Marie Tomanova
I spent the past few days searching through my old journals from the early 2010s, hoping that I would find some mention of my upcoming trip to America in 2011. Yet, I didn’t find anything. Today, I know I was on a brink of a lifechanging experience but back then I was obsessed with my friends and the memories we were creating together in our small town, Mikulov, in the Czech Republic. We were having the time of our lives. My journal pages are full of detailed emotions of brief yet passionate relationships, the struggle of letting go of my first big love, and a somewhat clumsy search for identity. Love stories mingle with contemplating the purpose of life. I felt lost. I didn’t have a direction. Out of sheer luck, and an unclear subconscious motivation, I signed up for a yearlong au pair program in the United States and was about to leave all I knew – forever.
I was freshly out of university with an MFA degree in painting and zero hopes for making a career as an artist in the Czech Republic. I had never been to the United States before and neither had anyone in my family. America embodied an entirely unknown entity on the other side of the world. Literally.
I left home on February 7, 2011. It felt bittersweet. I wasn’t scared of the unknown ahead of me. All I could think of was how hard it is to leave behind the people I love. I was sure I would be back in half a year or a year at the most. But little did I know it would be over eight long years before I would set foot back home and see my family again.
I landed in North Carolina with one piece of luggage, poor English, and no expectations. I lived and worked for a family, yet never before had I felt so lonely and isolated. I knew nobody and nobody knew me. Everything was new, different, foreign and very often undecodable.
I think my cultural shock lasted several months. But at some point, discovering the unknown became my new passion.
After spending the first year in North Carolina, I moved to upstate New York. I kept coming to New York City every weekend and fell totally in love. In early 2013, when my au pair program ended, I moved on my own to a tiny room in the East Village, which I rented from a Yugoslavian artist I befriended. There was so much magic in wandering the city, alone. Being lost on the inside, as well as on the outside. Allowing the city to swallow me, chew me apart, and transform me. I had so many new feelings and dreams. I felt utterly alive. New York allowed me to become.
As the years kept passing, my immigration status became complicated and I was stuck in between. I had never been away from my family for so long. I was homesick and I desperately wanted to visit them. But if I left America, I would not be able to come back. I had to choose – New York City or Mikulov? I couldn’t have both. I was torn. Where did I belong? I didn’t want to lose everything I had built over the years in the United States, abandon the relationship I was in, leave the photography career I cherished. To leave New York City…or stay? I chose to wait and stay at the cost of losing time that I could have spent in the closeness of my family.
There were times when it felt very dark. My grandma passed away and I never saw her again. My sisters’ kids grew into adults, without knowing me. I wasn’t very present in my family’s life, nor were they in mine. We became separated by distance and time. I questioned myself and my decision to stay in America so many times. I had no freedom to travel or possibility to find a job for which I was actually qualified. I was living in the shadows of American society, fearing the Trump administration, and losing sight of a better future. Deep pain, overwhelming feelings of uncertainty, and guilt for being so selfish as to choose myself rather than my family were burning inside of me for a long time.
My freedom arrived in the fall of 2018 in an envelope in the mailbox. Green Card. This perhaps sounds cliché, a statement with no meaning. To me, it meant everything. Everything. It was freedom. It was freedom to visit home, to travel, to work, to be who I wanted to be. I still sometimes can’t fully comprehend how absurd it is that one’s life could be defined and restricted by the system. By how much the government can dictate your life and decide where you do or do not belong. But I was free. And the moment I dreamt about for so long was ahead of me. I was going to see my family and visit my hometown.
I arrived home in Mikulov on December 17, 2018 and I stayed until January 5, 2019. So many things happened. So many intense feelings in such a short time. Confusion. Shifting perceptions. Disillusionments. My mom’s wedding. Christmas with family after eight years. New Year’s with friends. Internal clash of personalities, as I faced my old self standing in my teenage room that I left eight years ago. It still looked the same as when I left it. Painted pink, with my old drawings and paintings on the walls, the familiar smell of the wooden floors, the big pine tree outside my window that always comforted me, and all the old clothes that were so strongly connected to my younger identity. It was all there. Still in their original place, almost as a time capsule.
Yet, everything changed. I changed. I felt smacked in the face with reality. Feeling like a stranger in my own town, my family house, my own body placed in this familiar landscape. None of it felt like I expected. This was supposed to be my home, the only place on Earth that I really knew. The place that I grew up in and held so close to my heart. But, I felt displaced and off-kilter. I couldn’t make sense of it. As an escape, or maybe as a way of coping and trying to understand this shift, I photographed everything. There was certain liberation in capturing everything that spurred feelings in me. I didn’t have to decode those feelings immediately. I could file them away on the film and keep them for later. It was a process of acknowledging what I was going through without having to understand it right away. I knew I would develop the film once I was back in New York City and by then I hoped for more clarity.
So I photographed everything. The two brown chairs standing by the wall in the living room where my mom and Willy, my stepfather, always sit. They are the most ordinary chairs but to see them, to photograph them, to touch them – it meant I was there. I photographed mom and Willy’s wedding. I captured portraits of my now grown nephews and their kittens. I photographed the house and close surroundings, the goats and horses, the routine of life on our small farm, the enchanting moments of the winter landscape.
I went through my old belongings, forgotten old family pictures, searched through cupboards and drawers for treasures of what now felt like past life. I was rediscovering home and myself. I dressed up couple of times in my old clothes and felt strangely in between. I felt the urgency to place myself again in all of my favorite places around Mikulov where I used to go with my dog. I was retracing myself. My past. My connection to family, self, and home.
These photographs of home still make me uneasy. They are deeply personal and reveal who I am and where I come from. I remember standing in the old quarry towards the end of my trip, dressed in my mom’s teal coat, looking around with a deep strange feeling in my heart knowing that – it was once my universe. All of it. It was all I once knew.