2000 Charles River Review: Listening for Home

I don't usually offer to show people photographs from my junior year abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland. For weeks, which became months, which have now become years, I have kept them in a closet in my room in the house where I grew up. For a long time, I wasn't sure why I consigned them to a fate of dark obscurity. Now I think it is because I understand the limitations of photographs--that they don't capture the interior of experiences--the realignments and realizations, challenge and chafe, the efforts and epiphanies.

While I have learned not to rely on the telling power of these images, there is one photo that I tend to keep with me because it, unlike the others, points to what I discovered about identity by leaving home. I remember taking the picture during one of my first weeks in the Scottish capital, on a visit to Edinburgh Castle. Bending down by the closed end of one of the Castle's low, and now merely decorative, cannons, I yearned to capture the view it once guarded. The picture shows the foreground structure of aged bricks that make up the castle's defensive walls and then follows the length of the cannon from its wide round base, through the small square opening in the wall, opening out on a vaguely grey-colored sky and stone buildings set into a distant hill across town. At the time, I liked the sense of being able to frame one image of the city--the hill and the buildings situated there--with the nearness of the tactile fortress walls. Today, however, I look at this photo in terms of a mental state of being--one that starts in one place and ends in another.

Despite the expectations I had about that year, and my intention to leave America behind, I found America most clearly while away. Perhaps the other piles of pictures, the ones still in the closet, are representative of how I thought when I left America. They show a surface, a smile, and a location--the rather obvious fact of simply being somewhere else. What they don't show, however, is what I learned, that "no culture . . . retains its identity in isolation; identity is attained in contact, in contrast, in breakthrough" (Carlos Fuentes). In order to understand myself as an American, I had to feel the usually mild, yet occasionally pinprick sharp, combination of panic and curiosity that arises in reaction to the unknown. Early in the year, as my mind scrambled with questions, I developed a smile and nod reflex in response to uncertainty about everything from etiquette to alcohol. Is he going to kiss me on both cheeks in greeting? How do they know which cheek to kiss first? Why is everything fried? Furthermore, despite my interest in international news, the looming British general election in May 1997 required a comparative politics background that my education had never provided. What was my opinion about embargoes on British beef and the implementation of the Euro? These experiences simultaneously knocked down my barriers of cultural isolation and reminded me that America, as home, was a place where I didn't have to ask those questions.

Before leaving home, while still figuratively standing with the cannon inside the castle walls, I had loosely identified two main reasons for going away. One was the concept of "more"--as in there has to be more out there than the life I knew growing up in the DC suburbs and the two years I had spent at Mount Holyoke College--and the second was a romanticized concept of contact with the "other." I didn't see the two as connected in any way, or that I would understand more about who I was and my background only as a result of exposure to the "other."

In respect to the latter, I clearly remember one Saturday night, during my first winter at Mount Holyoke College. My friends and I miscalculated the length of a movie at the Northampton film house, and, having missed the Five College bus, found ourselves stranded for more than one hour in the Massachusetts cold. Already well trained in Mount Holyoke mentality, our thoughts turned not to finding refuge in a bar, but to the chance that if Smith College (Mount Holyoke's rival school) was anything like our campus home, we would find the library open and busy on a Saturday night. My disenchantment with the New England winter faded when I stumbled upon the world map that took up a small dividing wall in the Smith library. Suddenly the one-dimensional shapes were competing for my attention, and as my fingers traced the borders imprinted there, my mind animated the puzzle of people, smells, tastes, and sounds represented by the faded wall covering. I imagined the "other"--the world that was not America--in the flat surface in front of me. Later, reading Elizabeth Bishop's poetry in the spring of my sophomore year, I knew I would answer the poet's query in Questions of Travel, "Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too," with a definitive yes.

In fact, I think I was brought up on dreams of travel. If you were to ask me why I left America to study abroad, I would only be able to point to these dreams, which had their roots in the stories my mom would tell me of her own experiences in Europe as a college student. I had filled out the study abroad forms for an academic leave of absence from Mount Holyoke, knowing that as much as I did want to "explore history from a British perspective," I also wanted to follow in her footsteps and find the corners of the world designed for anyone with an open mind and heart. She had dropped out of a large university in the Midwest in the mid-1960s, bound for France with only two years of introductory French and a promise from a Parisian family of room and board in exchange for au pair responsibilities. She never did grow to like the wealthy family's spoiled children, but there was a moral to her story: leaving America changed her life. I don't know exactly what changed in her life, or what it was I thought I would change in mine (other than to discover the nebulous "more" mentioned before), but that didn't seem important at the time. I never felt the need to analyze the stories of travel and life abroad I was raised with, and as a result, leaving home never felt like a conscious decision. It was a predetermined place in my life that I had simply been waiting to reach.

