Dislocation

So here's the confession: I didn't read Ali's "Brick Lane".

But I woke up Saturday morning and decided to go to class regardless. I was exhausted from lack of sleep, demoralized due to my inability to read more than two pages without falling asleep. But I thought: "I wonder what everyone else has to say?" And more importantly, I wondered why this book was the only book being covered in the seminar.

What I found in the classroom, was one of the best discussions I've heard. Not so much about the book, but about our lives. It was a discussion in which I participated deeply as well. Everybody, either directly or indirectly, has had a deep experience with dislocation in their lives.

The obvious ones were people like Nash, Havi and Nooshin who had immigrated to one, or, in a few cases, several, foreign lands. Their experiences and the palpable pain they described was something that we've each lived with and near.

I have been fascinated by the experience of World War II most of my life. Not so much by battles and machinery or the political history surrounding the time, but by the notion of how shocking it must have been to come face-to-face with the enemy. They didn't speak the same languages or look the same, especially in the Pacific theater. Movies that I've watched over the years have made those encounters seem horrifying. A blur of screaming, confusion. Faces that were masks of fury. Nothing recognizable. Movies, even recent ones like Eastwood's series about Iwo Jima, and Saving Private Ryan, seems to me to be more about the horrors of encountering a foreign culture than about the horror of war itself.

And I wonder what it must be like for veterans of these wars to walk around now, in a modern world, and see so many different faces and hear so many different languages in places that only reflected their own image back to themselves a single generation ago. The Germans I've know seem so unconnected to the SS soldiers of the movies. The many Vietnamese I've known in the past seem nothing like the crazed sadists portrayed in "Deer Hunter", or "The Killing Fields". This sense of the "foreign-ness" of other people has disintegrated visibly, even over the course of my life-time.

My point is, this experience of mass dislocation is so new. How much movement was there between cultures one hundred years ago? It was, I imagine, for the most part an exceptional experience. Now it's a common one. Although, it appears to have been an important aspect of the Roman Empire. Many different races became "Roman", and slaves from foreign lands were part of the culture.

In Israel, I saw workers on buildings who were asian. As a cook, I met Asians who spoke with Indian accents because they learned their english in India.. following the trail of economic breadcrumbs to a hoped-for prosperity, or only to escape the oppression of poverty.

In my own life, I was deeply involved, through my ex, with the orthodox Jewish community, most of whom had survived the camps only to find no families, towns, or countries to return to, and who were now deeply torn between recreating their old worlds and navigating the new one. One man came to the Holocaust center in Montreal, where I volunteered, to give a video testimony of his experience in the holocaust. His only condition for doing so was that we not allow his family to know about it until after his death. He had come to Canada, changed his name, married, had children and grandchildren, and no one even knew he was Jewish, let alone a camp survivor.

My former father-in-law was born into a Hassidic community in Czechoslovakia. He was trained as a Cantor, the person who sings the prayers at service. Because of the holocaust, he no longer practiced his faith, in fact he was openly skeptical. He lived a very secular life as a doctor. But he sang all the high holiday services at the make-shift synagogue at the hospital every year. It always seemed to me not that he was attempting to find God or faith again with his singing, but rather to bring to life the ghosts of the past life that he was cut off from so violently.

This is the world we live in today. And so how do we define ourselves after the rupture of leaving our homes? How do we define ourselves as people and citizens when we live in a foreign land and are reminded of our foreign-ness every time we speak, or eat? How do express ourselves in the different languages we learn? These questions are still a struggle for us. We know this because of the reactions that are taking place more and more around the world. The far-right christian/political movements seem on the surface like sophisticated (some not-so-sophisticated) segregation movements. Like the Spanish Inquisition, they are racial cleansing under another name.

It's remarkable to think that the world has blended so much in such a short time. But it makes one wonder how far it can go without exploding, and also what the possibilities are, the great ones, I mean, for a future.

Coetzee wrote in "Elizabeth Costelloe" that the novel is the course of human civilization and thought, one case at a time. It sounds like Brick Lane is indeed that. I will read it when time permits.