Thresholds: Getting Lost

In the late 1990s, a Japanese scientist called Osamum Shimomura took what appeared to be sesame seeds out of a small jar. He sprayed them with a little water and then ground them into a paste. The lights were turned off and then there was nothing except a cold, blue aura like low-level neon. The sesame seeds were the dried bodies of crustaceans, Ostracods. During the Second World War, the Japanese army had harvested huge numbers of the creatures from the ocean. The umihotaru (sea fireflies) were bright enough for soldiers to read maps and correspondence, but too dim to give away their position to nearby enemies. This is part of a history of the utilisation of marine biology for the purpose of the advancement of civilisation. I think of all of these things now, this information, as it dawns on me that I have a fear about something that has only just entered my mind’s ‘line of vision’: a fear of getting lost.

Long before Shimomura’s experiments with sea fireflies, the Burmese Moken tribe (of the Mergui Archipelago) adapted to their local habitat in such a way that their underwater vision is at least twice as effective compared with their European counterparts. According to the Swedish scientist Anna Glisen in her study ‘Underwater Vision in a Human Population of Sea Gypsies’, the Moken people rely on sea-diving to collect food from the sea floor and their enhanced ability to see underwater is a direct result of environmental conditioning and evolutionary adaptation.¹

Both my great-grandmothers were Burmese tribeswomen; Parquala, my paternal great-grandmother taught my father how to navigate the northern hill regions of Myanmar as a child, passing on knowledge that was ancient, instinctive, rooted in the landscapes she inhabited. Parquala made sure my father knew how to follow the line of the treetops and the shapes of ochre and Burmese jade which represented the contours of the land. In doing this, she instilled in him a map of the land she tended to. She didn’t want him to get lost, but she could not protect him forever. Both of them became prisoners of war when the Japanese invaded what was then known as Burma in 1945. I know very little about my maternal great-grandmother, Lucy Ma Aung, a Burmese woman who married my Scottish colonial great-grandfather, Benjamin Fox Duncan.

The author’s grandmother Phyllis Duncan and great-grandmother Lucy Ma Aung

My mother was just a girl when she arrived in England at the age of 15 and my father was only 18. My fear of getting lost connects me to all of the trauma my own parents suffered as they arrived from Asia, it ensnares us, indefinitely in time and space. For me, the queasy sensation that always accompanies that feeling of getting lost gets tethered to my parents’ migration and their geographical displacement, their real and psychological losses which play out as a cycle of perpetual vulnerability and fear.

The opposite of getting lost is not really the idea of being found. To be more precise, the opposite of getting lost is ‘belonging’. When we belong, we feel safe. Sometimes, the hope of safety is all we have. My maternal grandmother, Phyllis, always wore a gold pendant depicting St. Christopher, the patron saint of safe travels, often seen crossing a body of water. Phyllis did not cross the river Chindwin in Myanmar with three small children during the Second World War while my grandfather served in the Burmese army, but perhaps the pendant was a reminder of her own bravery and her avoidance of a watery trial. After the war, my grandfather was exiled from Burma owing to his mixed heritage (Scottish Burmese). India became their home for a decade before they left for England. So many moves and unsettled paths. As a result, they all spoke multiple languages. My father was able to speak conversational Burmese, Hindi, Punjabi and Tamil. My aunt could read and write in Burmese, the only person in my family who was afforded an education prior to the war (after the war, my father was sent to an American Catholic boarding school in Shalimar and so never learned to write in Burmese).

The opposite of getting lost is not really the idea of being found. To be more precise, the opposite of getting lost is ‘belonging’

Unlike the tracks humans make through routes of migration and across geographical co-ordinates on a map, or on a hike, with an ordinance survey and headlights strapped to our heads, the paths that animals take are tracked by humans through the study of their paw prints and other bodily secretions. Animals also locate each other in this way. The term ‘spoor’ is used to describe a trace, or a set of footprints, by which the progress of someone or something may be followed. This also includes scents, or broken foliage.² To search for the trace of a living thing through holes in a hedgerow is to make sense of a track engendered by multiple bodies, human, non-human and vegetative. Large or small, we all leave something behind. What, then, is the track, or ‘spoor’, my parents have left for me and what knowledge might it hold? Am I following them, or I am being pursued through time, leaving tracks for the next generation to gather together? Perhaps, this movement I’m describing resembles a version of the double helix found within the very structure of DNA itself. Is it a wide loop or a binding, these are things I want to know.

As much as getting lost is a literal disorientation, it is also fraught with existential implications, of the body and mind. Between 1974-79, the pioneering psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus carefully crafted experiments relating to false memories, implanting the idea of getting lost in a shopping mall with several test subjects. She concluded: ‘in short, misleading post-event information can alter a person’s recollection in powerful ways, even leading to the creation of false memories of objects that never existed’.³ We make sense of the world in such fragile ways. My fear of getting lost relates to real events, but also ones I have inherited. These transcend my own timeline and are enmeshed within wider histories of colonialism and cultural appropriation. My indigenous grandmothers, who never migrated with the rest of their families to England, had to ‘get lost’, forgotten, erased, in order for future generations to survive. My parents, like so many other immigrants, tried to assimilate as best they could, parts of themselves ‘getting lost’ in order to make a path for me and my children to exist.

