Why this, voyage-inthedark?

Imagine the first page of a Penguin classic; a rather yellowed page, as the book is a second-hand acquisition.

Black crow's feet, black twigs, black swirls: lots of letters but short words, set in Baskerville Linotype.

They were such simple, short words, but strung together they seemed to hold some immutable truth, like beads of a rosary, which individually are nothing much, but rolled repeatedly between fervent fingers acquire encantatory power. There was such depth of experience and feeling hidden in this chapelet that it felt like the song of a modern oracle.

"It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known. It was almost like being born again. The colours were different, the smells different, the feeling things gave you right down inside you was different. Not just the difference between heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey. But a difference in the way I was frightened, and the way I was happy.(...) "

I read avidly, sipping in each crisp word:

"Sometimes it was as if I were back there and as if England were a dream. At other times England was the real thing and out there was the dream, but I could never fit them together."

The first time I read these words, they sent shivers down my arms. These are the first lines of "Voyage in the dark", an autobiographical novel written in 1934 by someone that I deeply admire and identify with, Jean Rhys. In these first lines, the character describes her first days in a new country: she distills the experience of culture shock better than any modern theorist could. Probably best known for her novel "Wide Sargasso Sea", Jean Rhys was the prose poet of exile, dislocation, nostalgia and loneliness.

What was this "back there", "out there" that Jean Rhys writes about? It was the other place, the other home: an island in the West Indies. England and the Caribbean. Here and there. There and here. Two dreams, two bubbles that would not merge. And each one was just as real as the other.

Few can describe as well as Jean the sensation of inhabiting several realities at once, of shuttling back and forth between islands, as it were, which is what you may experience when you have lived in several different countries and cultures. As contemporary theory would try to define it: you are cross-cultural, transcultural, international, postnational, postcolonial, global and local at once. You are everywhere and nowhere, you are from here and you are from there.

Emotionally, it takes its toll. Yes, you adapt, you learn the ways, you make this new place yours, and try to hold the old place very close to your chest, lest it slip away. Day after day you are in the new place, living your life in the new place, making it yours.

Still, you get protective about the old place, because as time goes by, you start forgetting about it. Things "over there", people, happenings, memories, it all gets fuzzy around the edges. Perhaps a bit blue-tinted, or pale canary yellow. And when you are suddenly reminded of that place, over there, because of a smell, a song, or the way a woman walks, it comes back to you, like a strong gust of wind throwing a window open. You are plunged in that other life, that other world. Though it is all happening in your head. But really, isn't your life over there continuing, on a parallel line to yours over here? Isn't your life still being lived there --by a phantom self?

Fine, then decide to go back to the old place. And discover that there are actually three realities, three dreams: over here, over there, and the over there that existed in your imagination, the one made up of memories, ghosts, stories that you told yourself about your past. Now try to fit those two over-theres together. Oh no. They don't fit. They do not overlap, not even like a child's tracing of a drawing sitting comfortably on top of the original picture. Those two over-theres are locked away for ever in two compartments of the world; and never the twain shall meet.

My over-there was the place where I was born and which I had left at age thirteen: Brazil. I returned after twenty years of absence. In February 2007, I arrived in São Paulo. This is my voyage in the dark.