Recently I’ve read a slew of books that have characters with a sense of place; they come from a culture rooted in some geographic area, a language spoken to their people and understood.
I don’t have that; I’m an American.
Which is to say I am a cultural mutt.
On one side I have relatives arriving in America in 1637. I have a straight line from there to membership in the DAR (should I want it), to a diary from my Civil War veteran ancestor, to census documents from 1890 on up to 2010. It is an easy shot. I am named after one of these ancestors. I know nothing about her.
Yet it is a shot with no identity. In America, we love to say what we are. We are Italian. We are Jewish. We are Cherokee and Mexican and Polish. I believe I am a mix of British, Dutch, Alsatian, Scotch, Irish, Swedish and Iroquois but nothing about me confirms that. My family has no traditions, no meals we share or prayers we say that have passed down from generation to generation like a loving quilt of identity and home. We don’t have those words that tie us to each other. Every holiday is a rudderless experience; they are new each year and thus wide open. Nothing has any sense of sacred.
We have one phrase from my Swedish grandmother. She is the only one of my relatives of any “pure” culture heritage, and thus the only one who has any. What I know in Swedish is a toast she taught my mother, a silly little bar song to celebrate all the pretty girls in the room. That’s it. 9 words. And the grandchildren, me included, are so attached to this, because it is something. It is a clue; it is our family’s secret language that ties us to what we wouldn’t otherwise know.
Maybe that is it: culture ties us to history, ties us to family and ties us to the sacred. That commonality tells us who we are by telling us where we came from; it serves as the string, collecting the beads of each life and each generation.
2 comments:
I totally get what you're saying, but also think you've overlooked a few things.
Do you celebrate Thanksgiving, Independence Day, Free Donut Day? Do you look forward to the 'A Christmas Story' marathon on Christmas Eve?
Can you get good italian sausage, swedish meatballs, and hummus fairly easily, possibly at the same store?
I think it's hard to see when you're in it because I totally felt like you, almost ashamed of my lack of 'culture', but then I realised I didn't give America, or my background, enough credit. In many ways I'm proud of and miss American culture. I think we are pretty damn good at taking great things from other countries/cultures (mainly food for me) and embracing them, enjoying them and making them work in our lives. Sure - the meatballs may be better in Sweden when made with a family recipe by a matriarch, but I bet she couldn't hold a candle to our homemade burgers. And our chocolate chip cookies... fuggetaboutit. I think we totally have something to bring to the table.
I may just be hormonal and sensitive to having very limited 'American' influence in my son's life, but I'm already making a mental list of things from MY heritage and background that I really hope he embraces and understands. Even if it's just getting the joke when I tell him he'll shoot his eye out.
I love it, Liz!
I've been thinking a bit more about it, trying to think of things "we" do. I know that I treat Independence Day as the most important holiday of the year, but it doesn't have any firm traditions, short of fireworks. There isn't a set meal, or set plan, or ceremony attached to it. The same with Thanksgiving. I've spent a total of 2 Thanksgiving with my family in 11 years. Every year is a question of if and where I do a meal. I don’t have any Christmas traditions, aside from wake up, open gifts, go back to bed. I don’t think I’ve ever watched “Christmas Vacation” on the holiday, much less “A Christmas Story.” I didn’t grow up with those holiday habits that others espouse.
The food, however, I get. Good BBQ? Salt potatoes? Pecan pie? Baked beans? Bourbon? Fried chicken? Delicious. I guess because it is so common here I forget it isn’t internationally ubiquitous. We have the mutts of international fare too. French next to Indian next to Caribbean next to Chinese; I can eat ethnically almost whenever I want. But I’m not tied to any of those cultures; that curry has no meaning. It is a learned taste, not a birthed one.
American football is a tradition I love, a constantly changing yet completely stable element of our time and passion, like bluegrass, jazz or baseball.
But I guess, for most Americans, you are absolutely right. A culture does exist, there are American traditions and thoughts and phrases and meals and holidays unique to us that help define us in the scope of the world.
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