“The Land of the Free”

          

            I never thought of myself as an immigrant, not until recently. I thought I was an academic / writer / public intellectual crossing borders, writing, doing research, going back and from Romania to the US and back and, most of the time, living in a country that was so diverse and used to its diversity that accent and skin color didn’t matter as long as you worked hard and got along with everyone else.

            Somehow, at the end of my bios that I had to submit for conferences or publications, the phrase “originally from Romania” made its way. And once I heard myself say, in a faculty meeting, “as an immigrant woman,” which kind of scared me. I didn’t think I was an immigrant. I thought I was a hip academic who happened to have an accent and a Romanian passport.

            Yet after ten years of teaching and writing, after living in New York, Texas, Michigan, and New Jersey, teaching more than a thousand students in the process, struggling very hard to get an academic job, and even getting some two-year positions, it gradually dawned upon me that I’m not a tourist, I’m not visiting, that I actually live here, work here and work hard for that matter, and that the locals, from my students to the USCIS, do think that I’m an immigrant, a newcomer in a long series of arrivals, someone who has given up being in the country of their birth in order to be here, the land of the free.

            Ok, fine, but what do they have to say about it? At the beginning of every course I teach, one of my students usually informs me that they can’t stand it when immigrants come to the United States and then criticize their country. They also say that the US is the land of the free and that in the US people have freedoms they don’t have in other countries. Usually it’s students who have never traveled abroad who say that.

            Now I agree that counting who has how many freedoms where is a tough question to answer. But my student are right in a way: in the United States, we talk about freedom a lot. The United States does pride itself in its national identity, like every nation should, and it defines its national identity as “the land of the free”. In contrast, Romania never thought of itself as “the land of the free.” If anything, they would call it “the land where Romanians can be free,” given that Romanians had been dominated by Turks, Russians, and Hungarians from the Middle Ages on.

            So it’s all fine so far, we can call the United States “the land of the free”, but that sets it up high and at some point or another the US has to respond to such lofty expectations. And it does at times and it tried to do so, in an honest way, many times in its history. Like for example during Radical Reconstruction, when the South experienced one of the most progressive “interracial democracies”, or during the 1960s, when women gained new freedoms, or more recently, by attempting, again honestly, to expand the definition of marriage.  

            But that begs the question, how should we define freedom? Is it “freedom from” you name it—government interference in private matters, government regulations, taxes, ideological control, etc.? According to John Dewey, American philosopher, that would be freedom defined as a negative concept, freedom defined as the absence of something.  

            Or should it rather be freedom, defined as a positive concept this time, to do what makes us happy (provided it doesn’t hurt someone else), freedom to thrive, freedom to be healthy and generous and creative and freedom to make sure that everyone has opportunities to do the same?

            I’d love to live in a country like that.           

Resisting Translation

 

            I’m a good immigrant. Seriously. I do my best to blend in. I have a deep respect for place, language, culture—when I lived in Budapest for a year, I tried to learn Hungarian; good luck trying to learn Hungarian in a year! But I diligently studied prepositions added at the end of the noun and nouns that changed their last syllable according to the preposition added and made choppy sentences with all that.

            Living in the US for ten years, you can guess, I give my bookishness free reins. I get a doctorate in American Studies (once someone remarked, “Well, this is the right place to do that!”). I read as much as I can on American history. I check English words in my etymological dictionary: hood and house come from the same root, according to the Chambers, a Germanic word that signifies “cover.” How important is that?

            Yet my Romanianness sneaks up on me at the most unexpected moments. I don’t know where I read about hybrid identities and how immigrant people manage their multiple identities etc. I don’t manage that well. It’s more like I’m controlled by foreign forces. They come and seize me when I’m not aware.

            Like for example when I answer the phone and say Alo! Instead of Hello!

            Like when I explain an assignment to a student and all of a sudden, in my speech, Romanian words mix with English ones. “You only missed one class and in the syllabus it says you can miss up to two without grade penalty, prin urmare you don’t need to worry about it.” I wonder how my student hears it. Are foreigners supposed to babble anyway?

            Like when I get angry and my accent becomes stronger and all of a sudden I can’t find English words, right when I need them the most.

