Sarah Habersack is a great example of what entails to be a global citizen. She is an assimilation of various cultures, yet holds her own quintessential self. Born and brought up in Austria, a Wiener, in the last fifteen years she has lived in Mexico, Delhi, and now in Brasília, mostly on her own, and has travelled–in the true sense of the word–all over the world. She works for a German agency that has operations across the globe, but her association to a place is not limited to work, it is where it starts and gets deeper and deeper.
“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.” When I read these words by Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, I pictured Sarah.
Sarah has a process: she learns the language, reads the local literature, cultivates a community of friends who love her, and lives like a native, experiencing the land without filters.
When she was in Delhi for five ‘short’ years, she learned to cook Indian food, dabbling with Indian art (which is fairly varied, like the country), she owns a beautiful and emphatic Madhubani painting of Durga with liberal use of bold red colour, she even learned contemporary Indian dancing and is fairly good at it. I’m not the only one who has accused her of being more Indian than me. She faces such utterances across cultures, most recently in Brazil.
The wanderlust, the need for new, the vagabond soul she embodies propels her to explore the uncharted frontiers. And her innate ability to want to know a thing by living it helps her experience the adopted culture in all its manifestations. With time, she makes it her home—an irrevocable condition–in her case, temporarily.
The same wanderlust and curiosity and intensity to know by living or experiencing, after a passage of some time, starts to disenchant her, for she wants something new to explore. It’s intuitive. A matter of spirit. The intensity that brings her close, also propels her away.
This happens every five or six years–if we were to look at the past trend. And that's when she goes back to Vienna, her anchor is her ‘beautiful’ family (‘beautiful’ I know for sure because I’m a beneficiary of their kindness and warmheartedness, particularly her mother and brother). If she is a kite soaring high, Vienna is the line or the string.
This phase is an intermission, internalising experiences of the recent past and sort of coming to terms with it, and in the process getting ready for the next. It's like a ship that anchors after a long voyage, to repair, revivify, replenish, and get ready for the next.
This is easier said than done, or experienced. It has its own challenges. Sarah is a strong person, extremely brainy, and is blessed with this incredible capacity to learn new languages, and not forgetting the ones she already knows. Because language is a means to an end, to experience people and places. “Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.” When I read these words by Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, I pictured Sarah.
To a casual observer, she may seem to be a person who is constantly seeking a certain stability, a kind of predictability in life. And she gets into people and situations that promise that stability. In her case, stability is the seed of instability. It’s a paradox. But life’s a bundle of contradictions and paradoxes.
Lately, she has made home in Brazil. A few months before she was to move in, she started learning Portuguese. And by the time she was there, she could speak the language with a certain facility. And the fact that she knows German–her mother tongue–, English, Hindi, French, Spanish helped her to learn one more. And within a year of her stay, she decided to write a book.
Her book O QUE DESEJARAM was “parallelly written in two languages” she tells me–German and Portuguese. It’s an enriching account of four women from different generations and their existential quest against “internal conflict and external oppression, to break free and liberate.” And in the process make sense of their eventful lives. Death gives life the perspective to deal with all eventualities, and that essentially everything will pass. Given this fact, it’s not bad to be on the move.
I loved her writing process. Sarah first did a part of the book in German, her mother tongue–so that the narrative flowed unhindered, and then translated it into Portuguese, and discussed it in a local writers’ forum, who’d give their feedback and suggestions, and that would help her tighten her draft in Portuguese, and then she would translate it back to German. This book by Sarah is shaped by writing in a cyclic loop between German and Portuguese. Interesting and incredible, only a global citizen like Sarah could have done it.
She tells me that one of the characters in the book is inspired by me. I’m curious. Is it a buffoon? But to be able to read the book, either I have to learn Portuguese, in which it is published, or German, in which it will get published soon. Or, perhaps wait for an English translation.
This quest for stability has taken her to places. And, perhaps, with time she will realise, that journey is the destination. “Not all those who wander are lost,” as J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in his book The Fellowship of the Ring.
The cultural and spiritual exchange requires stepping out of the mundane. Occult fuels Sarah’s imagination, and helps to put things in perspective. She educates herself with spiritual concepts and practices and applies it in her life.
Lately, she draws inspiration from Orishas–the Afro-Brazilian spiritual traditions that have had a profound impact on Brazil's daily life through rituals, offerings, and prayers, connecting individuals with divine energies.
Each Orisha, or the saint, or demi-god, has unique characteristics, based on which they have their domains in the vast landscape of human existence. For a change, here water reaches out to thirsty people. An Orisha picks his disciple. A priest in possession of deep knowledge, or a babalawos, interprets signs and messages, and connects an Orisha to his or her chosen disciple.
Sarah is picked by Oshosi, associated with the hunt (with a bow and arrow), forests, animals, and wealth, lightness, astuteness, wisdom, and craftiness in the hunt is a saint of contemplation, loving the arts and beautiful things and hunts for good influences and positive energies. The second is Iemanja–a motherly figure with a profound message, accept who you’re and there’s no goodbyes. The Orishas that picked her tells a lot about her.
This has to be said, Sarah, is true to how she feels and is open about it. She can’t fake good when she’s miserable and vice versa. And this incredible acumen to act on what and how she feels, and not sit and suffer silently, get her to do things, take bold steps. She has suffered a lot in this fashion, but has emerged stronger every time.
The quest for stability makes her wander and explore. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years I come to know she’s making a film in the Congo basin. She goes with the flow. “Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls,” as Joseph Campbell poetically puts it.
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