Here we are, after generations of privilege (from the teaching trenches)

 
Mareike Pietzsch writes for Denizen "my forever state cannot be running away, or wishing away, or whiling my thoughts away from here. And the “away” is slowly turning into a “here.”"  My freshmen students found this when I asked them to "poke around" several TCK sites to try and figure out what preoccupied TCKs.  They liked it.  They liked its insistence on being Here now.  They liked the idea of not running perpetually.

My freshmen students are not TCKs.  In fact, as a group, they have been openly hostile to studying third culture.  Of Jane Alison's Natives and Exotics they said "It's privileged brats whining about having no home" and " So they've said a lot of goodbyes, so what?"
Tough moments those, in the game of responding academically rather than personally.  Today's redirect in teaching Native and Exotics will involve pointing out that Alice, the TCK daughter of diplomats, repeatedly comments on not wanting to be in the position she is in.  Also, she sees and overhears her parents talking about foreign involvement in Ecuador, and her reiteration of their conversations critiques her step father Hal in particular.  So, the parents in the novel are neocolonists, but their TCK daughter is critical of such positioning.  And of course there are complications too: Alice's great great grandfather was one of Australia's colonial settlers, putting him on the negative side of colonial history.  However, he only ever left Scotland because of violent oppression at the hands of the English (who murdered his parents), putting him on a colonial-moral highground as unfortunate dispossessed.

Of course TCK IS privileged, "expatriate" is privileged. (Students at this nice liberal arts college?  Also privileged, by the way).  But maybe the thing is TCKs know their privilege and feel guilty about it? They are required to follow their parents, but I think they see more than their parents do about neocolonialism and  the exploitation that goes into comfy lives abroad.

In my senior seminar we have been reading Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, and recent conversations have revolved around how the surviving daughters (Adah, Leah, Rachel) grow up to become: a medical doctor, an impoverished wife in the DRC, and a hotelier for expats, respectively.

Putting the Seniors and their thoughts and the Freshmen and their thoughts together makes me think that Kingsolver is trying to answer the question "What to do when you recognize your TCK privilege?"  She presents us three options: become a doctor as Adah does (to eradicate diseases endemic to the less fortunate in less developed countries), marry your host country as Leah does (commit to it, give up your privilege, relinquish your right to vitamins and disposable diapers and live an unprivileged life) or reconcile yourself to being an expat, as Rachel does (living henceforth amidst expats and neocolonialists like herself).

Of the three Kingsolver presents, Rachel's choice (expat hotelier) is perhaps the least hypocritical.  Leah's choice seems smug, paternalist, as does Adah's.  Rachel, malapropist savante, simply  lives where she is, who she is, how she is.  She is a more honest Here.

This gives me pause, it makes me think.  TCKness should be able to be Here.  Not to exploit, or neo-colonize.  But to acknowledge, accept, and be honest about what TCKness is. Is it Disadvantaged?  On the whole, no (and it's a lie to pretend to it if you are not).
Must it become AID? Guh.  We know better the ways in which AID can sometimes equal paternalist condescension.
Is it foreign amongst other foreigners.  Often, yes.  Is that so very bad?  Perhaps.  But at least it is honest.  At least it knows.

This week a group of TCKs at my college had a skype life-coaching session with Kilian Kroell, and it was fantastic.  "Where do you go to the dentist?" he asked, revealing that for many of us home is where the dentist is!  He too emphasized Here, being here.  And then making concrete plans based on what one values.  He suggests perhaps worrying less about where one fits in and more about what one values.

Here.  What do we value, us TCKs?  Not neocolonial privilege, not condescension in the international sphere.  But what?


PS.  On a personal-political note:  Writing Out Of Limbo linked this  Wall Street Journal article today "Please Don't Call My Child a Third Culture Kid" .  It's a timely addendum to my piece as it rejects the term TCK because of the privilege the term connotes.  (It also has a quotation from a TCK who thinks Fourth Culture Kid, for TCKs of colour, is a good idea: I kinda like that).

Here, and pardon my gut, is a thought: generally TCK IS privileged.  I don't think we should or ought to dissemble.  I don't WANT to be on the "side" of the exploiters, the neocolonial, the problematic expat.  No one does.  Teaching in Baltimore (Freddie Gray died here), I don't want to be white either.  I cannot simply say, however, "I don't like to be called white because it's privileged"; I have to accept that I have privilege and decide what I want to do about that.  I feel the same about TCKness.  I don't want the privilege it connotes, but honestly I think I need to own it, and decide what I want to do with it.

 PPS  Rachel Cason has intelligent and thoughtful responses to both the necessity of the term TCK and the problems of conflating it with privilege (which I do above *ahem*!  My bad.  Always learning.)  Cason's work is in the post "Third Culture Kids – a nonsense label?"  Check out the rest of her blog too.

O'Neill's The Dog, Parenthetically Speaking.

My seminar students and I recently finished discussing Joseph O'Neill's The Dog.  O'Neill is a TCK, and his protagonist is one too.  The novel is set in Dubai,  the epitome of an expat-dense metropolis that is a breeding ground for TCK experiences.

In recent years, I have been working on the kinds of stylistic quirks that characterize third culture novels.  Chiefly, so far, I have worked on time lines that are disrupted by spatial and geographical clusters.

I was especially excited, then, to have my students notice and discuss parentheses in The Dog.  They abound!  (And I have been told more than once that I use brackets far too often, so I wonder if there is a TCKness in the grammar of parenthesis?). [grammatical pun intended]

In The Dog, O'Neill often embeds so many parentheses (brackets) inside each other over the course of a paragraph that it will close like this ".)))" or this ".))))))" (72, 190 and 203).  Whoa!  It's like Sterne's Tristram Shandy writ all parenthethical!

Theories:

-This is Stream of Consciousness (Abby Messer).  Interesting!  I wonder.  I have thought about Virginia Woolf and The Waves in the context of TCK narrative, but not conclusively.  This makes me ask questions afresh. What makes modernist stream of consciousness different from this repeated intrusion of new detail?  Woolf does not bracket, she just flows.  So, perhaps the very brackets themselves, as visually they separate each little pod of information, emphasisng TCK disconnection while also evoking the jumbles and juxtapositions that characterise TCK experience.

-These are confidential asides which the protagonist proffers the reader because he is so lonely and needs to make a connection (Cyndi Koster).  Well, that's compelling and very TCK (TCKs can tend to be isolated).

-These repeated, excessive brackets just make the narrator look ridiculous (Koster again).  Yes.  True.  This returns us to satirist Sterne in my quip above, reminding us, importantly, that The Dog is satirical: it satirises expats, and Dubai, and travel narratives, and murder mysteries and lawyers and epistolary novels (so many unsent emails) , and yes, perhaps also the experience of TCKness itself.

And by the way, all those unsent emails seem like an uncanny echo of Van Reken's Letters Never Sent, don't they?