            Like when I count in Romanian—sorry, can’t do two things at the same time, count and speak a foreign language, it’s either one or the other. To the bank teller it must seem like I’m whispering charms over twenty dollar bills.

            Like when I apologize too much, or say thank you when there’s nothing really to thank someone for, I just like that person and I say thanks to mask my happiness.

            And these are situations when I know it. How many other times do I act Romanian, speak Romanian, betray myself as being from somewhere else, perform my foreignness in perhaps disruptive ways?

            But what is my fantasy here? That indeed I can control my worlds, prevent them from seeping undetected into one another, crossing the mental border between “I am here” and “I was there”? Maybe I fear that, unbeknownst to me, I’m functioning according to rules that have changed since I last took a serious look at them, as if I’m playing a game of soccer and halftime has passed and the teams have switched halves but I still don’t know it yet, and I’m running triumphantly with the ball toward the net, about to score a goal, and it’s too late when I realize that it’s my own team’s net and I’ve just scored for the other team?

            This whole experience of living away from the country where I was born, under very different circumstances, makes me realize at a very deep level how much we’re a product of our worlds, how what we believe, expect from life, celebrate and eat all depend on how we spent the first twenty years of our lives. But then, what should I keep? What should I actively try to lose? Here's what's frightening: it doesn't completely depend on me.

Migration, Poverty, and Food

I arrived in Buffalo, NY, in August 2001, to go to graduate school. The first three days I spent at one of my professors’ apartment, a penthouse overlooking the impoverished Buffalo downtown. It struck me as a town of sharp contrasts and sharp winters. Nothing seemed to be in the middle, everything white or black, old, very rich and decaying or young and extremely poor. Where did I belong? I found out soon enough after learning about the many deductions from my $8,000 a year teaching assistant’s stipend.

            That first week, from my professor’s penthouse, I walked to a train station, six or seven blocks away. Used to living in Europe and walking downtown and pretty much everywhere—I didn't need a car in Europe and I couldn’t afford a car in the US—it didn’t bother me. What bothered me was the presence of extreme poverty just a block away from the fashionable area with interwar buildings inhabited by middle-class professionals.

            At a street corner, already in the “bad” area that as I learned later my colleagues who had cars avoided, there was a neighborhood food store owned by a Middle Eastern family. That was my first experience buying food in the United States. Everything was canned and dusty, the sloping floors were covered with ancient linoleum, the smell of some disinfectant detergent made me sneeze. In the end I picked up some cheese, wanting to reward my professor’s hospitality. I wanted to make an omelet. The cheese turned out to be Monterey Jack and, for my tastes at that time, uneatable. My professor, shocked yet amused, explained to me “what horrible things they were doing to cheese”—that’s how she put it—and then two days later took me shopping to a nice smelling shop with bright windows, a young good looking sales person, and carefully wrapped cheeses and jars of olives that cost as much as some of the books I needed to buy—another expense I had failed to calculate out of my meager TA paycheck.

            Then I found a room in a house and I started cooking at home. I dreaded the foreignness of it all. Everything tasted different, even the milk: whether Vitamin D enhanced or the simple 2%, it tasted as if it had been made out of powdered milk, not as if it came from a cow. Bread was different too—either the prohibitively expensive baguettes or the prepackaged stuff, which I once tried to eat untoasted and regretted it. Why did bread have to be sweet? Where were the regular bakeries that poor people could afford, so that they could eat bread, real bread with crust and middle, and not… and not… this? And why were tomatoes so expensive—that was poor people’s food back in Romania, everyone had tomatoes, with everything, they were cheap, you could grow them in your backyard—and why, and why please someone tell me, even when these tomatoes were so expensive, why is it that they didn’t have any taste, just a pale color and a slippery yet hard texture that made me think of seafood?

            And why did it bother me so much?

            “But of course,” an anthropology professor said to me, “it’s normal, it’s food, the ground of your identity.” I thought about this for a long time.

The Politics of Emotions

            I want to write about the emotions that exist in political issues and about the politics of my emotions.

            Can I be an artist committed to social justice? Not in a socialist realist sense, of course: Ben Shahn, painted, photographer, and muralist, once criticized Diego Rivera for depicting workers stereotypically, “with heavy wrists.” I’m looking for art that doesn’t eschew the complexity of human experience in order to make a political point, because life always exceeds any depictions of right and wrong.

