

29 Ursula Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (London: Ignota Books, 2019).

30 Winnicott, Playing and Reality.

31 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 184.

32 Ibid.

33 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991).