Inner emigration
on moving, staying put, & spaces in between
We’re moving again. Just 5 minutes away to Belchertown, a name so silly I laugh every time I say it. (It was once called Cold Spring, but I guess that sounded too good.) We weren’t planning to move again, but our friends were selling their place, and we weren’t ready to say goodbye. Fortunately, they didn’t move far, we still see them all the time, and we’ll soon be living in their old house.
There’s been a feeling of randomness to our living here in Western Massachusetts. We’re closer to our families but not that close. We could have moved closer, but I didn’t want to raise kids where either of us grew up. Also, Joe did a year of medical school at Baystate and wanted to work there. I used to visit him during that year, when he lived in a converted carpet factory in Enfield, Connecticut, and we’d go to Northampton, which felt like a place we could live. For a while, it felt like the only place here we could live, but that was a failure of imagination.
Now we’re moving to a place I didn’t know existed five years ago, yet it feels less random. I think it’s because this move arose from friendship, a human connection, and connection gives things meaning. It’s also good we have some friends already because our animal neighbors will soon outnumber our human ones. Despite being a mega introvert, I hadn’t realized I wanted this kind of seclusion, but Joe did. We’ll no longer have sidewalks, but there are trails in the woods, which is the only place I walk to on the sidewalks in our subdivision anyway.
It’s been interesting to go through the upheaval of moving for no reason except desire. It’s made me think about my relationship to desire, if I craft desires because I don’t know how to be without wanting. I also keep thinking about this passage from Weike Wang’s Rental House:
In Nate’s childhood home, Keru had trouble grasping what being American was. Stagnation was the opposite of immigration. Her own parents had uprooted continents. Her own mother hated old things. But for rooted families that never changed zip codes, the norm was to have a weathered living room like Nate had, that once was the space of comedy and bright mornings, the father in the kitchen flipping pancakes and whistling, the mother flipping picture books for her boys on the new couch. The goal then was to enshrine this room forever, even in its decay.
At the end last year, when I had no idea we were going to move again, I was trying to find a house for my parents here. My dad’s dementia took a downward turn after a Covid infection, and it was clear he could no longer live in their multi-split level home with no first floor bathroom. For a mercifully brief period, I devoted myself to trying to delay his inevitable move to a nursing home, and it seemed like this last ditch effort may pay off. Then a space opened up in a memory care home just outside DC, and he’s been living there since. This was no one’s first choice and still breaks my heart, but at least he’s safe and properly cared for, and I’ve come to accept it as the best of no good options.
For a time, though, I was not in a place of acceptance and also having a lot of fear about my mom aging in the same split-level house and feeling a lot like Keru does about Nate’s family in the passage above, namely wondering: what was the point? Why enshrine a family house with no family in it? I wrote an exhortation to myself to live in such a way that if, in the future, my children ask me to move closer to them, I’ll come quickly, on light feet. My parents’ house is buried under forty-plus years of memories and accumulation, and the task of unearthing it seems so huge that it keeps getting kicked down the line—to the next crisis, the next person.
So maybe we’re moving again to stay light on our feet? We’ve only lived in our current house for two years, and while moving is always a pain in the ass, I keep thinking how much worse it would be if we’d been here longer.
On the other hand, it feels like we’re doing the opposite of staying light by moving to a house where I already feel an emotional attachment, where I can imagine us hunkering down for the end of the world, none of us ever leaving. I understand if you don’t believe me, but the plan is never to move again. At least there’s a first floor bathroom.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this except that I’ve been swinging between extremes: stagnation (at least one of us has been sick since January) and striving (to sell our house while people are vomiting in it), excitement (for the move and my children) and despair (for my country, Gaza, and humanity).
I keep returning to the Wikipedia page for inner emigration, wondering if this is an acceptable response to the current moment. I previously associated the term with people in Nazi Germany who turned a blind eye to the Holocaust, Zone of Interest style, but there have been internal emigres in all eras and regimes. The basic definition describes me and so many people I know: “an individual or social group who feels a sense of alienation from their country, its government and culture.”
I’m especially drawn to the way Boris Pasternak used the idea in his letter to another Soviet dissident poet: “Dig more deeply with your drill without fear or favor, but inside yourself, inside yourself. If you do not find the people, the earth and the heaven there, then give up your search, for then there is nowhere else to search.” So, not turning a blind eye, but going so deep inside that you find everyone. I want to be an internal emigre that way. After one last move.
