Nostalgia

Nostalgia by Jennifer Lenow

The English word “nostalgia” is overwrought and overburdened (as laden as the past becomes once the forces of nostalgia are done with it)1. But returning to a word’s etymology can sometimes help rejuvenate it, emptying the word of all the cultural and personal sediment it’s acquired through oversuage so that it can once again hold new or restored meaning.

“Nostalgia” is derived from the Greek “pain” (algos) and “homecoming” (nostos). Its first usage was in the 17th century by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer to refer to a serious medical condition among homesick Swiss soldiers. He described the condition as a “continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibers of the middle brain in which impressed traces of ideas of the Fatherland still cling.” Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, soldiers, sailors, slaves, and other displaced persons were diagnosed with “nostalgia.” It was even listed as a cause of death in battle. 

It wasn’t until the 20th century that the term took on a more temporal dimension, likely under the direction of French writers Marcel Proust and Alain-Fournier. In contemporary parlance, we firmly think of nostalgia as a wistful yearning of the past. The two definitions can be reconciled, though, by the observation that someone who is homesick is not only separated from their home in space but also, necessarily, in time. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the past, but I spend a lot of time thinking about nostalgia. So I wanted to screen two films that grapple with these two different dimensions of the word.

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Although Diouana is initially eager to leave Senegal, relishing the opportunity to live in France among the beautiful, the wealthy, and the civilized, once there she quickly becomes disillusioned, as her days fill with drudgery, subjugation, and, then, visions of her homeland. In the film, a traditional African mask seems to represent her fraught relationship to both her pre-colonial past, as represented by rural Senegal, and her postcolonial future, as represented by France -- and the uneasy, liminal existence she inhabits between these two unreachable poles. 

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One of Ingmar Bergman’s first films, and perhaps his most sanguine, Wild Strawberries (1957)3 stars the silent film actor Victor Sjöström — someone who Bergman would have grown up watching -- as Isak Borg, an aging Swedish physician who is both haunted and enchanted by apparitions from his past. The original Swedish title Smultronstället refers not just to a patch of wild strawberries but more symbolically as a special, hidden place, a kind of personal Eden. For the main character, this Eden is, in fact, literally a patch of wild strawberries at his childhood summer home.

As we journey with Borg and his daughter-in-law through the Swedish countryside (they are on their way to Borg’s alma mater where he will receive an honorary award), we meander through his dreams, memories, yearnings, and regrets. Symbolism abounds. At one point in the film, a motley group of people pile into their car, each of whom seems to serve as a personal memento for Borg (eventually, his daughter-in-law evicts a quarrelsome couple who likely reminds both of them of their respective marriages). In another ingenious move, Bergman casts the same actress, Bibi Andersson (with whom Bergman was having an affair at the time), to play both Borg’s childhood amour and a young woman he meets, decades later, frolicking in the very fields where he fell in love. 

Borg’s nostalgic voyage not only revisits his past, as if it were an immutable place, but transfigures it. Whether he emerges at the end as a changed person depends on whether you think people are capable of change. Bergman likely did not, but I think I do (maybe I’m too naive and haven't had enough affairs or stomach ulcers yet).

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Although Black Girl and Wild Strawberries might occasionally err, both films offer profoundly rich psychological portraits and inquiries into longing and belonging, return and redemption. That one is about a Senegalese maid and another a Swedish doctor contrasts the many ways in which nostalgia can function, in the specific and universal, the inevitable and the contingent. Nostalgia can create a portal to one’s past that can, possibly, lead to reconciliation or it can wreak havoc on a psyche. Innocence is lost by all but for some it is stolen. 

To add yet another layer of retrospection to this, both films were, in situ, met with ambivalence. Pauline Kael called Wild Strawberries “a rather lumpy Odyssey” while Roger Ebert called Black Girl “slow and pedestrian.” Now, they are both lauded as masterpieces. 

1 That our culture seems obsessed with nostalgia perhaps indicates that something is wrong with it, a morbid symptom of our own decadence and atrophying collective imagination or horizon, a desperate grasping for when and where we went wrong.  

2 Remarking on the role of Senegal in Diouana’s consciousness made me think about how Senegal has become a site of pilgrimage for the African diaspora, particularly African Americans, in the last century. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in The Message of going to Dakar to find “the Africa of our imagination, the glorious Eden we conjured up as exiles,” a place he knows does not exist. Yet Coates writes after visiting Gorée Island, what has apocryphally been called the “door of no return” for millions of enslaved people in the Middle Passage, “I was stunned to find tears welling in my eyes. I felt ridiculous. Gorée was a mythical site of departure, but still it had gotten a hold of me.” 

3 As a personal aside, and yet another layer of temporal meaning, I feel very nostalgic about Wild Strawberries, which I had not seen since I was 17 years old--17 years ago! I was as smitten with Ingmar Bergman as I was with my boyfriend at the time. And though I generally have a terrible memory, I don’t even have to close my eyes to feel like I’m back at the Central Library in Memphis, inspecting every DVD in their film collection.