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Dwelling
“Getting lost” was a goal of the Iva Asks project, for which Iva Radivojević, inspired by near-constant travel, made a weekly series of lovely, perceptive and allusive short essay films about the people and places she’d visit. In 2018, the 2013 25 New Face filmmaker moved her home base from Brooklyn to the Greek island of Lesbos. I asked her if she’d reflect on that change, and she responded with this poem accompanied by Super 8 stills of her new home.
Dwelling
When I inquire with Simon(e) about the idea of a return,
they ask, “Does a return require something to have left,
to have been dispossessed?”
and offer Fumi Okiji’s thoughts in Jazz As Critique:
I am interested in this word dwelling…. A dwelling is a place we reside or stay.
To dwell is also used to refer to when one spends some time thinking through an issue. To stay there and linger. To delay moving on. The word is a development of the Old English dwęllan, which sometimes meant to “tarry, linger, delay,” but more often to “seduce, lead astray.”
For the last seven years I’ve been dwelling on Lesbos.
Lesbos is an island of birds.
Black storks and falcons migrate here every spring from Africa and South Asia.
Three hundred species of birds, however, are permanent dwellers:
long-eared owl, the little owl, hoopoe, avocets, red-rumped swallow,
purple and night herons, kingfishers, and a large number of the Greater flamingo.
This island marks a return for me.
Or,
the start of a new line,
like answering a telephone call.
Inevitable, but without knowing what’s on the other side.
Lesbos maps an emotional memory.
I return to an island where Greek is spoken, but not Cyprus,
where I grew up following the civil war across the Balkans.
I return to the Balkans, but not Yugoslavia where I was born.
Lesbos is a migrant’s island, where I arrive differently.
Without historical burden, and voluntarily this time.
A personal mapping, or a seduction.
Following a return, what’s next in time?
Birds help me orient.
In Cyprus, flamingos are migratory birds.
They arrive every November from the Caspian Sea to feed at the Salt Lake in Larnaca.
Here, on Lesbos, flamingos are perpetual.
What does it mean for something to be lastingly present?
A dwelling calls,
through some kind of portal telephonics.
