Living abroad for many years, especially when you left at a very young age, is a bit like looking at your former life from a distance, as if it were an anthill. You no longer make out every single flaw, contradiction or annoyance that used to bother you. What remains is a blurred picture, shaped mostly by your own imagination.
Being young and alone, far from home, also makes the mind particularly eager to find some source of human warmth. And quite often, that source becomes the very place we left behind. Home is remembered as something warm, familiar and welcoming. Perhaps this is even more true when home is a small village.
From afar, the village becomes a community. Everyone knows everyone, people greet each other, speak the same language, share memories, expressions and rituals. Everything that once felt suffocating when we lived there slowly begins to take on a warmer glow.
But then… you go back. And you stay.
And when you get close to the anthill again, this time carrying all the experience you have accumulated over the years, something interesting happens, though in hindsight it is not all that surprising: the happy little island we had built in our minds does not exist. In reality, every ant minds its own business, but only until another one raises its head a little too high. That is when the whole anthill suddenly starts paying attention.
Returning to my village in Sardinia for a year, after spending almost eleven years abroad, felt more or less like that. I felt slightly betrayed. Not by Sardinia, but by myself, by the way I had ended up romanticising a place I remembered as far more authentic and genuine than it now seemed to me.
Perhaps this also has something to do with that very Sardinian tendency of ours to worship the past, to keep telling ourselves who we once were, and often to feel more Sardinian than Italian.
Distance, however, creates a strange paradox. The more you idealise the place you come from, the more likely you are to discover, once you return, that it no longer fully belongs to you. And yet the place you emigrated to cannot necessarily be called “home” either.
You end up suspended somewhere between different forms of belonging. When you are away, you are the one from Sardinia. When you come back, you are the one who left.
And perhaps that is where our relationship with home is reversed. You do not simply go back home. You have to build a home within yourself.
In my village, many things have changed over the course of a decade. Others were probably already there and I simply could not see them because I was too young. Still others seem to have become more pronounced.
Depopulation, for example, does not only produce empty houses. As the number of people decreases, the lives of those who remain become more visible. People watch each other more, talk about each other more, and the community that seemed reassuring from afar can, up close, turn into social control and competition.
The relationship with identity has troubled me too. In a place where the local language and traditional ways of life are gradually weakening, you can at the same time come across people, including very young ones, who build their identity around nationalist symbols or behave like little fascists.
I have always found this contradiction striking. Not only because of Sardinia’s history and its complicated relationship with the Italian state, but because this kind of posturing seems to have very little to do with many of the things I had learned to think of as deeply Sardinian.
One of them was the relationship with s’istranzu, the stranger.
There is an expression that keeps coming back to me: prima ass’istranzu -the stranger first.
First the person who comes from elsewhere. First the person who knows no one. First the person who needs to be welcomed.
I do not want to romanticise the past either. Villages have never been idyllic islands of tolerance, and anyone who grew up in one knows the weight of social judgement all too well. But perhaps precisely because of this, I am struck by the distrust of difference I see today, which seems far removed from that older tradition of hospitality.
I felt the same contradiction when talking to some young men about relationships between men and women. I have heard men, including very young ones, step in to defend their partners with phrases such as: “You don’t speak to a woman like that. With a man it’s different.”
The sentence is meant to sound chivalrous; instead, it made me think of my grandmother. Because when I think of the women of her generation, I do not remember men deciding what tone others were allowed to use with them. If anything, my grandmother was the one who set the tone of the conversation.
Another contradiction: have we really always become more “modern”? Or have we abandoned certain aspects of the past without necessarily replacing them with anything better?
Returning after so many years also means this: realising that the place we remember no longer exists exactly as we remember it. But above all, it means realising that neither do we.
Perhaps that is what makes coming back feel so strange. We think we are returning to recover something we left behind, only to discover that while we were imagining a warm welcome home, we were the ones slowly becoming “the strangers”.
