conversation with a Senegalian

While I'm writing about the subject, I recently had a bit of a conversation with a fellow immigrant in Via Dante. He was one of the Senegalian booksellers who pound the pavement in the wealthier areas of Milan selling books about African culture. I've always wondered how this works, where the books come from and where the money goes. I've never bought one of the books, but the sellers are always so cheerful that I frequently end up talking to them.

Last Thursday I had sat on a bench in Via Dante to listen to some street musicians, and I knew in sitting down I would attract the booksellers, if I was lucky also a couple of rose vendors and the guys that want to tie bracelets to your wrists. After a few minutes a bookseller approached me, said hi, and asked if I had ever been to Africa.

"Yes," I said.
He looked up, surprised, "Where?"
"Kenya, a long time ago."
"Ah, I'm from the other part."
"Senegal?"
"How did you know?"
I wanted to say something like everyone who has ever tried to sell me a book has been from Senegal but then I thought that was inappropriate, so I said, "I guessed!"

He tried for a bit to sell me a book but I told him I didn't want one. He tried to sell me a children's book, but I told him the children in my family didn't speak Italian. Then he got interested and asked me where I was from. He started trying to speak a little English, and I listened and helped him (I am a professional, after all).

He said he had been in Milan for a year. I asked him if he wanted to stay and he said that if he makes enough money he'll go back to Senegal and if not he'll remain in Milan. He said he missed Senegal, its ocean and la gente allegra. In Milan everything was different. I agreed with him there, the people here are grumpy and rushed, and that day I had been feeling a bit down about the milanese atmosphere.

He said he was trying to learn English. I asked him what languages he knew, and he said French ("Because they were our colonizers, but here no one speaks it"), Wolof, Italian, and a little bit of English. He introduced himself then, but I, being forgetful, let his name slip out my other ear. He told me he was always in Via Dante, so I should come back. I said, Maybe. He said, "Thank you," and I asked him how to say your welcome in French, and he said "De rien." Then he said, "If you come back to Via Dante, I will teach you French and you can teach me English." This set my imagination whirling with all sorts of fantastic scenarios, but I said, "Alright, we'll see."

So that's my story, two extracomunitari having a conversation. I'd like to know more about what he thinks of Italy and its gente, who he knows here, where his family is, where he plans to go if Italy doesn't work. I'd like to know what drove him to come here, to this place that puts up posters saying that he's a thief and a criminal. Mainly I'd just like to talk, because I think it's the best defense against prejudice, especially my own.

home again, home again, where is home again?

I'm back. In Milan, I mean. It might seem like I just left (I did, four scant months ago) and that I just wrote that I was home in the U.S. Though, really, I'm not so sure where home is anymore.

Coming back to Milan was a hard decision, and then easy. I agonized over whether I would be able to make it through another winter of fog and bone-soaking rain, whether I was coming back for the wrong reasons, whether I shouldn't settle down with a Real Grown-Up Person Job already. My brother helped me break it down nicely, though: live in the U.S. with no guarantee of a job, especially not an intellectually stimulating one, probably in Northampton where the winters suck just as much if not more as the Milanese ones...or return to Italy for maybe my last opportunity to live in Europe, where I have a job I like and find interesting that (just barely) supports me, friends, and someone I love. Oh, I thought. Well, when you put it that way...

Quindi, eccomi qua. The summer felt like a brief american pause in a continuum, my life italiana. Arriving in Milan I was suprised by how comfortable I felt. My amoroso met me with a bunch of wilted flowers picked from the Parco delle Cave and helped me carry me egregiously large bags. My speaking wasn't so rusty after a summer of skype dates. I knew the train and the station where it arrived and the bar nearby where we stopped to recharge my phone. I knew the tram to take to get to the apartment where I would be staying with a lovely professoressa. Everything was much easier.

(My ensuing apartment hunt was easier too, though made longer and more frustrating by my knowledge of neighborhoods and average rents and bedbugs and old world attitudes towards guests. The specter of bedbugs haunts my dreams.)

