Passion fuels the lives we envision for ourselves better than discipline or elbow grease alone.
However, a little bit of passion’s dark side — anger — may be the best defense of our identity, and a future that looks like us.
This week Dialogue2010 participant Elmira Bayraslı shared the anger that keeps her hybrid. Rather than assimilate or choose one social group to belong to, the daughter of Turkish immigrants in New York ferociously defends her hard-won ability to switch to independent American woman — and back again.
As an expat I know this righteousness-to-be-hybrid. A defense mechanism not only kicks in but is kept in place by a low level anger about external pressures to live and be a certain way. It’s been a cornerstone of my survival, and for many people living between worlds.
Today I was reminded exactly how homegrown this righteousness is by a Facebook group of one-line jokes about Berkeley upbringings. How counterculture taboos affected childhood is dizzying:
- boycotts of table grapes and iceberg lettuce make kids anxious when visiting un-PC families,
- a sneaked McDonald’s meal draws punishment while smoking weed does not,
- the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts are off-limits (pseudo-military!),
- while the whitebread Brady Bunch and misogynistic Barbie are what’s wrong with the world.
Free Speech protests witnessed from baby strollers make this group a veritable Red Diaper Baby playdate.
Also glimpsed: the realization that much of what characterized a Berkeley childhood thirty or forty years ago — that is, the lifestyle and belief system of an alternative community, the anger that separated it from the rest of the nation — has now become mainstream in America.
So, my righteous sisters and brothers, what are you going to keep being angry about when it comes to who you are?
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Anastasia M. Ashman
2010 Capital of Culture monthly feature of best Istanbul links
I am angry that I still try to let other people or my environment “allow” me to be who I am. Sure my childhood was basically constructed by one assimilation effort by another, but why do I have to drag that shadow to this day? I know, it will continue until I die–that’s what old habit is about. Fortunately (?) I never succeeded in assimilating myself so I will happily keep failing at it, without taking any advantage of others or myself.
Isao, I’d think it’s good to fail at what’s not right for you!
Coincidentally (or not), Seth Godin’s blog post today is about “being mad at everyone and what they want and what they say”.
I’m feeling all this righteousness, between this post and Elmira’s! And that Facebook page had me laughing out loud, Californian of a certain age that I am.
Thankfully this is not the anger that’s related to fear, though that version is rampant here this winter in the US. It’s more an indignation that anyone would want to conform and not explore their boundaries. I think growing up in California helped me to see change and individuality as acceptable, so doing what others want me to do when I don’t agree is not part of my nature. Not that I haven’t tried, but I just know myself better now. Some do see my resistance as anger, but it’s truly self-preservation.
Catherine — great point. I wonder how much a California childhood has prepared us for a lifetime of mould-breaking?!
Regarding the Facebook group: it’s bracing to note what counterculture means when you’re raised in it rather than *choose* it. One girl wrote her mother found out she was smoking cigarettes and sent her to therapy. A reaction probably shared by many parents across the nation, yet the trigger was not that the kid was getting into illegal drugs and going to ruin her life. She was getting into legal drugs and was going to ruin her life!
What can I say? I feel self righteous about holding on to the notion that I never had a true feeling of belonging in what is my motherland. If I lived in an enclave of artists and thinkers most of whom were not originally from the Netherlands, why even try to fit in with Dutch expatriates abroad who are not birds of my feather? Being from the same country doesn’t mean we know where we are coming from …
What do you look for in your countrymen abroad?
Oh boy, I know that one Judith! Fitting in with my compatriots abroad is even stickier than finding some kind of fit with the other nationalities around me.
When I lived in Malaysia I recall a similar alienating realization when I joined an American club. They played bridge. Could I play? How about Bible study. Nope. Sharing a passport did not mean we had much else in common culturally — and I figured that had something to do with the size and diversity of my nation. But apparently it can happen to someone from a tiny nation as well!
My solution, which felt instantly better, was to join an international club. That’s what I was, an international woman abroad. Not a bridge-playing American. Somehow I intersected better with a big-laughing German-Iranian, a bubbly Egyptian, a feisty Indonesian, a sardonic Brit, a debonair French painter.
As for what I look for in compatriots abroad, I hope to write at more length about it in the future. For now I’ll say I look for people who truly feel like my peers. People I would be friends with anywhere in the world.
Anastasia: “…look for people who truly feel like my peers. People I would be friends with anywhere in the world.” I’m with you all the way!
Now I’m off for a biz meeting at the ArtXchange Gallery which is situated on the border of The International District and Pioneer Square.