Fiercely Rootless

Jonas has been living in Bamako for the last three years but for quite some time now, he’s been feeling like he needed to move somewhere else. Although he doesn’t know where his next destination will be, he just knows that his departure is approaching. Soon, he will relocate again. And again.

And again.

As a child, Jonas was used to moving around the world due to his parents’ job. Every four or five years, they would go to a different country and culture to start a new life. Jonas and his younger sister, Marine, would automatically follow. They would attend a new school, make new friends, adopt new local cultures. Although Jonas still remembers the excruciating pain that he felt every time he was taken away from his temporary home — the overflowing tears, the tightness in his chest, the shortness of his breathe— he believes that it was all worth it.

The proof is that he is still the same person today: rootless and restless.

But he was of the privilege kind. He was “rootless” because his sense of belonging knows no national boundaries but his official papers still linked him to France. We spoke at length about his attachment to the country of wine and cheese. Almost with no salient emotions, he stated the fact that he was French because his parents were both French citizens and so he inherited the passport upon birth. Generally speaking, he was happy with what France represented — its ideals, values and principles. Generally speaking, he was also happy with what France seems to represent in the world, mostly. 

But unlike many other more classically French people that Jonas knew, he didn’t feel any strong sense of patriotism towards France. He wasn’t blind to its flaws and imperfections. He never engaged in what seemed to be silly comparisons that involved pitching one country against another while using superlatives like “better”, “stronger”, “smarter” or any other of its derivatives.

He didn’t participate in that kind of debate not only because he never felt that strongly attached to France, but also because he felt like he belonged to many different cultures at the same time. And defending only France, he thought, was not fair enough.

It was not “him” enough.

Three years ago, after living in Bordeaux for a while for his higher education, Jonas moved to Bamako, Mali and started his professional life with different NGOs there. Out of all of the places that Jonas could have moved to, he picked Bamako. Though at first I thought Jonas decided to move there because he was longing for a sense of adventure, it could not be any further from the truth.

When moving to Bamako, Jonas was actually looking for a sense of familiarity.

Little did I know, despite his white skin, Jonas was (almost) a native of Bamako. Although he was born in Alsace, France, his parents brought him back to Bamako, Mali, when he was about three months old because that was where his parents were living at the time. And Bamako was the place where Jonas lived for the first seven years of his life, right before he moved to Hanoi, Vietnam.

So when he packed his suitcase and boarded his flight from Paris to Bamako in 2017, Jonas had a plan in mind: he wanted to reconnect with his past. Jonas admitted that he’s been feeling the urge to move back to the different places where he grew up for quite some time now because he wanted to reconnect to the inner child that he once was. The inner child that he continues to be.

What a brave move.

“Are you not afraid of no longer finding ‘home’ in those places?” I asked him mostly out of curiosity, but also out of jealousy because I knew that I was still afraid to do so.

He flashed me a smile, the I-understand-your-fear kind of smile and confessed that his journey has not been exactly the way that he had planned it to be. But it was and continue to be the best decision he has taken so far in his life. He shared with me that the first time he came back to Bamako ever since his departure in 1999 was in 2015. And that was one of the moments in which he would remember forever. It was the first time in his life where he was confronted with his past and his most cherished memories.

“You know, when you leave a place, you also leave a piece of yourself behind,” he whispered softly. Dreamily.

Jonas explained how to him, for some odd reasons, memories were connected to places and they didn’t necessarily travel with him to the following place. As if these memories wanted — deserved, even— his undivided loyalty and attention. As if they, too, carry a nationality or was bounded within the borders of a nation-state.

So seventeen years after he left his first home, he returned to it in a different body but still very much the same person.

A lot had changed and that was expected. Jonas described the house to me — “my house” he still called it — and explained how, within just a few minutes of arriving there, hundreds of flashbacks rushed into his adult head. He wasn’t sure where these memories came from or where they were stored in the first place, but with every step that he took closer to his house, a new memory emerged. He remembered the trees in front of his house and how he used to play beneath them. Suddenly, they didn’t seem as big and massive as they used to be. As he remembered them.

The new owners of the house took away the garden and put a garage there instead. But Jonas, somehow, still saw the garden in front of his eyes. He saw himself lying on the ground looking at the blue sky. He saw the grass that was no longer there, the bugs that have long departed.

Time always gives you different perspectives, I thought, for I knew this feeling way too well. I’ve experienced it almost with every flight that I’ve taken, over the last fifteen years, to go “home”.

According to Jonas, that experience has made his journey very much worthwhile. It confirmed his inner belief that as long as he didn’t go back to that place — to his past— he would never have access to the full memory bank that he had within him. For Jonas, it was a no brainer — he needed to get it back. Slowly but surely. Sometimes these memories come more naturally and he didn’t have to go too far to access them. Memories of the person he once was could be found in many things, but mostly tangible ones. An old furniture could remind him of the way he used to sit, a familiar painting could prompt him of the way he used to feel, a specific smell could turn him into the teenager he used to be.

He told me of his university self when he caught himself wishing he had the same luxury as most of his classmates — the luxury of having access to all of the different steps and phases of their lives in the same place, in the same people, in the same culture. Being back now in Bamako, Jonas had also caught himself wishing that he could have witnessed the evolutions of this beloved city, of Mali, of the African continent.

But he just didn’t.

Instead, he moved to Hanoi, Vietnam at the age of seven and blended right in with the melting pot culture that was nurtured in the French international school. In the process he became friends with other weird culture kids, which smoothed things out for him and allowed him to feel normal for the five years that he called Asia “home”. Then he moved to Colombo, Sri Lanka at the tender age of twelve where he had to deal with his immense sense of missing his friends for a long time before finally integrating into the newness that surrounded him.

That newness now has become an integral part of him. A part he can’t seem to shake of.

He elaborated and explained how the idea of settling down somewhere was very scary to him. Maybe because he was never taught to settle down anywhere - kids like us were never taught these things growing up. Or maybe he just hasn’t found the right place to settle down. The right person to settle with. The right moment to just settle. How could you blame him?

All Jonas knew was that, for now, he wanted to continue to time travel. He wanted to go back to his past, to the different homes he had built and subsequently left behind.

He wants to move back to Hanoi or Colombo. 

Or someplace new, even, but at least closer to these two Asian cities.

Perhaps in the hope of accessing his past one last time. 

Perhaps in the hope of accepting his scattered roots more fully. 

The truth lies somewhere between these two “perhapses”. 

“Don’t you feel like you’re just frantically looking for something that you’re missing from your past?”

“I’m just exploring the world like I was taught to do. After all, if you don’t test different lifestyles out, how can you ever know that the lifestyle that you’re living right now is good enough?”

“But what if it isn’t good enough and you’re missing out on the things you’ve left behind?”

“But what if you find something even better and realize that what you’ve lived was not that good, though?”

I felt endlessly jealous of his faith and zest in his own weird culture. After all, it’s the journey and not the destination that counted right?

And with that, we made plans to see each other over the summer, when he would come to France to visit. 

(And he did!)