Sometimes you have to leave, even if it’s never easy. It’s a bit like taking flight, but to go where? The place and the house where we live are rooted in our memory and it is precisely our language and our physical characteristics that remind us of our origins, and yet, despite all this, we sometimes leave. Sometimes we leave forever. We adopt other languages, we live in other houses and we observe other places with our eyes, which, even if open to change, remain the same. And slowly, what was foreign seems to become familiar, or must become so, as if by force majeure, taking the form of a refuge, while what has always belonged to us seems to change place inside us, but to end up where? What happens when time and distance become stronger than memory? What does it mean, then, to build a house?
Migratory birds by Mariana Oliver, published by Il margine, tells us about all these things. It is a collection of short texts, partly poetic reflections and partly live stories, where reportage, critical analysis and original travel writing are mixed. And even if there are many desires and stories, the matrix of everything is always migration. What does it mean to migrate?
Migrating sometimes means using new words, because otherwise the familiar ones, but foreign in the new land reached, become fragile in the memory, as happens to Emine Özdamar, a Turkish emigrant moved to Berlin, who decides to choose only German words to claim and reaffirm her identity, other times it means having faith in institutions, even foreign ones, entrusting the most precious thing you have, your children, as happens, at the beginning of the 60s, in Operation Peter Pan, in which we witness a great exodus of Cuban children, who will not see their parents again immediately, as promised, or ever again. Migrating means going beyond a barrier, breaking that fictitious border, as happens with the Berlin Wall, of which the author states in one of her essays: “A wall is a collective bandage that protects us from shame, the materialization of a recurring human fantasy: to exist where no one can see us”.
Migrating sometimes also means transcending one’s own borders to transform oneself into something else and find oneself, as Bill Lishman did, who, after becoming a pioneer in ultralight aviation, managed to first lead a flock of geese from Ontario to Virginia and then a group of endangered cranes. Migrating also means taking an often necessary inner journey, as happens in the caves of Cappadocia, as the author recounts in another of her essays: “Some initiation rites begin with someone’s descent into a cave or a pit: regressus ad uterum. There is a Turkish legend that explains the origin of humanity. It begins in a cave in the Black Mountain.”
You can also choose not to migrate and to stay, as the “Trümmerfrauen” did, the women of the ruins, who cleaned German cities from the rubble of post-war Germany, rebuilding them brick by brick and trying to save what could still be used, or you can choose to migrate, but without moving, because the transformation that is sometimes needed starts precisely from words and from the revolutionary force of a language that can also break down walls, as happened in Berlin, when, five days before the wall fell, Christa Wolf gave her memorable speech at Alexanderplatz.
In this book we travel in multiple dimensions: the places and times in which we land are always different each time, but the story, almost inevitably, repeats itself: it always tells of a migration, sometimes voluntary and other times forced. A journey that leads to great internal changes in language and habits, a journey where, like on a swing, pain and desire alternate, and where memory must deal with the past to find the strength to reinvent itself in a different place, a new place, but foreign, where the future scares because it always calls it into question.
“Home – the author states in her latest essay – is also a record of childhood, an implanted memory.” We build our home with the bricks of memory. When we move away from it, we remove the anchor, and the home, without its roots, could crumble. And that’s why we need big wings, because only thanks to them can we find the strength to take flight and protect ourselves, when needed.
Migratory birds
Mariana Oliver
The Margin
ISBN: 9791259820648
Page 128 – €16.00
