On Holding the Flux
Airborne seeds in sudden wind
After spending five months in Accra I returned three weeks ago to Bristol, the city in which I have lived on and off for the best part of two decades. As the plane descended towards the Heathrow runway, I felt a swell of emotion, a rising sense of nervousness and, somewhat strangely (given how ready I was to come home), fear.
I hadn’t been feeling so great when I left Bristol. Ever since the end of summer 2024 I’d been shouldering some seasonal depression, which is in large part why I went to Ghana in the first place (two days after a nutritionist advised me to work away in winter if I could, a member of a WhatsApp writing group I am a part of shared a room to rent in Accra - Why not? I thought).
As soon as I stepped out of the Kotoka International Airport, away from its air conditioning and into a wall of 1am heat, a lightness and a rightness seemed to fill my every cell as the heaviness that presses down upon me every autumn drifted off like airborne seeds in sudden wind.
Despite the fact I had plonked myself into a foreign city, and had therefore made myself for the umpteenth time a foreigner, it felt so physically correct. In part due, I think, to the fact I grew up in Jamaica ― heat of that kind forms a sensory highway to my first known version of self, and others since.
The impotence of language
In those first few days I was taken aback by vividly physical flashbacks, waves of dormant memory enlivened by the climate. Standing in the kitchen of the place I rented, for example, as music drifted in with the breeze, suddenly I wasn’t in Accra at all but Bagaomoyo, Tanzania, in the house I once rented with an ex. Feelings and sensations I’d forgotten I’d ever even had suddenly right there in my body and mind, equally accessible and hard to describe.
It made me think about the impotence of language, how difficult it is to articulate a sensory experience, even to oneself. And also of the self itself ― what else is lying there latent within me unremembered without a given context? How much of who we are is determined by place? Perhaps we are all more mutable and shaped by our surroundings than we tend to understand.
An overcoat of same old
And so, five months later in the skies above Greater London, I felt some apprehension around reinhabiting not only a European climate but also the very familiar: one expands in new surroundings, like a repotted plant. I feared the sense of constriction I hadn’t fully clocked until it left me in Ghana, and the psychogeographical impact of leaving one landscape for another, which is to say a redrawing of my physical and psychological boundaries. Which parts of me enlivened by Accra would fall back, and how soon? Which facets of self indelibly linked to Bristol would wake up? Did I have enough of a centre to hold the ineludible flux?
Having missed the welcome sunny spell of early April, my body was bamboozled by the cold. As I walked through the well-loved but all-too-familiar postcode of BS5, waving to the boozehounds skinning up outside the bookies, smiling at the DnB blaring from a hatchback, I felt the sensory markers of Ghana recede like a dream into the morning, growing steadily harder to distinguish beneath an overcoat of Same Old.
The bulbul’s call that woke me up each 5am. The beeping of the bola boys soon after. The polyphonic racket of a sudden, heavy storm. The petrichor that rose up from the yard once it had passed. Hallmarks of a former world of which I was a part, albeit one removed by being Other. Where does it all go once it is over?
A wealth of different landscapes
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Solnit says: “[Places] become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.”
The world I look out on this morning is so different to the cold I encountered in the first weeks I was back. A bright and boundless, almost-summer day ― the epitome of hope and optimism. Lucky as I am to have escaped the British winter, I nonetheless feel that striking soaring of the heart which lives in all people of these isles. That singular sense of somatic relief, as if I too had lived through weeks of short dark cold grim days.
And with that soaring feeling comes a world of body memory. In the same way Ghana’s climate drew from me all kinds of forgotten thoughts and feelings, so, too, does this particular boundless blue stir up some former selves. If places are the tangible landscape of memory, then the body is the ultimate threshold, the form through which that landscape is perceived, translated and stored.
As I integrate my experience of Accra with all that Bristol was and will be, I’m starting to appreciate the richness of the vault of travel memories I hold within my being. A privilege indeed to possess and be possessed by a wealth of so many different landscapes.
