From Somewhere
I watched this great film on Sunday night, Mississippi Masala. Shot on location in Greenwood and Biloxi and Grenada and Ocean Springs in 1991, it follows Sarita Choudhury, a Ugandan-born Indian woman, as she falls in love with Denzel Washington, a Black man from her new home in Greenwood, MS. You should watch it - gorgeous cinematography and impossibly sexy. Two of my favorite things.
One of my obsessions is film and TV shot and filmed in Mississippi. I think this maybe comes from my dad, from his stories about films that used to shoot here when I was a kid, and from the mixed messaging that that is both an anomaly and was once a thriving industry. Maybe it is again, I don’t know. I met an accountant for an A24 film shooting here at the bar maybe a year ago. Anecdotal evidence.
It shocks me that this is a film nobody I can find from here has ever heard of. It shocked me that I had never heard of it. This, compounded with the film itself detailing an international conflict I was unfamiliar with, in addition to highlighting a place I know, but don’t know well, and people whose stories I understand, but haven’t experienced.
One of the things I love about Mississippi, something I think you begin to understand when you really dig in (in the United States at least) to the wider state outside your hometown, is how varied the place is. I love regionalism on a small scale. I think it’s fascinating. My favorite thing here is the variety of accents. Someone from Jackson sounds different from someone from North Mississippi, sounds different from someone from the Coast, sounds different from someone from the Delta. Within the state itself, you have different regionalized groups of people, when the world outside of Mississippi thinks of us all as fundamentally the same. Someone from the Coast grows up in a fundamentally different landscape from the North Mississippi Hill Country, a fundamentally different landscape from the flat vastness of the Mississippi Delta. I know so little about Jackson, but I know even less about every other region here. Sure, you can play Mississippi all day, finding a connection to someone else every few minutes or so, but you can’t really know the whole state, not truly. Not if you haven’t lived there. At least, that’s something that I think is true.
I think a lot about “place” in my free time, and what exactly that means. You could call it another obsession I guess. What does it mean to be from somewhere? Do you gain any intuitive knowledge by coming of age in a place, by making your home there, or is that a falsehood we’ve been fed? Do you really understand a place just because you’re “from there”? And what does that even mean, to be “from somewhere”?
When I moved to Wyoming for my MFA, I remember someone in my cohort saying to me, “Teach me about Mississippi.” It was a request that scared me, because what did I really know about Mississippi anyway? What could I tell them about the complicated nature of my home, when my home was actually the suburbs, which I would describe as generally pretty standardized across the United States? This was one anxiety, but while living in Wyoming, people also frequently forgot where I was from, confusing Mississippi for Missouri on more than one occasion. I wouldn’t say I found this offensive exactly, but more so confusing. I had thought the whole idea of being from Mississippi was that everyone knew about Mississippi because it was always the butt of every joke, that the rest of the United States was always aware of whatever terrible thing was happening here in the legislature or how the infrastructure was falling apart or how the entire state is gerrymandered to cripple Black voters. Or, at the very least, it occupied a place in their mind as a stronghold for white, racist rednecks. They couldn’t distinguish between this place and a half-Southern state with a similar sounding name? Why? Was it because people really didn’t think about Mississippi as much as I was led to believe they did? Or was it because they looked at me and saw nothing to remind me of the place, no indication that was where I was from, even though I mentioned it every time we spoke?
Perhaps there isn’t a deep answer to this question. Maybe most people just aren’t very good listeners.
Perhaps also, people in Mississippi (and maybe other places too) are taught more so than others that to be “from somewhere” means something. Maybe some people don’t think as much about what it means to be “from somewhere”. Maybe other people don’t define a large part of themselves by the place they grew up in.
This is something I can’t even imagine.
I spend a lot of time with people who live here but aren’t from here these days. I spend a lot of time hearing about the things they do and don’t understand about this place, and often I think they get it more than I do. I’m surprised by the things that surprise them, by the things they don’t know. And they continue to surprise me, remind me how little it is I truly know about the place where I am from. In some ways, that upsets me. But in other ways, I find it exciting. My interest as a writer is in an individual story and how it takes up space in a larger story. Tell me about something that happened to you, tell me something I haven’t heard before, and how it fits into the rest of the world, how you fit into the rest of the world. Tell me how it helped you understand a larger question just a little bit better.
It’s frustrating to feel like you are never going to really understand a place, but it’s also exhilarating to know there are so many new stories to discover, so many people who have a relationship to Mississippi that is different from mine. Sometimes you discover something like Mississippi Masala, a time capsule of a place you barely know and a story you’ve never heard. And sometimes it moves you in ways you didn’t expect.