I read a couple great essays on Substack recently about not moving abroad because you hate the government. This is different from moving abroad because the government is targeting you or your family. If that time seems nigh for us, we’ll leave the country, too. But we’re not there yet, and as
puts it in her beautiful “against the fleeing to europe industrial complex”, the best way to ensure we don’t get there is by “protecting those to whom the worst is already happening.” She also cautions againstthe constant invocation of past exiled and traumatized generations whose lives and conditions are not one-to-one comparable to ours, for the political situation is different and the most draconian persecutions are now being mapped onto different lines, different bodies. First they came for undocumented immigrants, and you are not an undocumented immigrant. You are a certified public accountant in New York City.
Guilty, say I, having just invoked Nazi Germany and Soviet dissidents in a newsletter about moving to Belchertown. But as Wagner and
(who wrote the other great piece: “I regret to inform the United States of America that it is stuck with me for the foreseeable future”) both point out, it’s okay to move abroad! (Or to Belchertown!) There are lots of good reasons to do it, if you have the energy and resources. But unless you’re actually fleeing for your life, freedom, or livelihood, it doesn’t make sense to claim that move’s about fascism or treat it as a widely applicable solution. Also, I think outrunning fascism in today’s world might be like trying to outrun climate change. Wherever you go, there it is.To understand where the U.S. is headed, it makes more sense to compare it to contemporary autocracies than historical ones. There are plenty to choose from. I was reminded of this while reading about Kseniia Petrova, who may face twenty years in prison for “smuggling frog embryos.” I had to read this a couple times to confirm it was happening here, not Russia, where Petrova was born, since it reminded me of the justifications given for detaining Brittany Griner and Evan Gershkovich, except more absurd. But no, this is the U.S. So Russia continues to be a good analogue.
I’m also frequently reminded of my students from Saudi Arabia, who taught me about the potential for joyful rebellion in autocratic regimes, and whom I got the chance to teach because their autocratic regime, unlike ours, invests in science and education. I wrote about how these students changed me in an essay excerpted here, which I’m happy to share in full with anyone who wants to read it. I’m not sure I shared it online when it was published because the confluence of issues felt too personal, but now I’m far enough removed that I don’t care and also want to say some things that I already said there better.
I didn’t foresee this administration going after international students as hard as it has, but I should have, since they’re a perfect target for the xenophobia and anti-intellectualism fueling MAGA and our country’s endless wars, which aren’t just MAGA. Another issue I’ve seen unite the left and right on my feeds better than any other is a hatred of student protesters, a trend I noticed long before this current movement against the Gaza genocide. It’s sometimes hard for me to understand what drives this hatred, but then I go back and remember my own attitude before teaching Saudi students, who I actually didn’t want to teach at first because of my own unexamined beliefs. I considered myself immune to the Islamophobic rhetoric permeating our post-9/11 culture, but of course I wasn’t. It’s in the air we breathe. Anyway, that’s all in the essay.
But even if you believe student activism is grounds for detention and deportation, how to account for the students targeted by this administration who weren’t involved in any activism at all? For every Mahmoud Khalil or Mohsen Mahdawi, there’s a Kseniia Petrova or Alireza Doroudi, who you probably haven’t heard of because he got little media attention and ultimately decided to get out of this nightmare, despite his fiancee being here. Doroudi’s story is in some ways the most heartbreaking of these to me (although it’s hard to beat Khalil missing the birth of his first child) because I think it’s the closest to how I would respond if imprisoned for no reason. I’m not someone who would easily bounce back from that kind of trauma, and neither are thousands of others in American prisons and detention facilities at this moment. Not to mention their families, the ramifications extending ever outward. . .
I have only one international student right now, whom I teach through a thriving ESL program at the public library. We often meet at my house because at least one of my kids is home sick, and now the library is moving too (temporarily for renovations) and I think my student is a little like, WTF why is everyone moving, but at least no one’s leaving the country. One of my favorite things about teaching international students is that you get to learn about other countries without going anywhere, which appeals to my lazy nature. I guess that’s another kind of inner emigration. As long as it’s possible, I have some hope.
Gofundmes to offset your tax dollars:
Aid and food also need to be allowed into Gaza, so we need to keep bothering our reps. I have a new one who looks worse than the old one so I will be calling him more.