Fourth of July. Happy Ambivalence Day!
Last year, as FB's "On this Day" feature has so helpfully reminded me, I was hit bit a tidal wave of homesickness. I wanted to be with my big extended family at their bbq's, eating vegetarian travesties/"hot dogs" and watching fireworks. I'd still, of course, love to be with my big extended family eating science projects and watching explosions, but... this year the overwhelming feeling isn't homesickness, so much as ambivalence.
Immigration to a place always implies emigration from another, and I am an im/emigrant. Not an expat. Expats are corporate types, or diplomats, sent by their employers for a set amount of time to work "abroad". Cushy! Or they are trust fund kids living the same padded life in Berlin that they would be in NYC, or SF, or London, throwing parties that double as performance art with a bit of tantric shenanigans in the corner (yes, really). No, I am not an expat. I am an immigrant. An emigrant.
Sure, I'll always have my family and friends in the US, will be there very often, will always be bound by growing up there and, inevitably, thinking in ways that are often tied up with that. But the more my accent warps into something amusing/grotesque, the more I switch back and forth between meaning Germans and Americans when pronouncing generalising "we" statements, the more I get to know Germany and, from an outsider's perspective, the USA, the more ambivalent I become.
The USA has lots of great things going for it. My family, to start. It's got loads of people who are forward thinking, accepting massive cultural shifts in understanding of things like gender and sexuality, for example, incorporating new vocabularies and ways of being without much fuss. Lots who do this even consider themselves conservative, and see not much contradiction there. It's got an easy-going, "but of course" approach to its diversity which, while challenged by competing narratives and violent hate crimes, I can still envy when comparing it to the conversation over here. The American approach to freedom of speech, even when it is difficult and makes us angry, is another pillar of American values that I can't help but admire, even if I wish we could smooth down its rough edges.
But it's also got a system that is so, so broken, and has been for a very long time. Trump may have awakened a new awareness of this among many of the formerly less-aware, but the repeated calls for a return to unity, our shared values, and a rejection of partisanism seem to miss the mark for me entirely. Compared with the way democracy works in Germany, with the German constitution - written, by the way, with active involvement of Americans during the occupation - America has a long way to go. Money, its role in public life, and it's place at the top of the hierarchy of American values, makes the promise of popular democracy illusory. Racism, and the legacy of the enslavement and genocide of Africans and Native Americans, are issues that, compared to German commemoration of the Shoah and other crimes of the Nazi period, remain barely addressed, even if many white people have the feeling that all we talk about in America are race and racism. The worship of money, and white supremacy: our twin historical and present-day evils that we just can't seem to deal with to create a society that keeps its promises to all its members. Soaring rhetoric and horrifying everyday realities.
Whenever the time comes for me to be sworn in as a German citizen (to "receive a German passport", as the Germans so detachedly and, rejectingly, phrase it), I'll surely embarrassedly mumble along with the German anthem, as the situation demands, and a bit more joyously sing along with the European one, but I have a feeling I'm stuck with this ambivalence. Maybe that's for the best. Just as I'd never give up my US citizenship, this ambivalence is part of me, pushes me to think. So, this Fourth of July, I will sit over here in Berlin, sipping a Brooklyn Lager and eating burgers and fries prepared by young American hipsters, and feel all torn up inside about the country I've left, but can't really leave behind.