            This being said, all human experience does have a moral dimension—looks like I’m using moral and political interchangeably here. For me, art that doesn’t to a certain extent “make a point”, or even worse, is not aware of the arguments it does make, isn’t good art.

            The politics of emotions: I was nine and my little brother was four and my mother worked until four pm everyday. In exchange for a sum that my mother at times complained about, an elderly neighbor came to our apartment, heated up our lunch for us, and waited while we ate. She lived in the same apartment building, with her daughter and her son-in-law, who in turn had two daughters. I think she must have wanted a son, or at least a grandson, because my little brother could get away with murder in her presence; he was four, but she spoonfed him his lunch, voluntarily. At times, he’d just refuse to eat, and she’d wait patiently until he finished playing with his toys. Once he gave her a card he had made for her birthday: “My sunshine!” she exclaimed with a lot of emotion, then she wiped off a tear from the corner of her eye.

            I could never elicit this kind of response. Months of good behavior, helping out with the dishes etc. could barely receive approval: tanti Eleonora wasn’t actually very expressive emotionally and I never saw her very effusive around her own granddaughters. But there were more than actions at play there: there were emotions, and hers gravitated toward the young male.

            The politics of emotions (2): once my friend Cristina asked me whether I had noticed that people (back home) loved women only if they were really unhappy—if they could say poor X, she has three small children and her husband deserted her and now she’s about to lose her job, or poor Y, who has cancer and her husband drinks and what’s going to happen to her now… it seemed, according to Cristina, that everyone loved unhappy women in terrible life situations not of their own making. That was one way women could get social approval back home.

            Are things any different here?

Feminist (2)

            I became a feminist in my early twenties. I was a student at the University of the West, Timisoara (that’s in Romania), and I was studying literature and languages. It was the early 90s. In my Romanian literature classes, made up of twenty-five women and at times one or two men, I learned, from male professors, that women can’t write Great Novels. There was a female novelist, Hortensia Papadat Bengescu (the Romanian equivalent of Virginia Woolf) whom we studied and who actually had written great novels… and our professors told us that she had had a very, very unhappy life. When Virginia Woolf herself was mentioned, everyone reminded us about her suicide. In other words: writing is so bad for women, it makes them suicidal.

            I was then reading Christa Wolf’s Cassandra too, one feminist book available among shelves and shelves of theory of literature, linguistics, history, novels, so many novels, most of them written by male authors of course. Out of one hundred books I read every four or five months, let’s say less than ten were by women, and I almost expected that the author’s femaleness would carry into her writing, the mark of their gender giving an indelible aura to the printed word: this was written by a woman. I almost expected the black ink to ripple: what would this woman have to say that it would be so different? and of course, it was up to the male professors to prove, immediately after the word was read, that it was… well, insufficient, different, charming perhaps at first but soon revealing some mysterious flaw emanating from the gender of the writer. 

            One of my professors once told me, about a modern Romanian (guy) writer, that the said writer had been complimented—by women, no less!—that he understood female psychology better than any woman could. In other words, why should women write at all?

            But I still owe it to another male professor (who taught Comparative Literature) with whom I once shared this story and talked about Christa Wolf and Virginia Woolf and he suggested, for my senior thesis, to write about feminist literary criticism. It was the early nineties, after all, and he was perhaps more attuned to what was going on beyond the parochial borders of our country that had for more than two decades shut itself off from foreign cultures.

            After a tour through libraries around the country, I assembled a bibliography that included Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Toril Moi, Elaine Showalter… I agreed and disagreed with all. I had finally found my books.

            But more about this later.

Feminist

I’m an immigrant because I’m a feminist. But more about this later.

            Let me start from the beginning: growing up with censorship, in socialist Romania. In practice, it meant that you could always say something wrong in front of the wrong people and then… then there would repercussions, as threatening as they were mysterious, at least for us kids. It also meant that we grew up with very little television; instead we had books, which were supposed to be fun, except that the books were strictly censored. State-owned printing presses endlessly churned out the works of the “classics”, nineteenth-century novelists, mostly French and Russian (good luck trying to learn something about sex from those!), the greats of Romanian literature, socialist realist novels—with a good communist and a traitor and a girl that the communist got at the end (they held hands)—and the discourses of Nicolae Ceausescu, our prolific dictator.

