Roots and Locale

My time spent at home is time in reflection of the sort of place I hope to establish sometime in the not-too-distant future. Home is a powerful and malleable concept, but my time this past year at school was spent, in part, in building a place where friends and acquaintances felt at ease, felt sincerely welcome. Now, I spend more time wondering what I must build up and it has incorporated itself both into my thoughts and my writing. It has, somewhat unfortunately, resulted in some tension amongst loved ones.

Last night, Miss Kalisa and I watched Fear(s) of the Dark, a series of short, animated horror films. The production was originally released in French, and we watched it subtitled. In it, one character protagonist was Asian, I believe Vietnamese since he was nationally French (or so I supposed from the other characters). His parents were mentioned but never shown. Another character was nationally English, but her parents had moved back to Japan where the story takes place. (This story was also spoken in French, which was at first odd considering the obvious rural Japan setting.) Two of the films--one showed snippets throughout while the other magnificently closed the ensemble--were almost completely voiceless and definitely language-less: the first appeared to be colonial in period and perhaps English or French, though most of the characters were socially outcast due to class or race; the latter revolved around a sturdy man I thought of as Germanic or Russian, who only spoke out in "Hey!" at one point in the film in an attempt to get help.

With the first film (the young, likely Vietnamese student), I began to consider the richness of his lineage's travels, including the character represented on my television screen with subtitles. For centuries, his family line shared a community of similar appearing, similar speaking (both in language and dialect), and culturally linked individuals. When his ancestors travelled, they might be identified by facial features, pronunciation, specific religious symbols and other cultural artifacts, and the direction from which he came. Now, the descendants of immigrants, who adopted a different language, whose children adopted a local accent, and were immersed in different culture(s) and ethnicities have undergone a profound mutation in inherited characteristics. Professor George Georgacarakos once commented that before the popular adoption of deodorants and scented toiletries, people could generally identify one another by smell--a skill we have since lost. Some television show on sexuality once suggested that we (or at least women) remain unconsciously skilled at identifying pheromones from genetically complimentary individuals from genetically similar; that is, we are more attracted to the olfactory qualities of people who would lend a greater range of genetic traits to our progeny that those who would homogenize the next generation's genes.

I might say that we have allowed our traditional roots to atrophy or have cut ourselves off from them entirely and are only continuing the process. The Midwest accent is spread nationwide via newscasters and weather forecasters, while we race to preserve and encourage traditional musical styles the world over as MTV broadcasts globally. American in particular, but humanity generally speaking is more mobile and less regionally bound. In Brazil, my friends and I were confounded trying to explain that someone was American but German descent, or English descent, or Norwegian. This is a new difficulty of language, new in the sense that it is increasingly common to have people work and live hundreds of miles from where their families lived or may continue to live--such as when Mexican laborers work in the United States while their families receive money and letters, or the border hopping husbands throughout the Middle East, or--the rather more long-lived--practice of prostitution and trafficking in persons to foreign lands for sex work.

The disconnections of person from heritage abound these days, in positive and negative guises, but I am reminded of an interviewee in Breaking Open the Head and the subsequent discussion on the legitimacy of American shamanism because the American people are so thoroughly divorced from the importance of regionality. Our families move, children move out for education and work, our food generally travels from other countries or half-way across the continent, music and style are imported from cultural centers in and outside of the country, an aesthetic for foreign film or exotic tastes suggests refinement, and so on. Meanwhile, we miss out on the traditions of conversation, storytelling, music making and practice, and even working locally with and for neighbors and friends are out of practice. This latter statement may be too strong or ill-informed, but I want to stress its encouragement all the more. I mean to say that we ought to nurture the our places--home, community, school, work, and so on--in order to preserve and cultivate the richness and identifiability by which they were once characterized. I think of my time in high school attending local music performances and my friends' art shows; those are the sorts of events that ring out, that ring with the exciting and convoluted sound of locality.



*** I realized partway in that this sort of thinking is very much in tune with Josiah Royce's writing on provincialism, a term often considered pejorative but used to encourage pride and cultivation of locality in order to build strength and richness in the larger structures of community. Mahatma Gandhi also writes about the strength of the nation deriving from the strength of villages, their economies, and the character of their population. Wendell Berry has something to say about bringing our thinking on economy and culture, health and happiness back to the small scale of rural communities, as well.