In The Sisters Antipodes, TCA (Third Culture Author) Jane Alison writes "Sometimes I think we all have embedded in the brain a personal space like a home we've lost that lingers in our skulls"(5). I wonder. Do we?
It's been a long three years for me in which I have not worked much on matters third culture. I have been engaged instead in the unraveling of my parents's lives 3,000 miles away, the sale of their house, the death of my father, and my mother's transition to a nursing home. To distract myself from all that, I wrote a novel and have thus joined the ranks of professors with unpublished novels in their desk drawers. That manuscript has a plot absolutely rooted in the place in which I currently live. Everything happens within a mile of here, where I sit typing this morning. I was also department chair, and then program chair, during a time of radical restructuring at the college at which I work. As my program's faculty dwindled, I was called upon to teach more historical literature than ever before. Last year, I taught no international fiction courses, but did teach, among other things, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales and The Inferno. I like all that other literature too, but: Who am I? Where am I?
This spring, in order to have the same citizenships as my children, I became an American citizen. At the citizenship ceremony, I cried when I sang the American anthem because what came out was my British schoolgirl voice, the accent of Welsh-Catholic hymn singing back when I was 14: Who am I? Where am I?
Last week I bought a house, also within a mile of where I sit now, typing. The mortgage broker gave me a present, a framed canvas with a map of Maryland and the words "Rauwerda Home est'd 2019" at the top, with the house's specific co-ordinates forming a banner across the bottom.
There is no more TCK issue than "Where are you from" and no more fraught topic for TCKs or really any adult trying to anchor their identity in the ever-shifting world than "where is home?"
Here I am, then. I have specific co-ordinates and a return to The Questions.
Over the summer I have funding to write an article about whether third culture identity can be viewed as a kind of nationalism.
In the fall I get to teach a course on contemporary international fiction and one on transnationalism.
I will dig back into this blog too. What to do with the bloated and unusable but impressively capacious list of authors, for instance?
Reading The Sisters Antipodes this morning, I notice that in 1965 Jane Alison "traveled by train to San Francisco, where [she] boarded the Oronsay" (17). What a fantastic co-incidence, for this is the same ship Michael Ondaatje writes of in The Cat's Table and indeed the same ship Ondaatje himself travelled upon in his 1954 journey from Ceylon to London! (Additional discovery thanks to Wikipedia, is that the Oronsay featured in a 1958 British Comedy called The Captain's Table: clearly Ondaatje's The Cat's Table is riffing on that).
Inhale, exhale, welcome home.
And I was baptised on the Oronsay, between England and India. I still have the baptism certificate.
ReplyDeleteI felt much kinship with Jane Alison when reading The Sisters Antipodes, having spent my own childhood between Australia and the US, even in some of the same cities, during the same time periods. (I also traveled across the US by train to board a P&O liner, but in 1964.) Of course, other aspects of her biography differ from mine, as my additional cultural interests, influences, and travels have been more related to East Asian countries.
ReplyDeleteI realize, having just now discovered your lists of TCK literature, that I have read many of these authors, and others, in whose work I have (consciously and unconsciously) felt a resonance with the dislocations in their backgrounds. Even so, as an adult I have not personally known many others with a peripatetic childhood in their past, and as a result I have often felt that my background, and even much of my work, was sufficiently foreign to that of most other people, particularly in this city where I live, that it was perhaps unrelatable, even alienating, to them.
I had not consciously, and explicitly, considered how to summarize the effect of my transnational experiences on my writing (poetry) until recently, when thinking about how or whether to reference my history in a brief bio note to accompany a book manuscript. This train of reflection and inquiry led me to an exploration of your blog, where I am grateful, and relieved, to discover that you and other scholars are working to develop this separate field in literature, focusing on TCK (certainly not a category I had encountered during my literary studies in the 60s & 70s!)