Made of Red, White and Something Else

I did not submit my piece on hope for my homeland. To put it simply, I think it’s icky - for lack of a more appropriate word. It’s not that atrocious. But framed in a book? Even if the only readers are the writers and the editors themselves, I don’t want it. This is the condensed version of what I wrote:

Someone called me a traitor for having lived most of my life outside of my homeland. That jerk.

How can I lay claim to having hopes for my homeland when it is not my home?

My relationship with my countrymen revolves largely around guilt, created by the false notion of identity that is incongruent with who I am. I’m going to pretend that made sense, thankyouverymuch. What does it really mean to be a Citizen of Some State? Is it level of contribution to our dear GDP? Is it cultural consumption? s it political participation? Is it possession of capital? Is it about family?

I think it’s about family. If so I belong to a large complicated family connected by legal strings and hereditary diabetics. I do not belong to a country. What have I to inherit? I may just be a product deficient of civic education or national education or what have you. I consider it a blessing frankly. I just feel out of place in the national sphere, be it here nor there.

Andrew Largeman in Garden State said it best:

“You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone….You’ll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it’s just gone. And you can never get it back.It’s like you get homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. I mean it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.”

It’s just a constant state, not of anger or pain but just longing. It’s about wanting to have roots for all the frivolous, and all at once the most humane, reasons: just so you could never float away too far from gravity and too close into the sun.

All the strings that tie to me are those of by kin or by friendship. They pull me closer to the ground. But all the spaces that makes me feel like home? They lie beyond these political demarcations suspended in the international airspace: an enclave of 300 square feet in the sky.

This is life of the modern nomadic: feeling like you belong to Someplace Somewhere Somehow but never here nor there. With “internationally mobile work force” and “globalization of labour” and “transnational flows of human capital” - terms that mean the movement of people - I’m sure you’ll feel it too. In the coming generation, this is what we’d all come to.

Does this make me a traitor to my own country? I think not.

Let me float on the margins. I’ve found some of the most wonderful misfits here.

This is where I belong.