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What We Lost

What We Lost

– Nonfiction by Heather McClean –

Honourable Mention in the 2024 Dreamers Sense of Home Contest and featured in issue 17 of Dreamers Magazine

Homemade Insanity

The word of the day app teaches me hiraeth. A homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home that maybe never was; the nostalgia, yearning, grief for the lost places of your past. I sit with it for a long time, practicing how to pronounce it in the original Welsh. It sounds like hear-writh, but there’s a roll of the tongue on the second syllable that I can’t master. I say it over and over and reread the definition until neither the word nor its meaning make sense. Or, until both have settled into me to such an extent that they’re as clear to me as my own name. Hiraeth. Heather. Hiraeth. Heather. Hiraeth Heather Hiraeth Heather Hiraeth Heather. It’s as though there’s never been a time I didn’t know the word or understand it.

***

I’m not fully anything, making me long for the countries of my family and people I never knew. I’m American born, but not American. Half Jamaican, half Trinidadian, but not part of either because I’ve only been to both islands twice in my forty-eight years. I was a tourist in the places where my ancestors were born, where they loved and laughed and dreamt of what could be. They’re where I say my parents were from, but I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean to me. Their past is intertwined into who I am, their losses as real to me as my own. But still. None of it really belongs to me.

Even though my government documents say I’m American— and despite my best efforts to fit in as much as possible growing up—I’ve never been the “All-American Girl” anyone imagines. I had to contend with my family’s accents, their British ways (for they left before independence), their not understanding sleep-overs or cheese singles wrapped in cellophane or that curry chicken in a thermos guaranteed me a lonely lunch, but baloney (not bologna) with yellow mustard on white bread that sticks to the roof of your mouth meant instant acceptance. I wanted cartoons on Saturday mornings and roller-skating parties and spaghetti with tomato sauce from jars. I didn’t want to be an outsider from countries that no one had heard of or if they had, it was because that’s where they went on Christmas vacation to sit in the sun until their pale skin peeled and to get their thin hair tightly braided with beads by the locals who were just so pleasant.

Because my immigrant family could deny their only American-born off-spring nothing, they fought to pronounce the er at the end of words, including the name they carefully—oddly—chose for me, and learned to make the right sandwiches, and took me to birthday parties in jeans and t-shirts that matched the other kids, and only fed me curry chicken and beef patties and guava jam and rice and peas at holidays. They listened to my stories instead of telling me their own, because my stories were the ones that mattered. My childish chattering about television shows and movies and books about white girls who rode horses and talked back to adults was proof that they had done the right thing. I was their American dream.

Still, though, when I reached too far, when I acted too much like them (always their description for Americans Black or white) by forgetting my manners or my place or my role in the family as the one they had given up everything for, I got lectures about emigration and gratitude and reminders not to get too comfortable, because this cold, barren land where we lived wasn’t really home for us. Home was a place they didn’t want me to be born in, but that they wanted me to always remember as where I came from. Those places were supposed to be my foundation and my guide, but in their careful efforts to make sure I attained everything my birth certificate guaranteed, they overlooked giving me any direction on how to integrate all of the different parts that were supposed to make me whole.

It’s only now, decades later with all of them gone and the America they believed in pretty much gone, too, that I fully grasp what was lost by pushing to belong to a place that didn’t want us. As a child, I hoped that one day I would find or make a place of my own and finally shed that constant sense of never being either/or. I know now, though, that the loneliness and isolation, the never quite fitting in, the questioning of who I am and whether anywhere will feel comfortable is as much a part of me as the oval shaped birthmark on my left leg. Hiraeth is imprinted on me and my spirit. It was decided for me when my mother and her parents wept as they renounced their Jamaican citizenship and my father left next-in-line familial expectations in Trinidad to become an artist in 1970s New York. I’m sure they imagined whatever was ahead was better than what was behind them, but I’ve learned that in order to move forward in life, a choice has to be made to let go, to surrender and abandon, to realize that some things can never be replaced or restored or found again.

***

In an effort to survive, I do all the things one does when they are homesick. I seek out food and music and people who remind me of what I missed as a child and will never truly know as an adult. From a distance, I try to soak up as much as I can about what should be a part of me, always just on the edge of understanding a joke or a custom that another version of me would take for granted. I talk of trips to each island I never take, too scared to actually go, because I fear that I won’t be recognized as one of them when I arrive. I’m left yearning for places that feel far removed from me and who I was shaped into being.

Part of living through homesickness is knowing there is someone you’ve left behind awaiting your return or that you’ll go back to a place that will feel familiar to help quell the heartache or longing. Despite how much I dream of what could be, I know I cannot truly go home, because what I imagine was never mine to have. I’m not missed on either island. No one is waiting for me and there is nothing I know for me to return to. It feels, almost always, that home has lost all meaning.

About the Author – Heather McClean

Heather McClean is a writer, attorney, and certified diversity, equity, and inclusion professional in Chicago. At the University of Chicago, she received a certificate in creative writing from the Graham School, where she won the student writing prize for novel writing and was nominated for the student writing prize for creative nonfiction. Heather is also a graduate of Vassar College and Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.
Heather’s novel, Who They Told Us We Were, was chosen as one of three finalists in Simon and Schuster’s inaugural First Novel Contest. Her writing, both fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in the New York Times, Embark Literary Journal, and Barrelhouse Magazine.

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