Nomads

            Immigrant. How long do I want to deal with this? It can be tiring at times. It has to end, there has to be some point in my life when I don’t have an accent anymore, when I fit in, when I’m just like everyone else, when I’m from here.

            But how can that be? And, anyway, immigrant as opposed to what? Living in the country of one’s birth? In the same state? The same county, town, neighborhood? Surely everyone’s moved at least once. The only difference, perhaps, is that the immigrants have crossed some border, a political one, unlike, let’s say, someone moving from Texas to Michigan.

            But then countries are strange entities: some times people move across borders, other times borders move across territories, surprising the locals. We know that the nation-state is a nineteenth century invention and that nations are imagined communities, to quote Benedict Anderson. Could we perhaps change the way we imagine them?

            But here’s the clincher: the fact that nations are imagined and culturally constructed doesn’t diminish their tremendous power: think of wars, for example. Or, even better, think of the last time your national team won the first prize in some sports competition that usually you don’t care about. It’s almost as if you recognize a lost love: “See, you did love me for a while,” says the nation, “Look how proud you are of me, how moved, how nostalgic, how ready to die for me.”

            But then, why do we privilege “staying” over “leaving”? Being tied to the land over moving, traveling? Nomads have always been part of the world; in the history of the human species, it’ only been approximately 10,000 years since the agricultural revolution. Anatomically modern humans, on the other hand, have been around for circa 200,000 years, gathering and hunting, a nomadic lifestyle.

            “My great grandfather was a man named Naki, and he was a sheep herder,” my father told me one day. He didn’t know anything more about that.

            But then in college I learned about transhumance, sheep herders travelling up and down the mountains with their sheep, looking for new pasture, depending on the season. Or else they travelled south through the Balkan peninsula in winter, with their sheep, across borders, rivers, mountain chains, in order to spend the winter in the south of Europe, where the weather was milder, and then to travel back north to their mountain villages in the spring. (“As a sheep herder, I have no country,” my great grandfather could have said, anticipating Virginia Woolf. But then I don’t know for sure whether he was actually a transhumating sheep herder, or if he just had sheep and let other people do the traveling for him).

            As late as the 1980s, transhumanting sheep herders were apparently still around. One of my neighbors managed to leave the country with their help.

At that time, Romanians lived in their country like in a prison: many dreamt of escaping, few dared to actually try. Beyond the border, in Hungary, a more relaxed political environment would have had border patrols turning a blind eye to the infrequent escapees. A few hundred miles away, after crossing another border, there was Austria, a free (read non-socialist) country, part of the western world, ready to embrace refugees or to allow them safe passage to wherever their dreams led them (usually farther west).

            My neighbor defied the Romanian border patrols ready to shoot defectors. He hid among the sheep, in a large herd, and crossed the border together with them. He called from Vienna to let his parents know he was ok. I imagined him, crouched for hours in the cold weather, or maybe he was crawling on all four (was it early spring? late fall?—he was a good athlete though, he was in the swimming team). He ended up in Paris, where he still lives.