When our fears have all been serialized, our creativity censured, our ideas “marketplaced,” our rights sold, our intelligence sloganized, our strength downsized, our privacy auctioned; when the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.
Home
LAST YEAR a colleague of mine asked me where I had gone to school when a child. I told her, Lorain, Ohio. Then she questioned me: Were your schools desegregated then? I said, What? They were never segregated in the thirties and forties—so why would they be desegregated. Besides, we had one high school and four junior high schools. Then I recalled that she herself was around forty years old when that term “desegregated” was alive everywhere. Obviously I was in a time warp and obviously the early diverse population of the town I grew up in was not the way of the country. Before I left Lorain for Washington, D.C., then Texas, then Ithaca, then New York City, I thought every place was more or less like it, except in size. Nothing could be further from the truth. In any case her questions made me think anew about this area of Ohio and my recollections of home. This region (Lorain, Elyria, Oberlin) is not like it was when I lived here, but in a way it doesn’t matter because home is memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory. But equally important as the memory and place and people of one’s personal home is the very idea of home. What do we mean when we say “home”?
It is a virtual question because the destiny of the twenty-first century will be shaped by the possibility or the collapse of a shareable world. The question of cultural apartheid and/or cultural integration is at the heart of all governments and informs our perception of the ways in which governance and culture compel the exoduses of peoples (voluntarily or driven) and raises complex questions of dispossession, recovery, and the reinforcement of siege mentalities. How do individuals resist or become complicit in the process of alienizing others’ demonization—a process that can infect the foreigner’s geographical sanctuary with the country’s xenophobia? By welcoming immigrants, or importing slaves into their midst for economic reasons and relegating their children to a modern version of the “undead.” Or by reducing an entire native population, some with a history hundreds, even thousands of years long, into despised foreigners in their own country. Or by the privileged indifference of a government watching an almost biblical flood destroy a city because its citizens were surplus black or poor people without transportation, water, food, help and left to their own devices to swim, slog, or die in fetid water, attics, hospitals, jails, boulevards, and holding pens. Such are the consequences of persistent demonization; such is the harvest of shame.
Clearly, the movement of peoples under duress at, beyond, and across borders is not new. Forced or eager exodus into strange territory (psychological or geographical) is indelible in the history of every quadrant of the known world, from the trek of Africans into China and Australia; to military interventions by Romans, Ottomans, Europeans; to merchant forays fulfilling the desires of a plethora of regimes, monarchies, and republics. From Venice to Virginia, from Liverpool to Hong Kong. All these and more have transferred the riches and art they found into other realms. And all these left that foreign soil stained with their blood and/or transplanted into the veins of the conquered. While in their wake the languages of conquered and conqueror swell with condemnation of the other.
The reconfiguration of political and economic alliances and the almost instant reparsing of nation-states encourage and repel the relocation of large numbers of peoples. Excluding the height of the slave trade, this mass movement of peoples is greater now than it has ever been. It involves the distribution of workers, intellectuals, refugees, traders, immigrants, and armies all crossing oceans and continents, through custom offices and via hidden routes, with multiple narratives spoken in multiple languages of commerce, of military intervention, political persecution, exile, violence, poverty, death, and shame. There is little doubt that the voluntary or involuntary displacement of people all over the globe tops the agenda of the state, the boardrooms, the neighborhoods, the streets. Political maneuvers to control this movement are not limited to monitoring the dispossessed. The transplantation of management and diplomatic classes to globalization’s outposts, as well as the deployment of military units and bases, feature prominently in legislative attempts to exert authority over the constant flow of people. This slide of people has freighted the concept of citizenship and altered our perceptions of space—public and private. The strain has been marked by a plethora of hyphenated designations of national identity. In press descriptions, place of origin has become more telling than citizenship, and persons are identified as “a German citizen of such and such origin” or “a British citizen of such and such origin.” All this while a new cosmopolitanism, a kind of multilayered cultural citizenship, is simultaneously being hailed. The relocation of peoples has ignited and disrupted the idea of home and expanded the focus of identity beyond definitions of citizenship to clarifications of foreignness. Who is the foreigner? is a question that leads us to the perception of an implicit and heightened threat within “difference.” We see it in the defense of the local against the outsider; personal discomfort with one’s own sense of belonging (Am I the foreigner in my own home?); of unwanted intimacy instead of safe distance. It may be that the most defining characteristic of our times is that, again, walls and weapons feature as prominently now as they once did in medieval times. Porous borders are understood in some quarters to be areas of threat and certain chaos, and whether real or imagined, enforced separation is posited as the solution. Walls, ammunition—they do work. For a while. But they are major failures over time, as the occupants of casual, unmarked, and mass grave sites haunt the entire history of civilization.
Consider another consequence of the blatant, violent uses to which foreignness is put—ethnic cleansing. We would be not merely remiss but irrelevant if we did not address the doom currently faced by millions of people reduced to animal, insect, or polluted status by nations with unmitigated, unrepentant power to decide who is a stranger and whether they live or die at, or far from, home. I mentioned earlier that the expulsion and slaughter of “enemies” are as old as history. But there is something new and soul destroying about this last and current century. At no other period have we witnessed such a myriad of aggression against people designated as “not us.” Now, as you have seen over the last two years, the central political question was, Who or what is an American?
From what I gather from those who have studied the history of genocide—its definition and application—there seems to be a pattern. Nation-states, governments seeking legitimacy and identity, seem able and determined to shape themselves by the destruction of a collective “other.” When European nations were in thrall to royal consolidation, they were able to act out this slaughter in other countries—African, South American, Asian. Australia and the United States, self-declared republics, required the annihilation of all indigenous peoples if not the usurpation of their land to create their new, democratic state. The fall of communism created a bouquet of new or reinvented nations who measured their statehood by “cleansing” communities. Whether the targets were of different religions, races, cultures—whatever—reasons were found first to demonize then to expel or murder them. For an assumed safety, hegemony, or pure land grabs, foreigners were constructed as the sum total of the putative nation’s ills. If these scholars are right, we will see more and more illogical waves of war—designed for the grasp of control by the leaders of such states. Laws cannot stop them, nor can any god. Interventions merely provoke.