Perhaps it should not have come as a great surprise to me to realize my American identity as a result of leaving the United States. It didn't occur to me to think about the way I would feel as an outsider, as an American, or how I would begin to consider the way I fit into my new environment. In my initial pursuit of the non-American, I enthusiastically registered for a Scottish ethnology class to immerse myself in the past and present of the nation's customs, religion, language, culture, financial challenges, and political changes. Yet the Celtic tales and tribulations were exhibited in class as if part of a historical, multimedia slideshow, never providing a space in which to negotiate the culture they represented. What I learned about life in Scotland and about myself abroad came not from these very sincere seminars on Gaelic story-telling and traditional wedding ceremonies, but from the environment around me.

It was the seemingly insignificant details of the day-to-day, such as fashion, that revealed markers of national identity. Whether I was traversing the cobbled streets toward class or following my nose into a small bakery for a scone, I was always alert to what people were wearing and, in connection, where they were from. Before long I became resigned to the fact that the bright Gortex parkas and white running shoes worn by American students were always going to be glaringly obvious among the classic cloths and muted colors usually preferred by the natives. In other instances I found myself too often speechless on the topic of football. Reading the newspaper, I came away with smudged fingers and a fairy tale list of football franchise team names kicking and shooting in my mind. Sitting on the edge of a conversation in the concrete chill of the Edinburgh University Student Union, it didn't take me long to conclude that not only was their football not our football, but I had never before been compelled to care. Again, I could question much more than I could contribute.

Although I usually found answers to the quandaries my new exposure provoked, neither my ears nor mind relaxed their hold on the voices and languages carried on the smoke in the pubs and the wind of the streets. Telling of his search for identity, Carlos Fuentes articulates a connection with language that I began to ponder for myself as a student abroad: "My passage from English to Spanish determined the concrete expression of what, before, in Washington had been the revelation of an identity." Yet why was it language that made the difference for Fuentes, and for me? Is it the sound of a language--sounds that recreate the culture and atmosphere of home? Living in a foreign place, the punctuation, silences, highs and lows of a language form an environment as telling as that of the street noise, ringing bells, or rushing feet reverberating throughout a city. There is also a quality of what my Hebrew teacher calls musikah (music)--the rhythm to the language that helps you pronounce and express words correctly.

Away from home, surrounded by a different musical tone, it was easy to feel out of synch among someone else's linguistic melodies. In Edinburgh my offbeat speech was a constant reminder of my American identity. Although the differences between American English and the various forms of British English seem minute compared to the distinct sources and sounds that make Fuentes' English and Spanish unalike, I was always acutely aware of the places in which our cousin languages failed to find common ground. Despite my efforts, the adjective "bloody" always translated into an image of an unfortunate incident with a knife rather than the appropriate expletive the British intended it to be.

Furthermore, the divergence between American and British English reminded me that despite America's initial Anglo heritage, I had no historical or emotional ties to British life. In some ways it was not the spoken words that made the difference, it was not because I said "pants" rather than "trousers" or "elevator" rather than "lift" that I sensed the language's bifurcation. Instead, it was the unspoken acknowledgement that my identity was based on the uniquely American heritage that stemmed from the nation's independent, postcolonial history--and all the words that have developed along with it. Sometimes I wondered, though, if my sensitivity to the sentences, phrases, and words around me was too extreme. Why couldn't I let the voices roll over me, accepting the words our languages had in common and tucking away the others to examine later?

Perhaps I held onto everything audible because language and accent marked people in Edinburgh, coloring them with names not found on birth certificates. Lines were not only drawn around those hailing from one continent or another, but roped among those from the Isles whose rights to study at the Scottish university stem from the 1707 union that transformed Scotland from nation to state (in the American sense of the word). Walking from my dorm near Holyrood Palace, once home to Mary Queen of Scots, I passed the headquarters for the Scottish National Party, adorned with banners for Scottish independence. I knew the voices that rose and fell in the rooms of that building would not match those of my friends at the University, from London, my fellow equestrian club members, from Wales and Northern Ireland, or my history project partner from northern England. When I spoke, it was clear that I was foreign, and thus temporary, while they were tumbled up in a more complicated relationship that was, for some, unwelcome. I think all of us sensed the linguistic currents of both diction and tune that cast Edinburgh in the role of an uneasy host, and kept us at heart most closely connected to the locations we had always known as home.

In the song "American Tune," Paul Simon sings the following lyric: "And I dreamed I was flying / And high up above me my eyes could clearly see the Statue of Liberty / Sailing out to sea." Simon finds freedom through flight, distancing himself from the Statue of Liberty and the America it represents. As much as I enjoy the image of the Statue of Liberty bobbing among the waves of the Atlantic Ocean, I also equate Simon's sentiment with my experience of leaving home to study in Scotland. Despite my intention to put faces to the names on the map and simply try life somewhere else, the Statue of Liberty followed me across the sea. For all I did learn about life in Scotland, and as the transcript sent to Mount Holyoke reported, about imperialism and British perspectives of American history, the world that I thought was there for my taking kept bringing me back to claim America as my home. Elizabeth Bishop writes, "Continent, city, country, society: / the choice is never wide and never free. / And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home, / whatever that may be?" This time my answer is no--for I think that until I left home, my understanding of my identity remained trapped with the cannons behind those castle walls.