on something-elseness

Colombia -

The last time that I visited you, in February 2009, I came to you as a tourist, a stranger. I know that you see me this way before anything else. I visited your most beautiful places, like the beaches of Parque Tayrona and the streets of Cartagena. I hardly got to know you, seeing you as a flash of paradise.

Before that, in 2006, I hid myself from you, behind my cousins so that they would speak for me, so that you would not see my American posture, or hear my accent so that I could "blend in." It was the last of those last days that I realized that I had to face you, and that it wasn't worth the trouble to keep hiding myself from you, especially if I ever wanted to know you, and that, in any case, you saw me anyway. And to face you, I had to accept myself, the stranger that I am to you, and that you are to me. This alienation, and our efforts to negotiate it, in spite of it, is part of both of our stories.

***

It is easy to look and talk American, and thus identify culturally as pretty much solely American, even when you are half-something else, until you speak that something-else language, and people wonder where you got your accent. Then you are a hybrid where your something-else lays dormant until you find one of its compatriots. Then you are not entirely the something-else, as you are entirely American in your native turf, but your something-elseness seems to occupy a liminal space, from which it speaks and acts and dances through you, but you can never entirely be it so long as your desire to be it marks the gap between yourself and that space.

Three years since I had begun to develop the idea that it might be possible to be 100% something and (up to (depending on how you quantify these unquantifiable things)) 50% something-else, I now have a chance to explore my something-else, Colombia, on my own terms. My own terms being, as ones that I am comfortable with, particularly the freedom of the traveler, i.e. not restricted by family obligations, although I will be visiting family. My goal is not, as it was in 2006, to cultivate the fundamental practices of my Colombian identity, though of course I will be building on my Spanish. This time, I actually want to see Colombia as an outsider, with the access of a semi-insider (I intend to write more on the complications of this). I want to document things as much as time and sanity will allow. Those things include my family, the tourist scene, and Colombia´s ¨culture,¨ particularly how its diverse societal sectors relate to the world stage as I (so far) understand it, and how they relate to each other. And of course, how I relate to them.