reflections on expat life

discussed the headscarf in anthropology today...man, i cannot escape this topic. it just follows me everywhere, from course to course, all the way over the atlantic, reminding me that former colonial powers are racist in real time, and making me wish i had kept up with french a bit more. all the discussion of immigrants and their kids is making me think about expat life.

a couple of weeks ago my boss said something interesting to me when i was asking him about coming back next summer to do more refugee research (this time with fieldwork!). he said, it takes about nine months to a year to understand south africa. that is, to be able to "get" the news/radio, to move through the city without a hitch or a second thought, to know where the good parking is, to know what days the market gets new shipments, to know where to take a classy business associate to dinner, to figure out the SABC tv schedules, to be able to understand people through thick accents. i think it took me about the same time to 'get' new york, at which point i was so in love with brooklyn thanks to that canvassing job i knew exactly where to go.

sorry, i digress.

anyway, he was joking about the one french postgrad in our office who says she is just now beginning to understand things, and yet has to leave at the end of the term. i can sympathize. and most of our postgrads have sublet apartments in melville, which is a pretty familiar welcoming area at this point (not so much late at night). overall a good place for young folks to live. i guess it would be like living in williamsburg in brooklyn, but with more crime. and a lot of guys guarding cars parked in the street (but they do that everywhere here).

i suppose my boss has the mind of a long term expatriate (a loopy, slightly jet-lagged expatriate that day). every american adult i've met here seems to have this kind of mindset. or, they have come to consider this home and have expatriate mindsets about other parts of the country/region, like my anthro lecturer who has a pretty serious connection to zimbabwe since he has been going there since 1982. he has two homes, i guess. or at least one and a half. maybe more, he is a really well-traveled guy.

i think it would be wonderful to have two homes or one and a half homes in different places, and by that i mean cultural 'homes', not just the fact of owning two apartments on two continents. sometimes life in the US makes me want to throw myself off my little brooklyn porch and down onto the renovation in progress below. this is mostly a function of us politics. simply having a place to go where people know you and you know people and things are Very Different, politically and otherwise, could be a relief. south africa is a good option, croatia is a good option, and perhaps i'll get to come across more options in the future. i should follow my lecturer's example: travel far and travel wide.

i mean, zuma may be a callous, politically manipulative, corrupt arms-dealing rapist, but i could never get as angry about him as i do about some plain old non-rapist american knuckleheads. because home #1 is really home, i guess. or maybe i haven't lived here long enough...