            Somehow, in the mishmash of books that my father brought home every three months or so (he had a friend who worked in a bookstore; she selected the books for him from whatever was available) I found one day a copy of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra. Being from socialist Germany, Christa Wolf—who passed away in 2011—had probably been deemed safe enough to be translated. Cassandra: Four Essays and a Novel (1984) is a re-telling of the story of the Trojan war from a feminist perspective. Cassandra, high priestess in her native Troy, and one of King Priamus’s many daughters, had, according to the Illyad, Aeneid and a few Greek tragedies, predicted the fall of Troy; prior to that, she had been cursed by Apollo that no one believe her prophecies. Christa Wolf tells the story from the perspective of Cassandra—a woman seer who refuses the illusions those around her hold dear.

            I loved the book. I may have read it ten times while in college. I loved Cassandra—that’s how I wanted to be, regardless of the fact that she ended up alone and a slave in Christa Wolf’s version. Wolf recreated Cassandra as a model for the female / feminist intellectual, someone who is unable to relinquish her understanding, her vision, when it becomes uncomfortable to those around her.

            As an added bonus, the book introduced me to what for me at that time was a new form of literary creation if you wish, a feminist retelling of one of the founding epics of Western literature. What they were teaching us then in school was to read, read as much as possible, memorize and perhaps interpret with small audacities. That one could re-write, change perspective, reorganize the hierarchy of characters, do all that to a venerable tradition and then simply tell the same story again, but how different! seemed at once an enormous task and also very liberating.

            I know of few feminist rewritings as powerful as Wolf’s Cassandra. There are many books I’d love to see retold with the same compelling vision. Among them, probably the first would be Nabokov’s Lolita.

            But more about this later.

The Realm of the Near-Friend

            My mother-in-law, a few friends from high school, my niece, two (or three? actually three) ex-boyfriends, friends from graduate school, friends from Romania, from Buffalo, Michigan, and Houston, my husband, a couple of students, some of my husband’s friends, a few colleagues from work, what do they all have in common? They’re my friends on Facebook.

            What? Under normal circumstances, my mother, who married her high school sweetheart, should never see two, not to mention three, of my ex-boyfriends in the same context (she knows them). I imagine them in the same room, what would they talk about?

            But it doesn’t matter: on Facebook, we’re all near-friends. It’s the endless happy ending: I loved his person when I was in my twenties, we argued and fought and betrayed one another, and now we’re friends on Facebook. Or: this is a person I met at a party and thought she was smart and it would be fun to talk more with her. Or: I cheated on this person, he liked me a lot, and now we’re friends on Facebook. Some of my students are my friends on Facebook (mercifully, not many), what must they be thinking of me? My mother is my friend on Facebook: I love her now and I used to seriously hate her when I was in my twenties. Or: this co-worker tried to hit on me and she was so damn neurotic that when I wasn’t too welcoming she ruined one of my projects, but somehow we ended up on Facebook together and now we’re friends.

            On Facebook, we’re all polite: no dislike button. No love button either. This may have something to do with the atmosphere of an elite college, which is where it all started; its ethos shapes the options that we have (the like button) and how we interact. We don’t hate each other, we don’t absolutely love each other, we’re all smart and cool and noncommittal and passive aggressive and we write well. Mr. Zuckerberg, please go to grad school at least.

            On Facebook, we don’t betray one another: how could we? We’re all friends, no strings attached. We’re actually not friends-friends, which back home used to mean a rather small circle of confidantes, we’re not the high school gang either, we’re not acquaintances. We’re near-friends. In real life, real friends betray one another, are annoying, call at the wrong time, borrow money and don’t return it, flirt with your significant other. They can’t do that on Facebook. They can’t be extremely generous or hug you. They say “that’s so funny” instead. They’re near-friends.

            On the other hand, for someone who’s moved around a lot, being near-friends is much better than completely slipping into oblivion. It’s the equivalent of old handwritten letters, which announced births deaths weddings and other relevant matters, except that now, stuck into the ethos of twenty-something college kids, we communicate where we travel, what we see, what we cooked yesterday etc. –what we “experience”—and we hope that we can continue the polite and funny conversation we started a few years ago with someone in Grand Rapids, Michigan.