30 June 03
How We Are Defined and Shaped By the Place We Live
The Ecotone Wiki is running its second collective biweekly post on place; the link to other entries can be found here.
Thinking about this question on the plane from Philadelphia to Sacramento over the weekend threw me into a panic. Why?
Because: I’m not, I don’t think.
I’m sure, at least, I’m not defined by the places I’ve lived: not by Davis, nor by Santa Barbara, nor by Cambridge, Massachusetts, nor Cambridge England, nor Paris, nor Birmingham (UK, university), nor Montpellier (junior year abroad), nor Derbyshire (boarding school), nor Madrid, nor least of all by Tiburon, Tiburon in Marin County, California, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where I spent the first five years of my life.
I have two passports. One corresponds to the country of my birth; the other to the nationality of my father (British). It’s handy, this land/blood dichotomy: it opens up the world to you as a place to live and work. It also left me at an early age with an identity crisis: I was always defined by somewhere OTHER than where I was actually living, especially in Spain where no matter what we did or wore or ate or said we were always, ALWAYS foreigners. Even today, my hybrid accent sets me apart (I’m well aware it also confers on me a certain status in this country of rampant, albeit often undeserved, Anglophilia).
Being a “Permanent Expatriate” (sometimes I think I should have this stamped on my forehead) is quite different from the experience of being a refugee. Refugees have few choices. They are at the mercy of the authorities of the places they end up in, where the culture is often completely alien, the language is different, the food, climate, customs, expectations, manners, plants, landscapes, buildings, graphic design, EVERYTHING-everything that combines to make a place what it is to inhabit-is unfamiliar. It is very hard for mainstream American culture to understand the unwillingness of certain ethnic groups (the Hmong, for example, who fled Laos in the aftermath of the Vietnam war having fought and died for the CIA with the promise of a new life in the U.S. and who have settled in large numbers in the Central Valley of California) to assimilate. Why, this is the melting pot! We welcome all comers! Bring us your weary, your destitute…
Only, of course, it’s not really true, is it. Bring us your white, well-educated, well-spoken, polite, PRODUCTIVE, portfolio-endowed, expatriates in ones-and-twos and we’ll be welcoming and admire your nice British accents. Otherwise, we’ll growl. We’ll inflict our cumbersome bureaucracy on you. You’ll have to wait in long lines in emergency rooms and we’ll make you walk through nightmarish hoops to get your food stamps. We’ll give you work, maybe, and then at minimum wage. And when we wave our American flags in your face by the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands, or by the millions, you’d better cheer and holler (even when we bomb your country of origin) or we’ll place you under surveillance.
There is little doubt, though, that the places I’ve lived have somehow contributed to who I am today, the kind of person who might produce the above rant, for example. The kind of person who might subsequently feel it important to apologize for it (being half English means you often have to preface a question with the word “sorry,” as in “sorry, would you mind if I opened the window?”). And the kind of person who could segue, neatly, into a parallel track, one which is far less likely to cause offense.
Such as:
The connecting thread in my life for all the places I’ve lived and even visited has been birds. The birds of Europe are very different from the birds of North America, but they’re all birds, and they don’t know or care what passports I carry. I look at birds while I’m walking, bicycling, driving, or riding a train. The sight of a flock of white-faced ibis that flew southwest over Sacramento Airport on Saturday evening as I waited for the shuttle brought the first smile to my lips after landing—saying, I suppose, I’m home. Home. Not the home of flag-waving bigots, the home of the white-faced ibis. The home they share with me. The home I will fight to protect—the landscape that is falling piece by piece to developers of tract houses.
Previous: The Painting of Place Next: It Must Be July
I understand your bird-bond. For me, it is wildflowers, that, fortunately, are much the same throughout the southern Appalachians where I have migrated to find ‘home’ a half-dozen times (with my roots in Bham, AL). While not as vagile as birds, to be sure, they show up in upexpected places and bring a smile that only I understand. And maybe you would, as well?
Yes, I think the smile’s the same.
One time I was having a deep conversation with a good American friend who kept insisting that I had to carry some sort of idntification with some place, that I couldn’t just live my life seeing myself as aimless all the time. It was an emotional discussion, and not without some heated responses, simply because this sense of identity is essential to all of us and when someone treads on it, it hurts, especially when that sense of identity has never been defined. However, that day an interesting thing happened: while we were talking, my friend brought out a globe, the kind you keep on your desk. I was dumbstruck. I turned to the photograph of the Earth that she kept over her desk and pointed at it: “There, that’s where I belong. That’s my home and where I identify with.” I promptly broke down weeping. It was quite overwhelming to discover where you belong if you’ve never felt you belonged anywhere.
But, like you, it has always been the animals, especially birds and insects, that have knitted places together for me. The first thing I do when I visit a new place is to get up at dawn and go for a walk. I listen for the new sounds of birds and peer at tree bark or leaves to find insects that I can name. With the gained familiarity of newly discovered birds, a place settles into something less ethereal. Birds make a place real, especially their calls.
Spain still comes to my mind as the place where Pallid Swifts and Alpine Chough live; the Shetlands “Maalies” (Fulmars), Gannets, and “Bonxies” (Great Skuas); Singapore Black-naped Orioles, Greater Coucals, and Pied Fantails; Japan Azure-winged Magpies, Brown-eared Bulbuls, and Rufous Turtle Doves. All these birds have drawn me into these places and I became part of them.
Rather than rootedness, you have been shaped by the tropes of migration, flight, bones full of air, feathers of hope.
The ironic impermanence of nesting.
The citizens of nowhere, dependant on every stop they make for sustainance and rest.
I get it…beautiful.
Humans, perhaps, have lost that direct connection to the food-bearing properties of place. What’s a grocery store compared to a marsh? Perhaps we invented stories on the day that we moved into a house and had food brought to us instead of eating it in the bush.
A wild fantasy, not especially accurate, but evocative.