Reflections on Belonging

INTRODUCTION In 2002 I wrote an article for Tiltas (the British-Lithuanian Society journal) on ‘Why being Lithuanian is so important to me.’ So while in 2020 I could flesh out the initial rough sketch outline, and fill it in with further cultural insights from eighteen years of living, I feel that in light of what’s happening in […]

Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us. —Hélène Cixous Sometime I would like to write a book (I have written a book)             but here I begin by telling a story. There is not enough time or space

Genealogy My name is not my own. It was a mistranslation. It was a word torn from a forbidden holy book, its pages blurred and swollen by another century’s rain. It was a patch sewn on a uniform. It was the name of a city on a map that was never drawn. It was a

Imagine how the universe comes into being, apparently out of nothing. The first particle pops out of nowhere followed by a huge stream of particles that start interacting with each other instantly, the fields appear, first atoms get born according to physical laws that had never existed before. The atoms clump together led by that

Raised by Lithuanians in Chicago, I naturally gathered that little in the world was more important than being Lithuanian. This was self-evident: how could being Lithuanian be less than paramount if people like us, Lithuanians, had been born Lithuanian? Naturally, I did all the important things that Lithuanians do to demonstrate their importance: I danced

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Kierkegaard   xxx I look out of the café window, just sitting, not thinking about whether anybody will come in. Different people come into the café every day; nobody has breakfast, lunch, or dinner here regularly. The café  gets flooded with visitors, a

Surreal moods I collected surrealistic moods while still living in Lithuania. And then, when I was looking at albums or sitting in Montmartre near the Salvador Dalí museum in Paris, more than once I tried to intrude into this artist`s mind. At that moment I did not know yet that layers of surrealism would greet

I don’t know who or what I am. I used to think I was a plant. Not the kind that burrows its roots into the soil of an old farmstead and feeds off the lifeblood of its ancestors, but a plant in a flower pot that a fickle housewife constantly moves from the window sill

Oh, to belong. I see a little girl hugging a Sunshine Family doll that is a flat-chested mom (the doll comes complete with a husband, two children and a house) while the little girl’s friends dance their leggy Barbies with their impossible boobs and stiletto-ready feet closer to the Ken dolls that are packaged separately.

Some time ago I wrote an essay called Už konteksto ribų (Outside of Context), where I wrote about the freedom of writers (and humans in general) and about ‘belonging’ to a context as both a good thing and a problem. Today, I’d title that essay Tarp kontekstų—Between Contexts. Although that’s the same thing. I believe