Transbodied Spaces

Tasoulla Hadjiyanni (University of Minnesota)

Absence has long been a part of my life as a refugee and an immigrant, eating away at my sense of home and selfhood. I missed the grandparents at birthdays, I missed the foods and conversations, the way the light dissolves the silver leaves of the olive trees. I set out to quench my thirst for what home means in displacement by connecting with other refugees in Cyprus, people who, like me, had children born after the 1974 war. Exposing myself to the stories of 200 parents and their children, I believed, could help me figure out how to rebuild my broken past. I continued my search with the stories of Hmong, Somalis, Mexicans, Ojibwe, and African Americans. Trusting me with their experiences of absence, my interviewees helped me embrace absence as a part of my identity and my definition of home. This openness to who I was and how I came to be allowed me to see my work differently and gave me the confidence to push the theoretical frameworks through which to understand home in a world of movement. I concluded that homes are transbodied spaces, spaces produced at the junctures of presence and absence.

Getting caught in the whirlwind of promotion and tenure guidelines however, much of my energy went on determining bullet points on my CV and measuring excellence with dollars from grants, number of papers accepted, and ratings in teaching evaluations. My confrontation with death after my breast cancer diagnosis propelled me to reflect on the words of Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan poet and writer, who said: “In the end, we are what we do to change who we are.” I embarked on intentional change and my new set of measures includes the power of being, the power of imperfection, and the power of non-doing.