Fitting In

 

We’ve all seen “that” kid. You know the one. Socially inept. Physically awkward. Fashion challenged. Not mainstream in looks or deeds. The misfit, the oddball, the square peg trying to fit in with the cooler, circular peeps. Sound familiar?

Now apply all those adjectives migrants.   Moving from one group of peoples to another, either country to country or even state to state, leaves the “new kid” to seek hospitality, acceptance, and safety in their new home, often at the price of their own personal, square-shaped narrative. Arjun Appadurai argues in his article, “Traumatic Exit, Identity Narratives, and the Ethics of Hospitality”, that “migrants, especially refugees, in the contemporary globalized world are inevitably second-class citizens because their stories do not fit the narrative requirements of modern nation-states”.

Though I have not been an immigrant, I have been migratory my entire life. Due partially to being a military brat and partially to unique life circumstances, I moved a lot. By the time I entered my first year of college, I had attended 13 different schools. That averages out to about one school per year for my kindergarten through 12^th grade schooling. Every year, sometimes twice a year, I was “that” kid. Awkward, inept, and different, yet willing to change my narrative to gain acceptance just to survive.

                                                             

R. Radhakrishnan expounds on this idea in “Between Living and Telling: Ethnicity in the Age of Transnationalism”. He asks hard questions like, “Does living possess an intrinsic structure that telling is supposed to unveil noninvasively, or is structure intuited into the living moment…?” and “Am I my own private and intimate inquisitor?” and “As I ‘subjectivate’ myself, what other imperative am I obeying?” Looking back on all my years of moving, I have realized how many times I allowed my own ethnic values and morals to be overruled by the majority. As a Caucasian woman (girl back then), I was frequently in the minority population in my neighborhoods, schools, and communities. Though my experiences give me an inkling towards understanding cultural homogenization and assimilation, I know they are nothing compared those who navigated through harrowing escapes seeking better lives.

So how do these experiences change the story, the identity, the culture of a person/people/nation? For myself, I do not have a single ethnicity or cultural identity to claim as my own. My Puerto Rican husband proudly proclaims his heritage and greets every Puerto Rican person he meets with confidence in shared experiences, shared stories, and shared language, even if they have never met before. I do not have one singular identifying marker, as he does. I am a misfit, awkward in my own assigned “cultural identity”, yet not fitting the requirements for others. I have taken little bits from each ethnic and cultural experience to form my own.

Similarly, transnationally migrant writers have formed their own literary systems, genres, and even languages. In her article, “The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer”, Rebecca L. Walkowitz argues that “contemporary literature in an age of globalization is, in many ways, a comparative literature: works circulate in several literary systems at once, and can—some would say, need—to be read within several national traditions”. A book written in English is not necessarily English literature, nor is it just for native English speakers. The author might have taken bits and pieces of her nomadic life to create a global identity rather than a national, ethnic, or cultural one.