15KB of Fame: Our Discontented Bones

Our Discontented Bones

26 February 2007

Today the Miami sun is a hungover showgirl, leaving pink and purple smears on her pillow-clouds. She washes with lazy rain. It drips on Mediterranean collonades and quirky Arabian facades: memories ancient Persia by way of Spain. It drizzles into your Calle Ocho cafe con leche. It puddles the driveways of a hundred thousand SUVs and a dozen kinds of palm trees -- all of them, like most of us, recent imports.

The lure of Miami is how it embraces the international and mocks the cosmopolitan. Another block is another dimesion: Little Haiti, Little Havana, pockets of Europe and Argentina and Hong Kong, people trading driving, praying, building, teeming in and out of one of the Grand Caravanserais of the New World.

On occasion some 4th-generation cracker will read too much into my complexion. He will confide the unmoored feeling that comes every time he sees a billboard written in another language. I will drop into an accent that is comfortable to my tounge yet alien to my ears. It's an unconcious habit. I will share with him in the Brotherhood of Expatriates: a club with no rites or roster but which calls itself into session wherever beleaguered men find the familiar in a strange place. We will sit and sip and I will listen to how is it's a shame to have to taste the Brotherhood while on our native soil.

The first time it happened I threw the ignorant prick out of my house. But that was during the golden time between callow youth and heavy drinking, before I realized that the unmoored feeling was with me always.

People of recently mixed heritage have no homeland in this sense: there is no place, however distant in space and time, peopled with those who share every one of your values. Is the answer a permanent Wanderjahr?

Quoth Nathaniel Hawthorne, a man who got paid by the comma:

"...the years, after all, have a kind of emptiness, when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore. We defer the reality of life, in such cases, until a future moment, when we shall again breathe our native air; but, by and by, there are no future moments; or, if we do return, we find that the native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary residents. Thus, between two countries, we have none at all, or only that little space of either, in which we finally lay down our discontented bones."

I didn't come to love this place until I had left, seen what was around, and came back. I needed distance to appreciate this mad soup that seems to be self-organizing into a cultural capital.

posted by bueno # 19:23

Comments:

BREATHES there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
'This is my own, my native land!'
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd 5
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim; 10
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung, 15
Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.

this is a poem written by Sir walter Scott. The opening sentiments are fine but the closing is depressing, I guess, until you know the title of the poem == Patriotism.
I think the opening reflects somewhat the situation that most of us who are 'mixed' culturally have felt from time to time. The ending is in line with the sense of nationalism that comes over us whenever we travel outside our usual surroundings, be it outside our country or even outside our city or neighborhood. Where we are may be better or worse than where we live but 'our place' is where we would rather be.

# posted by

Bueno : March 4, 2007 3:32 PM

L was talking recently about feeling alien wherever 'home' happened to be (Google docs). I found something online that sounds a little like what we're like:

Third Culture Kids

We're not totally in this demographic, but we had enough 'blending' going on in our home and family 'culture' that we might as well have been missionaries or something similar growing up.

I don't miss El Paso the city. Or the people. The landscape, the mountains, the desert, that I do miss.

I got here and was stunned to find makeup that matched my complexion. And I had the rednecks tell me how much they hated "them furrin TA's whut cain't talk English". I'd just say "oh" and do my work.

# posted by

bit : March 5, 2007 11:35 AM

Hybrid vitality was a word my husband and I used privately when talking about our 'mixed' offspring. It entailed not just surface ethnic differences,( hair color,skin tones) but more importantly, the deliberate constant exposure to what we thought was the best of the worlds we inhabited(books,music, education,the ability to connect and interact with all types of people in varied situations), and the deliberate exclusion of undesirable elements. In short, we did what any caring parent does. But because we came from different backgrounds and lifestyles, we had the opportunity to choose from a much wider world, and we took it. At first, mixed third culture kids may have a harder time sorting out the larger than normal world they are exposed to, and finding and building their own place to thrive and grow. But the trade off is they have a rare wider, stronger, deeper understanding and appreciation for that larger world and the people in it. My wish is that they all remember to keep the good bits and enlarge the world they find.

# posted by

mombott : December 3, 2007 10:55 AM