DID YOU MEAN HER PRESENT?

This is how I always imagined America: you’re scooting down the highway from Texas to Mississippi and you don’t give a damn about anything. America: the land of Charlie Parker and Etta James, where people love to drink whisky a lot, and to talk just a little; it seems like such a waste of time! Anyway, when I was little I had a plan: I was going to go to America and win the war. Don’t ask me which war. I’ve got no idea, even now. The only thing that mattered was that, in my mind, America was somewhere where you could be free, somewhere where you could be by yourself. At least that’s how it seemed in the movies, and I knew, too, that some-where on the other side of the mountains and oceans was a land which gave birth to people who sang freedom songs, songs about love and pain, who battled against the blues and believed in God, whatever that means... Back then I didn’t think of America as the land of McDonald’s, a land full of fat people who’ve gorged them-selves with hamburgers and cheeseburgers, a land where sharing your thoughts with your shrink was the in-thing.
In other words, the America I dreamed of was Black America, and between me and it lay several thousand miles and the fervent belief that one day I would step down onto its soil and say “Hi guys! I’m back. Do you know what khinkali is?”
But as it turned out, America was a lot more complicated than that.
My first chance came when I was a student and they announced the new IREX exchange programme. I didn’t sleep for three nights straight. I filled out the 32-page application form and produced three essays that were so beautifully crafted even Eco would have been impressed, but in this instant I think that was the prob-lem; the judges found my essays rather overworked and I didn’t get through. I responded like any Georgian would: I got angry and depressed, and then, as any Georgian would, drowned my sorrows in vodka and spent half the night with my head down the toilet. That was my first attempt to get to America. But I didn’t give up. In my final year at university I put so much effort into it that I managed to track down some acquaintances in America to help me get over there to do my Masters, but – wouldn’t you know it? – two months later I fell so madly in love with a pale, skinny guy that I forgot all about America with its Cadillacs and Char-lie Parker, and I got married instead... (See PDF)


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