Tis the season of candy corn. For some people, these months might be the time to celebrate ripening apples and changing leaves, but they’re wrong. Now is the time for those high fructose corn syrup pyramids, coloured with hues found only inside the crayon box that you used in primary school.
I love everything about those little pyramids, even the film they leave on my teeth and the sticky, slightly gritty residue they leave on my fingers. Candy corn is best if it’s slightly stale, resistant to that initial bite and then giving way in a burst of overwhelming sweetness that sometimes makes me cough with its intensity. It’s this time of year when I press friends travelling from the US to bring me a bag (or two) of sugary goodness. Candy corn is my Proustian madeleine, each bite conjuring memories from Manhattan autumns. Ironically, these utterly artificial candies remind me of the farmers’ market, filled with pumpkins and ripe Fuji and Honeycrisp apples. I can see in my mind’s eye the late-autumn sunshine gleaming on buildings whose shadows hold the promise of a cold November.
This year I’ve been subject to more than my usual bout of seasonally induced nostalgia. In previous years, when I return to Abu Dhabi after visiting my family in the US for the summer, I always have a period when the tug of being so far away pulls more sharply, but then the ache subsides and I remember that Abu Dhabi is also home. It’s as if I pack away my homesickness with my summer suitcases, but this year, the suitcases never got put away. We’ve spent the last two months living in a hotel while our apartment undergoes repairs, which means that we’ve not really been at home anywhere.
For migrant workers of all sorts, “home” becomes, out of necessity, a fluid notion rather than something fixed. We see “home” always with a kind of double focus. Here is Abu Dhabi, where we live and work and where our children grow and flourish. And there is that other place, wherever it is we came from, where we have relatives, friends, memories. Both are home and yet neither is home. No one told me, when I began my expat life, that I’d always feel slightly off-kilter: when I’m here, I’m thinking about there. When I’m there, I’m thinking about here.
Long-term hotel living seems to me like a microcosm of the expat experience. We were home but not home, and when September came along, we tried to create our regular routine of work and school, but hotel life is not “regular life” by any stretch of the imagination. Everything felt precariously perched, tentative. Each week we wondered when, or if, we’d be moving out. Even so, we more than once referred to the hotel as “home”. Just last week, however, we moved into a temporary apartment and so the process of relearning home begins again. And already, in this interim flat, I’m feeling a bit nostalgic about the kind people who worked to make life in “our” hotel feel like home.
During our hotel stay, we watched as different groups of tourists swept in and out: a few days of a German tour group, then a long weekend of Japanese families, a few days later a flotilla of Russians. All the groups started to merge into one amorphous entity, clutching cameras and tote bags, eager to see “Arabia”. Their guidebook understanding of Abu Dhabi raised the question of how expats living here can avoid floating on the surface of the city the way tourists do. We’ve all met people working here who know full well they’re only here for a while. They’re perched in Abu Dhabi waiting to leave, like tourists who check into a hotel but don’t unpack.
I ask myself: does my nostalgia for autumn in New York mean that psychologically I’ve not unpacked? I’d like to think that’s not the case: it would be a shame to neglect the beauty of autumn in Abu Dhabi because I’m pining for Manhattan. So perhaps I’ll say that my wistfulness is a seasonally specific affliction, one that can only be cured by regular doses of candy corn. And maybe those little orange candy pumpkins, too, just to make sure that I’m really cured.
Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her novel The Time Locket (written as Deborah Quinn) is now available on Amazon