Now I've found a place to live after three weeks and a run-in with old Sicilian sexism and I've begun working. Same characters, different year. The kids know me and greet me in the hallways (a quick and urget "Hi RAYchel!") as I round the corner of the stairs. A couple of my classes erupted in delight when they saw me walk in the door, but they're more happy for not having a test than for speaking English with me. Still, it feels good.

So I'm starting up the blog again. I have to keep stock of the wonderful things my kids do, and I have to keep stock of myself.

Life path English lessons

I've been rediscovering my nerdiness here, and it seems to fit well with my work with the kids, especially the 5th year students. Unfortunately, I'm not sure even the most enthusiastic gesticulating about Walt Whitman and Thoreau conveys their awesomeness. I mean, I understand when the adolescents start to nod off and drool on their desks, I've been there too. But now I've seen the light! The Romantics! The idealism! Nature! Simplicity! Isn't it just great kids?
Part of the problem, the source of my enthusiasm, is that every Romantic we read seems to be speaking to me. A little bit like how in 10th grade I thought every emo singer with a swoosh hair cut was speaking to me. Same deal, only now it's Whitman.

For example, let's start with something ridiculously well-known that I just now appreciate:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...
-Henry David Thoreau, beginning of Walden (obviously)

Oh my god Henry, did you just peer into my soul? Or was it the literature workbook that read my mind in deciding to include your brief excerpt? I've been worried in these months (years?) that I've been too distracted to think, let alone create or decide what I want to do next. I too must go into the woods to clear my mind, I just need to figure out where/what my woods are. I think I have narrowed it down to somewhere within two countries.

(The kids did not seem so psyched about this passage, but they're an especially quiet group. Next time we meet we will get to discuss it more, and I will find out whether they are at all as impressed as I am.)

Next, Whitman:

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill'd with them, and I will fill them in return.)
-Walt Whitman, "Song of the Open Road"

I've been carrying this little piece of poem around with me for awhile now, pretty much since I left the States. I hadn't really read any Whitman until I found an old edition of Leaves of Grass in the basement of my parents' house, given to my mom by an old boyfriend (A+ on the present, boyfriend). I found "Song of the Open Road" before any of the others, it comforted me then and it still does.

And then, in class, we read:

The Open Road. The great home of the Soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not 'above'. Not even 'within'. The soul is neither 'above' nor 'within'. It is a wayfarer down the open road[...]
Only by taking the open road.
Not through charity. Not through sacrifice. Not even through love. Not through good works. Not through these does the soul accomplish herself.
Only through the journey down the open road.
The journey itself, down the open road. Exposed to full contact. On two slow feet. Meeting whatever comes down the open road. In company with those that drift in the same measure along the same way. Towards no goal. Always the open road.
Having no known direction even. Only the soul remaining true to herself in her going.
Meeting all the other wayfarers along the road. And how? How meet them, and how pass ? With sympathy, says Whit- man. Sympathy. He does not say love. He says sympathy. Feeling with. Feel with them as they feel with themselves. Catching the vibration of their soul and flesh as we pass.
It is a new great doctrine. A doctrine of life. A new great morality. A morality of actual living, not of salvation. Europe has never got beyond the morality of salvation. America to this day is deathly sick with saviourism. But Whitman, the greatest and the first and the only American teacher, was no Saviour. His morality was no morality of salvation. His was a morality of the soul living her life, not saving herself. Accepting the contact with other souls along the open way, as they lived their lives. Never trying to save them. As lief try to arrest them and throw them in gaol. The soul living her life along the incarnate mystery of the open road.
This was Whitman. And the true rhythm of the American continent speaking out in him. He is the first white aboriginal.
-D.H. Lawrence, on Whitman

I thought of myself as being on the road in the beginning of my stay in Milan, some sort of vagabond traveler, but it's not so true. I live in an apartment in a very cosmopolitan city (at least Firenze was a little bit commie). I have a job (several jobs). I am settled. I'm a little bit deluding myself with all this identification with the open road...

And yet, I am very far from home. I am uncertain and doubtful, and I am always moving. I'm still working on my Soul. Hopefully my high school students can help me out with that, as I maybe can help them. As soon as they finish making sex jokes.