A Self Divided: What It Means to Leave Your Hometown

Translated from the Italian by Edoardo Andreoni

The most vivid memory I have of the summer I left home is of my mother.

She is in the kitchen, brightly lit by the August sun. Wearing a white cover-up, she’s cutting the sausage links with mournful meticulousness, sniffling as she slips each portion into a freezer bag.

Despite the heat, she had spent hours ironing clothes that would wrinkle again during the long journey and showing me how to cook this and that at the stove. She had bought me a set of kitchen utensils I didn’t yet know how to use, drawer sachets, and other things, some more useful than others. She did all of this almost wordlessly—as the ritual of separation unfolded feelings were left unspoken, replaced by a murmur of instructions.

Now it’s not the men who leave wives and children, but the children who leave their parents. And almost no one comes back.

On the day of departure, other young people and I stood crowded together in the town’s small airport, each surrounded by family. We exchanged only glances, a nod of recognition, so as not to distract ourselves from the solemnity of our farewells. Nervous hands rummaging for tissues in handbags, sweaty embraces, last words of advice—and then, we were gone. From then on, we would return only for a few days at a time.

I cannot think of a time in my life when I believed I would remain in the town where I was born. It’s not that I was dreaming of a different place—at least not exactly—and I certainly didn’t have a clear idea of what I would do somewhere else; I simply knew I wouldn’t stay there. I knew it, my parents knew it, all my peers knew it. We grew up with shallow roots, ready to rip them out when the time inevitably came. We experienced that separation largely unaware of what we were about to lose, and with an unbridled romanticization of elsewhere.

I am the product of a migratory tradition. My father is Berber and arrived in Italy from Morocco in the 1980s. I don’t know what he expected to find in Europe, but he chose to put down roots in a place that was geographically and culturally close to the one he had left behind. My father has a visceral love for the Casablanca neighborhood where he grew up and won’t hear a word against it. Sometimes I think that if he could have stayed, he would have never left; I also know that if he could go back tomorrow, he wouldn’t. He is no longer fully part of that world. And he will never fully belong to this one either: he exists in two places at once, and for that reason his identity is fractured.

In The Moon and the Bonfires Cesare Pavese wrote that everyone needs a hometown, even just for the pleasure of leaving it. For my mother, the opposite is true: the outside world always leads back home. She still lives in the same house where she was born; she doesn’t travel much and doesn’t like to eat out. My grandmother, too, was born two blocks away from the house where she lived all her life. Her father, though, had grown up in Brooklyn and then returned, as was the custom. Leaving, at the time, was seen as a temporary sacrifice, something connected to work and supporting a family, not to self-realization. Women stayed behind, yet their wait was dynamic: they kept alive tradition, memories, and above all the hope of return. Now it’s not the men who leave wives and children, but the children who leave their parents. And almost no one comes back.

People my age like to wallow in nostalgia for the town, in a romantic narrative of slow living, of sunshine, sea, and wind. I envy them. I wish I could be more forgiving toward my hometown, and toward myself too. But I cannot deny the profound sense of alienation I feel—perhaps even rejection: rejection by the town rather than the other way around, as though it were the place itself that had disowned me, and not I who had abandoned it. The vocabulary I use to describe our relationship is not geographical but emotional: I use words like abandonment, betrayal, rejection, and nostalgia.

When I think about it, I suspect this tension arose after I left the town, not while I lived there. My adolescence was an ordinary one, its joys and pains small. Sure, I suffered from the town’s provincialism, from the prejudice against my mixed family—but what teenager doesn’t feel out of place for one reason or another? I think my resentment developed afterward, and that it has to do with the discrepancy between who I thought I needed to become when I left and the person I actually am today.

My gaze is always, always measuring itself against the mirrors of home, the place I fled but never managed to leave behind.

My gaze is always, always measuring itself against the mirrors of home, the place I fled but never managed to leave behind. I want to exist outside of it, yet everything leads back to it, because a part of me has remained here.

To reconnect and reconcile these two parts is impossible: they never fully exist at the same time, just as I’m never in two places at once. And yet I can feel her, the one who remained, moving inside me. I attribute to her my secret shames: my belly swollen with food and wine; my womb that bears no children; my bed without a husband. Perhaps this is why, for so long, I resented the town, blaming it directly for all my troubles. It is the place where I cannot escape what I do not have, what I am not. I cannot rid myself of it in any way. I am unable to surrender to its contradictions, any more than to my own. When I go back, the fact that it is different from what I wish it were makes me angry: it can’t be a place where I can stay forever. But then again, I never tried to change it. Staying and leaving are opposite fates, and I do not remember choosing mine. I constantly think about how different I might have been if I had grown up elsewhere. I certainly wouldn’t write the way I do. Perhaps I wouldn’t write at all.

Both going and staying are restless states. One is consumed by boredom, frustration, or regret. Had I stayed, I might have been oppressed by the provincialism of my hometown, by its porousness to corruption and organized crime; instead, I’ll be oppressed by watching my parents grow old far away from me. And after all, if the decision to leave wasn’t entirely mine, the decision not to return is one I make consciously, every day.

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Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum, translated by Lucy Rand, is available from Europa Editions.