Where, then, are all these ‘parts’ my parents left behind, the fragments of themselves that they scattered to the wind? Did these aspects of their cultural identity fade with time or did they simply evolve into something new? I imagine a room somewhere full of these ‘missing parts’. For the French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, the human hand print is a ‘tactile form of representation that closes the gap between the mimetic reflection and its model, thereby avoiding the dominance of the eye and mind, imitation and idea’,⁴ and for wont of a better word, these traces fasten us to one place, they ‘grab’ us as we grab them. Some of the earliest set of hand prints ever discovered are located in Argentina. La Cueva de las Manos, or ‘Cave of Hands’, is comprised of hundreds of stencilled red and ochre handprints, dating back as far as 10, 000 years. These handprints are physical reminders of our mortality, our sense of place and our desire to communicate, to leave a legacy. That human instinct becomes more complicated, or interrupted, when our relationship with the world has altered as a result of migration and colonisation.

Where, then, do we leave our tracks? For me, the spectre of La Cueva de las Manos haunts one particular piece by the Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama. In ‘Obliteration Room’ (2022), visitors are invited to place round, multicoloured stickers anywhere inside a white room until every available surface is covered was spots (this is also how colonisation works). The same things hold true of both these acts of imprinting, the sticker and the handprint: we cannot resist the desire to make our presence felt, to leave a trail, but what if that feeling is more complexly bound up with an ambivalence towards what surrounds us, with pain, with fuzzy feelings of loss or estrangement.

Trails or traces can be found almost anywhere, or maybe I notice them more often than I should because I’ve been drawn to them for so many years. My gaze lingers longer than it should, I know. Sometimes, I catch myself holding my breath. I am obsessed with stains, bits of things stuck, worn away or barely there, perceptible nonetheless. I photograph spores of lichen on the pavement. Then again, it could be chewing gum, but either way I’ll stand over these tiny trails in awe of their beauty, preserved within the smallness of everyday life. I inspect the tidal marks at Exmouth Beach or Lympstone near my home in Devon. I stop to look at the places where the water has ebbed away from houses in coastal villages with poor or faltering flood defences; I’m fascinated by objects like cyanotypes, the kind of Prussian Blue photograph which uses only iron salts, water and ultraviolet light to develop an image, and Japanese Kintsugi in which broken pieces of pottery are repaired with a thin vein of golden lacquer.

During the UK’s summer heatwave in 2022, a newspaper reported sightings of parched lawns exposing traces of ‘ghostly’ paths and demolished water features around several National Trust properties including Polesden Lacey and Clandon Park in Surrey. In many ways, the revelation of these hidden structures and routes struck me as apt visual metaphors for the largely invisible histories of colonialism and slavery which many of the original occupants of these properties profited from. Such vivid irony: ‘body-tracks’ as dry as a bone, yet wrought from the watery passage of slaves traded across the Atlantic. Memento mori.

Objects get lost, but so do people. My little Anglo-Burmese family, most of which are now all gone, crossed the Indian and Atlantic ocean by ship during their long migration from India to England in the 1950s. My parents’ migration has marked me forever, and while it was not my own, it has left its shape, which I cannot erase – the ‘stickers’ I can never peel off. This amounts to a feeling a bit like being haunted. Or, maybe I am the one that does the haunting? Am I looking back over the waterline, or am I being dragged underneath? To make all of this visible, we have to understand what clings to us and what kinds of marks we have left behind. These traces aren’t static and contained, they shake and shift, constantly knocking against the edges of my own personal history, my sense of self, and they touch me in increasingly surprising ways. It’s not simply the faded documents I have which provide evidence of my parents’ journey, information about the ships they travelled on, or the records of their migration, it’s also their physical weight and texture, their smell and the way that these fragments are swept up in all of my other sense memories of my family. Material remains held in my head, like the odd, elliptical way that my mother’s hands moved through a bowl stained with saffron when she cooked most Burmese dishes; the jade and cotton-candy coloured mould that grew from my father’s parked Ford Escort once he had died and there was no one else to drive it; the thick indentations on my mother’s carpet when I removed her furniture in her flat in Exeter, making preparations for her to live out the last of her last days in a nursing home; the old, bright yellow garage door my uncle offered my father second hand from his own home when ours was broken.

Material remains held in my head, like the odd, elliptical way that my mother’s hands moved through a bowl stained with saffron

The traces and indelible lines of a migratory past, too, settle and etch themselves into my skin like an indecipherable map, an inheritance that is not simply biological, though it does travel through my blood and voice, the spaces between my speech and my breath. Maps only I’ve inherited. Maps of love and maps of pain. Like this, one thing stacks up against another. My parents’ traumatic exile from Myanmar to India, and then their flight to England, is one of a constellation of things which leave their mark on me. An inherited knowledge of something I did not experience but knew in my bones, like a soundwave felt from afar. Behind the backs of my eyes. Static noise ringing in my ears. All of this is muddled up with the blue-grey mottled shapes on the pavement, the tidemarks in Exmouth and those sun-bleached silhouettes on the lawns at Clandon, the fear of getting lost.