I have been a journal writer for a long time. Though I have heard about ebloggs a couple of years ago, I didn’t think it was for me. But I have a nomad spirit and I have moved away from that thought. And here I am jumping into the web ready to share my previous experiences, read others, and learn from this new experience.
My journal writing has focused in a variety of topics. It started as a research journal, a dissertation biography of my doctoral dissertation in sociology. Then it focused on my cultural journey through the United States as a graduate student and the process of becoming cosmopolitan, and reflecting from a distance about my Bolivian identity. Then, once I came back to Bolivia, my ruminations focused on the process of becoming local and the tensions between my acquired cosmopolitan self and the recovery of my local identify and self.
My experience isn’t probably unique, but rather another expression of our present global condition characterized by the mobility of “humanscapes”. So in this page I will basically address issues of becoming negotiating with other and our own cultures.
Though my home language is Spanish, I decided to keep this page in English for a simple reason. I few years ago, a Yugoslavian friend of mine asked me, why I kept a journal in English. I didn’t have an answer and replied recalling an anonymous saying written in my personal phone directory book: “Learn a new language and get a new soul”. Learning English allowed me to access to a deeply buried dimension of my own self. I came from an oral tradition. I was born in Bolivia, where Spanish is also a colonial language which probably didn’t fully expressed my own self and genes. I am cultural mestizo, so Spanish only expressed a part of my self, leaving aside another part of my self and identity. Though I understand and speak Quechua almost fluently, I have never learned to write it. So within the dialectics of Spanish and Quechua, I probably found a creative synthesis in a third language, English. So, English became the language to express my soul, and that is what I have been doing in my diaries the last ten years or so.
Welcome to DIONISIACOS. As suggested in the title, this isn’t only my page, but a page of all of you that have Dionysian identities and are always moving “away from here”, “always away from here” (Kafka, “My Destination”).
